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It all started innocently enough. I had $50 worth of Amazon gift certificates so I bought an Arduino Duemilanove from Hacktronics with part of the money. It came and I was thrilled to start blinking LEDs with it right out of the box. I wrote a little program that flashed “SOS” in Morse code. My wife said, “That’s kind of depressing.” So I changed it so that it sent “LOVE” in Morse code instead.

I don’t know why I am so surprised when things work the way they are supposed to. I think it probably goes back to all the times I built electronics kits and had to troubleshoot them for days to get them to work (if they ever worked at all). In any case, the bug had bit me. I started scouring the Internet for Arduino based projects.

One of the reasons that I was drawn to the Arduino in the first place was the concept of shields. Understand that this was not a new concept to me. The robots at work had been expanded through the addition of daughter cards that plugged into the motherboard. But the Arduino had dozens of shields that interfaced to all kinds of interesting hardware. And the best thing of all was that they were affordable on my next to non-existent budget.

I decided that I was going to build a robot from scratch. I had built a BOEbot and I still love to tinker with it but I had the urge to create a unique robot that was my design from the ground up. Oh, alright. I intended to assemble it from parts but I intended to build many of the boards as kits and assemble all the various pieces to make a unique final product. And what is really exciting is that it wasn’t just possible, it was down right easy.

I decided to build my robot around a chassis consisting of a Clementine tangerine crate that I had saved. I decided to use Google SketchUp to build a scale 3D drawing of the crate so that I could better visualize how I planned to transform it into a robotic vehicle. I managed to draw the crate itself fairly quickly but I’m still working on drawing the rest of the parts of the robot.

I drew up a prioritized list of parts that I thought I would need for the robot. At the top of the list was a Proto Shield. A Proto Shield is a board that has many uses but is often used as a place to mount a mini breadboard for experimenting with various hardware interfaces. The other major item on the list was a Motor Shield. The Motor Shield that I bought has connectors for 2 PWM servos and can control up to 4 bi-directional DC motors.

While I waited for my new hardware to come in, I decided to play with the hardware that I already had. I took one of the Infra-red receivers that came with my BOEbot and an old Sony CD player remote that I found laying around (the CD player had gone to hardware heaven years ago) and decided to see if I could get them to work together using the Arduino as the controller for the IR receiver. I got the circuit hooked up pretty quickly. Note: when building a circuit on a breadboard of one battery operated robot for control by another battery operated device, make sure you use a common ground. I eventually decided to just use the USB power from the Arduino.

Now I was ready for software. I Googled Arduino and IR and found RTFA’s video on YouTube. I followed the link to his site and downloaded his code as a starting point. I hacked it to work with the particular remote that I was using and before my Proto Shield had even arrived I had created my first Arduino based hardware hack.

Then the hardware arrived. As I was soldering the power plug on the end of the wires coming out of the  9 volt battery holder with switch that I had bought, I decided that I was going to need a better soldering iron than the little pencil style iron that I had used for 30+ years.

The two criteria that I had were that it had to have a switch so that I didn’t have to bend over to plug it in and unplug it every time I used it and it had to have a shielded stand so that I could safely set it down while it was hot. The next day, I want to my friendly neighborhood Radio Shack and decided that the difference in price between the iron that met my minimal requirements and one that was variable digitally temperature controlled was small enough that I couldn’t justify not buying the fancy one.

It took me two evenings working about an hour an evening to assemble and test the Proto Shield. It took about 5 minutes to move the IR receiver circuit over to the Proto Shield and get it working.

Stay tuned. More mania is on the way.

I download Firefox 3.5 today. While I browsed through the add-ons trying to replace the functionality of the add-ons that 3.5 made obsolete, I came across ScribeFire. It scratched an itch that I didn’t even know I had. Maybe this will help me start posting to my blog on a regular basis again.

I have to say, I’m ecstatic. I re-established contact with one of my cousins last night. I have talked to him on several occasions since we have been grown but I hadn’t heard from him in quite a while. I recently added my brother, Truett as a friend on Facebook and last night, I noticed that he had added several new friends. As it turns out, many of them were our cousins and their offspring. I went through friend chains finding and friending many of them. I didn’t friend those who hadn’t met me at least once as I didn’t want to be some creepy old man that they never heard of asking to be their friend. I have had two very brief (a la instant message) interactions with my cousin Randy (or is it Randall now). I was always Joe Kellie to them and now I have dropped the Joe to be called Kellie by friends, family and colleagues alike. I will probably ask what he prefers. Times change but, hopefully, people are still essentially who they always were.

I don’t particularly like Facebook but I am so glad that it helped me re-establish these ties to my past. I was just starting to miss them a lot. I guess I’ll put up with the things I don’t like about Facebook (too many to enumerate here and besides, this blog is to praise Facebook, not find fault with it). So much for my pseudo-monthly blog post. Stay tuned… you never know when I might post again.

I downloaded the brand new, fresh out of beta, version 2.0 of Flock. I’ll have to try it on the MacBook at home tonight. It looks like they have improved it somewhat. Give it a try if you’re in to social networking. I’m going to explore the RSS reader capabilities tonight myself. I think the drag and drop photo uploading is going to be useful too.

I will be blogging a little more frequently now. I’m doing an experiment in therapeutic writing. If I express myself here in writing, maybe it will help me work through issues and relieve some of my stress.

Tags: tech-tip, ramble, flock, rss

I love my MacBook but I spend all day every day that I go to work using the Dell PC laptop that my company provides me. It seems ironic to me that I have to endure the frustrations inherent in using Windows XP when I know there is a better way. I know that there are people that love Windows. My good friend, Jim is one of them. I just have a different opinion. I’m not a fanatic, just a satisfied user. I like other Unix based operating systems almost as much as I do OS X. As time goes by and all the operating systems improve (we’ll ignore Vista as an anomoly), it is getting less important than it once was. I guess I feel about my computer the way car lovers feel about their cars.

There are lots of features of my computer that I haven’t had time to discover yet. I am a professional programmer but I barely know the basic components of the OS X programming libraries. I also want to learn Objective C, one of the core programming languages on the Mac. The Ruby scripting language is another topic I’d like to explore more deeply but I rarely have time to play with it. From the little that I’ve been able to use the development tools on the Mac I’m convinced that they are far superior to any other tools that I’ve used on other platforms.

Another thing that I want to use my computer for more often is to write. I have several ideas for screenplays. I like to blog, as you can tell if you are reading this. I also think I have a novel and maybe a few textbooks that I want to write. I just installed Dave Winer’s OPML editor on my MacBook and I’m using its Wordpress tool to write this blog post. I’m trying to exercise some discipline and write something every day. I’m hoping that the OPML editor will help with this.

I went to the Huntsville, Alabama Hamfest on Saturday. I walked from around 10:00am until after 1:30pm. My feet were sore. I didn’t buy much. I bought an RCA Victor stuffed Dalmation for Riley and a bamboo cutting board for Pam. I bought me a little dual band (2m and 70cm) mag mount antenna with an SMA connector. It worked great. I got ready to go to work this morning and discovered that the main radiator had come loose and fallen off the antenna sometime since Saturday. I was angry and sad.

Also, this morning the sherrif was outside my neighbors house with a bull horn telling her to come out or call them on the phone and tell them her side of the story. Pam called later to say that she had come out of the house and gotten in the police car without handcuffs and of her own volition. We’re worried about her dog. We’ll call the sherrif’s office later and see if arrangements have been made.

I’m anxious about my trip to Huntington Beach this week. It’s not that I’m afraid of flying or anything. It’s just that flying to the west coast exhausts me. I have apnea and so I have to carry a CPAP machine with me. I can’t sleep without it so I  refuse to check it. I also have to carry a laptop to do my job while I’m there. The laptop the company provides me is a Dell M70 that weighs in at over 7 lbs. I am really excited about the training that is the reason that I’m going. I’m just dreading the travel process.

If any one is actually reading this, drop me an email. I am jkelliemiller at gmail dot com (you know the drill). I’d love to hear from you. Or comment here. Comments are moderated so it may take a little while for your comment to be approved. But I do read all the comments (even the spam).

I can’t remember exactly when I discovered Squeak but it was probably the late 90s. Even in it’s earliest releases, it was awesome. In case you haven’t heard of Squeak, it is a modern implementation of Smalltalk, based on Smalltalk 80. It was written by Dan Ingalls, Alan Kay, Ted Kaehler, and Scott Wallace at Apple in the 90s to explore Alan Kay’s idea of the Dynabook.

Smalltalk is the epitome of object oriented systems. It is, in fact, one of the most copied languages around. For example, the NextStep library was based to a large extent on the Smalltalk library. Objective C draws many of its OO concepts directly from Smalltalk. To someone like me, who has been doing OO programming for something like 20 years, Squeak is like coming home.

I’ll have to admit, Smalltalk is hard to get your mind around. I have been playing with Squeak off and on for years. Mostly, I’ve marveled at the rich applications that came bundled with the package. Each new distribution brought more nifty graphical applications that, more than just being examples of how to write applications in Squeak, were incredibly useful in their own right.

The thing that has changed recently for me is that I discovered the online book Squeak By Example. This has broken down all of the last mental barriers that were hindered me in developing Squeak applications on my own. It is an excellent tutorial for anyone with any knowledge of programming at all. I wonder if it isn’t a great book for people that have no knowledge of programming at all. But that’s a topic for another time.

Squeak has rekindled the utter joy of programming in me. I highly recommend that you download it and Squeak By Example, or SBE as it refers to itself, and have fun. Set aside a good chunk of time. You won’t want to put this one down.

So now I’ve got this really nice blank piece of paper in front of me. I’ve gotten myself into the habit of writing on it frequently. Where have all my ideas gone. I wrote them down somewhere. I guess I need to find that file or notebook or whatever.

I know what I’m interested in. Programming, video making - both vlogs and actual video production with scripts and editing and such, playing music, composing music, writing, building robots, ham radio, creating web sites, the list goes on and on.

I suppose I should write about those things and see what happens. I act so ADHD though. I flit from one thing to the next. I can’t do them all at once so I have a hard time sticking with anything for long enough at a stretch to accomplish anything to speak of.

The following pictures prove that posting pictures to a WordPress blog works. I’ll work on getting more sophisticated with these posts later. Dammit Jim, I’m a programmer, not a web designer.

Here is a picture of Elsie that lives on my Flickr account.

Here is a picture of me from a webcam snapshot that was uploaded to this site.

I finally figured out how to configure PHP on my server. It was documented in my provider’s help desk pages. I guess I won’t move yet. I will probably wait until I can afford to buy a slice and keep this site. “Don’t fix something that’s not broken” I always say. I promise I’ll write a post that is about something more substantial than my web hosting configuration adventure real soon now. In the mean time, at least I’m posting more frequently.