obligatory obscure reference

I’ve been happy using the ecamm iMage with my Macs for Processing, so I decided to go ahead and use it for ARToolkit as well.

Before I ran the two-stage calibration, it barely worked. I did the two-stage using only cardboard boxes and rulers to prop things up and keep things square, and the resulting calibration file is very usable.

I’m posting rev 1 of my calibration file, let me know how it works for you.

Technorati Tags: artoolkit, ecamm, image

I’m just now back from spending two weeks in Japan, almost exclusively in Tokyo. While the two cities are obviously very different culturally, I noticed some similarities between the two and was intrigued by how Tokyo’s residents benefit from things that Pittsburghers see as problems.

First question: How big do you think Tokyo is? Huge, right? 12 million people?

Wrong. Tokyo is (was) actually pretty small. It was a single town in the middle of the Tokyo Prefecture, which covers what we would call the greater Tokyo metropolitan area. There are actually 23 wards (think boroughs) in Tokyo, each that collects its own taxes and has its own local government. If you live in Shibuya you pay different taxes than if you live in Roppongi, but for those of us who don’t live there, we’d never know (or care) about such details. We see a huge city with consistent signage, the Tokyo Metro Police helping tourists, Tokyo Fire Department trucks being washed/polished, and the wonderful collection of decorated sewer and storm drain covers of the public services.

So how big is Pittsburgh? Is it a little town or is it a region? I live two towns away from Pittsburgh, yet my mailing address is still “Pittsburgh, PA”. A friend of mine in California told me he was from Pittsburgh, it turns out he’s from Murraysville.   

Now, how many police departments do we have in “Pittsburgh”? How many fire departments? How many road maintenance organizations?

Could the Borough of Forest Hills, Swissvale, and WIlkinsburg continue to retain what identity they have while sharing a police force with Pittsburgh and one another? Would “Pittsburgh” benefit from having unified police and fire departments that shared frequencies, training, and equipment?

I’m not talking about consolidating cities, I’m talking about sharing resources that are common across adjoining towns and communities. Pittsburgh already has several “zones” for its police department, would adding another zone (or few) be cheaper than operating multiple, tiny police departments with duplicated services?

Technorati Tags: pittsburgh, tokyo

Finally finished my MS Design degree and now have time to write for people other than professors and whatnot. I’ve got a bunch of half-finished posts to clean up, but I’m too busy doing metalworking stuff in the studio to write very much.

The current project is installing a 60G compressor, which also means bolting it to the floor, running hard line and adding a 220V circuit. I hemmed and hawed about which mini compressor to get, then just said “screw it” and went with a big 60G unit. More than enough PSI and CFM for anything I’ll do in my “one-car” sized studio, and when I get real studio space, I’ll move it there.

Still debating what my first air tool should be, however. I’m thinking a die grinder or a sheet-metal nibbler.

Technorati Tags: metalwork

and it’s rather large.

Something that has continually bugged me about the various flavors of Arduino is the number of pins that there are not 8 of. As in, 5 analog pins or 6 PWM pins or whatever. I end up adding multiplexors so I can drive 8 PWM outputs or read 8 sensors or what-have-you.

Arduino MEGA fixes all my problems, at the cost of size and a few extra $$$:

PWM: 14 pins, I’ll try not to complain about it not being 16

Analog Input: 16 pins

Thanks to all the extra I/O, I was able to ditch a specialized, $25 PWM controller and some support hardware and move my entire project from a pc board to an Arduino MEGA shield.

Technorati Tags: arduino mega

Perhaps folks in local government can learn something from the success in Boston?

“[...]

Researchers, working with police, identified 34 crime hot spots. In half of them, authorities set to work – clearing trash from the sidewalks, fixing street lights, and sending loiterers scurrying. Abandoned buildings were secured, businesses forced to meet code, and more arrests made for misdemeanors. Mental health services and homeless aid referrals expanded.

In the remaining hot spots, normal policing and services continued.

Then researchers from Harvard and Suffolk University sat back and watched, meticulously recording criminal incidents in each of the hot spots.

The results, just now circulating in law enforcement circles, are striking: A 20 percent plunge in calls to police from the parts of town that received extra attention. It is seen as strong scientific evidence that the long-debated “bro ken windows” theory really works – that disorderly conditions breed bad behavior, and that fixing them can help prevent crime.

[...]

Technorati Tags: crime, pittsburgh

On the way home tonight I stopped at a PCLB store (state owned liquor and wine but no beer store) to pick up a bottle of cheap sake. Good sake is hard to find here, but at least PLCB stocks Sho Chiku Bai Nigori, a fine table/drinking nigori. The PLCB I stopped at has a history of having “something other than gekkikan”, so I was checking out the good stuff and considering maybe trying a new ginjo or two.

Then I noticed bottles of Sho Chiku Bai Organic Nama Nigori on the shelf.

Yeah, you read that right. “…Nama Nigori on the shelf”. I don’t know that non-refrigerated sake is bad for you, but it’s probably going to taste pretty foul.

What happened next is a wonderful example of what I think of as a culture of complacency.

Me: Excuse me, but there’s a problem with some of your stock.

Manager: What?

Me: This sake. It’s nama sake, it’s unpasteurized, and if it’s not refrigerated it will go bad. It’s probably not safe to drink either, I don’t think spoiled sake is something I’d want to drink.

Manager (showing no interest in looking at the bottle): They ship me stuff, I put it where they tell me.

Me: Right, but they apparently didn’t tell you this needs to go in the fridge.   

Manager (still no interest in looking at the bottle): Look, I told you, they ship me stuff, I put it where they tell me.

Me: Ok, but it even says on the bottle to “keep refrigerated”. If it’s gone bad, or if it’s a health risk, you aren’t going to at least take it off the shelf?

Manager: Nobody’s returned any of it yet.

Me: Well, you just started carrying this. I’ve been living here 3 years, this is the first time I’ve seen nama anywhere in a state store.

Manager: I’m telling you, they ship me stuff, I put it where they tell me. You don’t have to buy it if you don’t want it.

And yes, I’m notifying the PLCB and ACHD including store and date/time of visit…

I’d like to think that if I went to a manager/owner of a privately owned store and said, “hey, one of your products is definitely gone off and might be bad for someone to drink” that their response wouldn’t be “so?”

Technorati Tags: complacency, pittsburgh, plcb, sake

If you’re into Amateur Radio and a *nix nerd, you probably know firsthand how little support there is *nix/*bsd/OSX. There’s a really great freeware program for managing a VX-7R, but it’s only on wintel.

Turns out that isn’t a problem if you have VMware and XP Pro. I wouldn’t have bought those just to support a radio, but the only PC app I “need” is SolidWorks. Everything else I do in darwin/bsd or linux. I really can’t justify carrying around two laptops all the time, and I’d have bought XP and SolidWorks if I did have a PC…

Here’s what I did to get VX-7R Commander working on my MacBook:

1) Use an IOGear QUC-232A cable as a USB<->serial adapter to the VX-7R adapter cable.

The reprap people have a new arduino-like out, the Sanguino. It uses the Atmel atmega644p, so it has 4x the memory, 14 more i/o pins, and JTAG support.

I ordered a couple of kits and soldered them up. Instructions are easy to follow, both for soldering up the board and for modifying Arduino to support the new chip. However, I ran into two problems right off the start, one of which would have probably stymied someone without any arduino/microcontroller experience.

1) No bootloader was installed on the Atmel. This is not the end of the world if you have a bootloader lying around. We had one in studio, but I can’t find it and everyone else is out of country/town. I took this as a sign that I should have my own, so I ordered a couple of USBtinyISP’s from Limor (always buy two of anything you rely upon), soldered them up, and bootloaded the Sanguino. I wrote a simple sketch that blinks the debug LED, pushed it to the Sanguino and yea, everything works now!

Now, to try replacing the Arduino nano or mini on one of my project boards.   

2) Oh. How cute. It won’t work on a breadboard. The spacing on the Sanguino pins is so wide that when it’s plugged into the center of ye olde standard breadboard, you can’t access one side of the Sanguino’s pins. That is, if you put one side of the Sanguino in column b so that you can use column a, the other side is in column j, not in column i. Looking at the board layout, I think this could have been completely avoided by moving the pins in a “row” on each side, and putting the labels for the pins inbetween the pins ala the Nano.

Yuck. I guess I’ll have to get clever if I want to use this with my existing projects.

Technorati Tags: arduino, sanguino

Frostburn is a “regional burn”, where local Burning Man types get together for a Burning Man style event. Frostburn is one of the few, if only, regional burns where survival is as much of an issue as it is in Black Rock City. Last year, temperatures were in the teens to the 20s and keeping warm was as important as keeping hydrated is on the playa.

We’ll be there again this year, with another Iced Tea event featuring the newly resurrected Colordome.

Join us, won’t you? I promise it will be more fun than being stuck in a lift line in some random crappy sky resort.

Technorati Tags: burning man, frostburn, geodesic domes

Surplus? What Surplus?

And I never thought about it this way, but yeah:

“Brain-drain no brainer: Where do young graduates go when they leave Pittsburgh? To cities with viable public transportation systems, so they can work and play without having to buy a car on entry-level salaries or coffee shop wages”

Technorati Tags: future, pittsburgh, PAT