Fun Weekend Ahead

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, September 26th, 2008

This weekend is going to be pretty fun for me

I have soooo many things to play with, it’s going to be wickedly hyper awesome!

I went to the RobotShop and got my Lynxmotion SSC-32, Soldering station, and some female jumper wires, and a force sensing resistor!

The SSC-32 is awesome! I tried it out the other day, and my MANOI is ALIVE! I made it move its head
The only thing though is that I’ll have to power all the servos externally – which is okay now as I got a 12V DC transformer to plug into the breadboard

The soldering iron is horrible I was (and still am) trying to solder the Wave Shield, but the solder won’t stick to the iron >:( So far it has taken me 3 hours (and counting) just to solder in the resistors. The iron doesn’t melt the solder, and the flux is GOOEY! It’s disgusting! I’m even trying lead solder (this stuff SUCKS) and it won’t work… going to try to sand the tip tomorrow, and see if it works better.

The old soldering iron literally exploded… so it’s in the garbage now.

I also bought a nintendo wii nunchuck (the accelerometer thing) to go with my WiiNunchuck Arduino adapters. I’ll be using it to control MANOI (and of course, many Processing programs)

I was playing around with the Fourier transform again today… and I somehow made it to morph time. It’s really freaky! I was recording sound, when my watch beeped. When I played back the sound (after the FFT alg) it was morphed… in a totally weird and unexplainable way XD kind of sped up, but also kinda moshed together…

This entire week I’ve been studying for the SAT. This pretty much involves me trying to sit in one place, focus on one thing, and not fall asleep/daydream for 4 ENTIRE HOURS! I just can’t stay focused that long… I make so many sleepy mistakes … I have absolutely no idea what to do. The real SAT is on October 4th (in 1 week) I’m not really in a panic as the test is so trivial and boring … I just can’t focus on one thing for more than 45 minutes! My brain is always in hyperdrive mode thinking about what ifs and whys… “Why exactly do they think this test evaluates your reasoning abilities” “What if they made this test interactive, like a game, on a computer?”

I’ve been asking what if and why a lot the past week… here’s some of the questions I can remember

What if time wasn’t measured in anything… but was just a continuous flow like a river
Why do we have to measure time?
Why do we always use graphs in two dimension? I don’t care about a squiggle function on a line… why can’t everything be graphed in 3 dimensions?
Why do we always round decimal points when it’s obvious it gives us inaccurate answers?
Why is the tinfoil on my lamp making high pitched noises like vibrations? Is it because of the heat… or did I just discover something I should look into further about light?
What if light had mass?
Why don’t we know what’s in/through a black hole?
What if we could make our own net of space and see how everything interacts with anything?
Why didn’t they put more corrector magnets into the LHC?
What if the computer isn’t monitoring enough information to really see what the Higgs is like?
What happens if they’re smashing the wrong particles together?
Why can’t they just model it on a computer?
Why is the LHC in a circle?
What would happen if it was in a spiral?
Why are my desks always messy?
What will happen when robots will become pets?
Why are people so judgemental about robots?
Why are robots stereotyped to be wirey and ugly?
What if the answer to better AI systems would be to create an “AI Internet” with many algs, and an API, to create a general AI?
What if cancer can be eliminated with the use of dandelions?
What if robots could code themselves and make better versions of their algorithms?
Why is random not random?
What if there were many robots in one square, and they were given random coordinates to navigate to and from? Would it be classified as swarm robots as eventually they will all converge?
What if I made a parrot robot that could read twitter feeds out loud, in a parrot voice?

So yeah… that’s pretty much the way I think all the time… I hardly can focus on one thing, ever!

Weeeee I can’t wait to get MANOI moving and waving this weekend!

Posted in: MANOI, Other, Programming, Projects, Robot, School.