UnixWars

Today is one of those nice days you stumble upon every now and then. Being a geek, you simply have to be happy when a processing monster like this arrives to your workplace.

Yep. It is! Octality’s first and very own Sun Fire 12000. Yes, I know it was recently retired by Sun, but still 52 processors and 288GB of RAM make a hell of machine to test things on. The photograph was taken this morning at the storage room.

Being dedicated to High Performance does have its benefits, don’t you think? It’s deffinitely getting interesting around here. I bet not many start ups get this kind of hardware after just a few months of existence.

By the way, this fella isn’t precisely small. It is 191×85x166 cm and weights 987kg.

A couple of days ago I mentioned this in the post about extending libStargate for a class assignment we had. The team was formed by Miguel, Gonzalo and myself, and we received a pretty good grade, by the way. I wanted to write again after having some patches sent to the main author of libStargate by the end of this week, but it turns out I won’t be able to properly test them until after that. Since a lot of friends have been having problems with their own projects, ours is going to be temporarily cannibalized until their time is up. Wish them luck! ;)

Anyway, I’ll post again once  I have the things properly tested and I’ve spoken to the people of IEArobotics. For now, here is the link to download Wiilson if you want to try it out.

As mentioned earlier, it is just a PWM Wiimote implementation to control a Skybot. The Wiimote is interfaced thanks to the excellent pywii library, Orienting the Wiimote makes the bot move and it goes faster or slower depending on the inclination of the controller. Changing from mode ‘A’ to ‘B’ (or ‘1′ to ‘2′) overrides this behavior and controls the bot with the direction keys of the Wiimote, being able to alter speeds with the ‘Plus’ and ‘Minus’ buttons. It’s not pretty, but it is a quick hack and works fine. If you want something better you’ll have to wait for the release of pybot, a Python module to control (extended) libStargate managed robots with PWM support. The only class present right now is to control the Skybot as it is out of the box, so PWM support is software based -you’d have to rewire it if you wanted a hardware version of this, much better but totally out of the scope-.

Coming up soon, at least as soon as our bot gets de-cannibalized if that is even a word!

By the way… I think I’m getting to love this stuff. I’ll have to buy a Skypic or Arduino for myself. You can’t ever play around enough with these things. And to think it was always there and I never knew!

In a previous post I mentioned that we would be playing around with a bot project to interface our Skypic board and the Wiimote as an assignment in class.

Hacking these things has been fairly easy thanks to some pretty handy pieces of software we stumbled upon at IeaRobotics and a bit of Python magic. The tools of the trade were Pydownloader to program the Skypic, libStargate to interface the PC and the bot, and finally Pywii, a wonderful Wiimote library.

We ended up implementing a new server for the Skypic that should enable a smooth control of the acceleration applied to the Skybot in response to the Wiimote’s movements. To handle it we had to extend libStargate. Our job wasn’t particularly hard to do, but up until now you only had the chance of applying an all-or-nothing type of movement. Now the acceleration is proportional to the pitch and roll values of the controller. Since the controlling code is in the PIC instead of the computer, the effect is really smooth.

The bot has dual power. 6V for the Skypic and 9V for the servos. If only we had used 12V for these the effect would be nicer yet, but overall its fine.

I’ll clean the code a bit before submitting the patches to the project’s author, and I hope to have it ready and submitted this week along with a new wrapper class around libStargate to control specifically the SkyBots with PWM capabilities. It is called pySkybot, by the way.

The other day as soon as I started Pidgin I received an IM from a friend of mine. It was something he wrote while I wasn’t online, so it popped up immediately. The sentence was “Hardware description languages turn me on“. Shocking, I know. But he is a geek. By now you shouldn’t be surprised if you found out that I’m one too. It’s one of the many silly conversations an average geek has every day. But back to the story, I mention this because it was him that brought to my attention the little device that gives title to this post some months ago. It looked cool, but I wasn’t really in the market for new gadgets so I mostly forgot about it.

That was until last week. And yes, it finally arrived on Monday.

I know it wasn’t long ago when I said that I wouldn’t probably have an eReader for a long time. But what can I say. I read a lot. And as noted, I’m a geek. So it was pretty much something bound to happen. (more…)

Following up a post about the Wiimote, here is something interesting I stumbled upon. It’s also about cheap 3 axis accelerometers, only this time it isn’t about the Wiimote. It is about the Wii Nunchuk. Check this out!

You can see the whole story at Hackaday. Although I’m not really used to hacking with circuits, I do check some of these sites on a regular basis. And I must say every now and then they come up with things that make me wish I were Ajo ;-)

I’ve never done anything bot-related and just couldn’t let it stay that way. A couple of friends and I (Hi there Miguel and Gonzalo!) have put together this simple bot and will be playing with it to discover the wonders of the Wiimote shortly.

It uses a Skypic board as brains and a Sky293 board for power, both of which are free hardware licensed under Creative Commons. Besides that it has some cheap sensors, the simplest skeleton ever, a couple of Futaba servos and a Wiimote (yet to be incorporated) as inexpensive do_it_all sensor. It’s not that a Wii Remote is cheap. Compare what it has to offer (accelerometer, optical sensor, Bluetooth connectivity) to the price of any single raw component from that list and you’ve got yourself the best deal ever!! And yes… if you own a Wii you can play with it too as a bonus. Thanks to Andres Prieto-Moreno (Hi, Teach!) for pointing out the possibilities of this little wonder.

Here… take a look.
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It seems I’ll have it in a few hours. Soon after the last post I was notified that the computer would be shipped the same day.

If everything goes according to plan, it should arrive a day earlier than expected. That means this evening!

By the way… do you remember I said it was rock solid? Look at the impressive video I’ve found.

It’s been a while since my last post. The last few months have been really crazy. Hopefully it’ll get more interesting from now on.

My current laptop isn’t in bad shape, but it is quite outdated now. Last month was my birthday, and since I didn’t do anything fancy I decided it was time to give myself a late present.

I would have loved a Macbook Pro, but I’m not made of money and I really wanted a hires screen.
So I did some research and finally decided on a ThinkPad R61. It’s a lot cheaper than the rest of the ThinkPad models, every single review I’ve read is excellent and I’m quite impressed with the specs.

It’s one of the models shipped by Lenovo directly with SUSE Linux, and as I’m not fond of paying a Microsoft tax for something I won’t be using, I tried really hard to find a retailer that would sell it with Linux in Spain. Unluckily with no success.

The price is just slightly above the average laptop, and it’s got one of the new Penryn 45nm Core 2 Duo processors, 4 GB of RAM, 15.4″ 1680×1050 screen and a rock solid design. I’ll be using it with Linux and OpenSolaris, so the virtualization support will be something to be grateful for.

I’m told I can expect it for this Friday. Just a couple more days… I can barely wait :)

As I said before, it comes with some severe software limitations, but as soon as I can unbreak it by wiping out Windows I’ll be bragging about the new machine right here ;-)