Instructions for base install of Groovy on Arch worked flawlessly. I followed the build-from-source instructions for Desktop-Full, installing dependencies as they came up (i.e., when CMake complained) and invoking catkin_make_isolated with the following: -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/ros/groovy -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/python2 -DPYTHON_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/include/python2.7 -DPYTHON_LIBRARY=/usr/lib/libpython2.7.so -DSETUPTOOLS_DEB_LAYOUT=OFF Some of the most annoying oddities: camera_calibraton_parsers wants yaml-cpp 0.3 (from the AUR), not 0.5! image_proc and [...]
Rode down Sickter Gnar (at Blackrock) for the second time, got overambitious with my speed, and went over the bars. Hit the ground with my right elbow and left pinky and noticed I no longer had a fifth knuckle. The area just under the head of the metacarpal is shattered and will need pins to [...]
Change is uncomfortable, so most people find it difficult to break away from their current way of doing things. Innovation is all about change and thus takes discipline and willpower. So stop being a lazy asshole and get stuff done.
The 900 MHz XBees I bought back in May 2012 came without antennas (not a mistake — the ones with whip antennas were out of stock, and I couldn’t wait). It turned out that making effective dipole antennas out of 50 ohm coax cable is fairly easy in practice: I followed this tutorial to make [...]
People have, in the past, used neural networks to train a program to guess the next character in a sequence of characters, and in doing so, write fairly coherent sentences. This is similar to what search engines like Google do to autocomplete queries. It would be a good exercise for me to implement such neural [...]
I often get ideas for various robotics and computer science-y projects I could take on after I finish my current projects, but as is the case for many of us, I just don’t have the time to implement most of them. Yet the ideas keep coming, and my todo list (a text file in my [...]
This is another braindump post, so my sentences may be a bit haphazard. In the scramble leading up to the IARC, I donated my Arduino’s atmega328p to the Aerial Team, which subsequently fried the chip. I ordered a new chip from Digi-Key a few days ago, but without the Arduino bootloader, I couldn’t upload sketches [...]
After a month-long hiatus after the crash, I redesigned the tricopter chassis. The aluminum arms are now foldable, and the motors are closer to the center of the chassis (I have yet to trim the arms to a shorter length). There is room for the new and bigger ESCs underneath the other electronics.
On August 1, we (the OSU Autonomous Aerial Robotics Team) will compete against 27 other collegiate teams from around the world in the 2012 International Aerial Robotics Competition. The current (6th) mission of the IARC requires teams to develop an aerial robot capable of autonomously navigating an indoor space (i.e., hallways, furnished rooms) to locate [...]
This is mainly for my record. Of the three Red Brick 70A ESCs I ordered from HobbyKing to replace my burnt-up ones, one had different pin assignments to the FETs than the other two. This required me to upload the rb50a firmware instead of the rb70a. Before I figured out that the rb50a firmware worked [...]