Us and Them

So I have been considering getting an Asus eee PC. I think if I get one, I'm going to get the 900. I only want to spend like $250-300 on it. I would mainly use it for on the go computing (word processing, browser, etc) and keep a VNC session over VPN open to my main laptop or my closet server. Still not sure whether or not I will get one. But its tempting. As I write this, the band Mae is warming up less than 50 yards from my room. Since the show starts at 11pm, I think I may be up late tonight, because I think they will be generating a significant amount of sound. I looked them up and downloaded everything they have done on Ruckus (ruckus.com in case you don't know what that is) and I like their sound. Its kinda punk/rock/progressive with some electronic overtones. So at least I won't be trying to sleep with a rap concert going. Anyway, to continue on tech, there is a really neat mod someone did here. When it comes to hacking and modding, sometimes, you do things for no reason other than you can. I have experienced this several times, and this guy is a perfect example. Why put an LCD screen on a mouse? Why not? Eveything can benefit from either an LCD screen or LEDs. As far as the Battlebot has been going, we have decided to make the basic shape into a hexigon. We also picked a main spinner motor (I'll post the link when I get the chance) and the 4 drive motors. The spinner motor is pretty awesome, its something like 4.5 horsepower, pancake, 24v, and about $550. Yikes. So since our budget is a grand total of $3200, thats a pretty good chunk when you consider we still need to buy lots of steel for the rest, and I'm not sure if we are recycling batteries and electronics from other robots laying around. But this week, we are all modeling it in CAD using either SolidWorks or AutoDesk Inventor. And, since I am a student (engineering students get all kinds of free software, yay) I can get everything that AutoDesk makes for free. So I have been busy learning how to model in that. I think I will work on that more tonight.

So since I have been taking a class on MATLAB, I have had some interesting ideas. For instance, I wrote a little simulation of swarm behavior. Now, please note that one script I borrowed from someone (I think the credits are in the comments of the code) and the rest I pieced together myself. I know that it is only in 2D and that it may not be what is technically considered a swarm simulation, but I was messing with an idea, and this was a rough sketch. ThinkGeek sells these little R/C flying things, and in the video, they show a bunch take off from a table. I immidiatly thought of a system that worked similarly to USB missle launchers. There would be a webcam pointed at the door to a room, capturing images. You would calibrate the system by taking a single picture of the door with no one there. Whenever someone walks in the line of sight, the software makes all of the little R/C things attack that person. Practically, this cannot be accomplished with the things from ThinkGeek because they can only go up and down. However, R/C helicopters could have no problem doing this. So the software sim I wrote for this is really simple. It does edge detection on the pictures from the webcam. You then set a threshold that is the difference in percent from the calibrated picture. This tolerance can be set so that if a cat runs by, nothing happens, but if a person walks in, then the script starts a swarm sim that takes a certain number of points (the number of R/C devices) and swarms them at a certain point. There are several ways of cheating this system, but oh well. Here are the scripts. They are hosted on my school website. If you want to test it or play with it, download everything in there and the sub directories. The main file is swarmTest1.m. Pop that in to MATLAB or the equivalent and let her rip. The arguments that it takes in are the 2 filenames of images to be compared. You can edit the if statement in there to change the tolerance. I should probably have just made that one of the arguments, but I don't feel like changing that right now. The test case I provided is to give it the arguements yesperson.jpg and noperson.jpg.

Thats all for now. Gotta go learn Inventor 2009.