#robotics Logs

Nov 26 2011

01:37 kd0mto I need to stop staying up so late to work on projects.
01:42 rue_house well, my plc software is comming along ok
01:42 rue_house but I need sleep
01:42 kd0mto nice
01:42 rue_house jand supper
01:43 kd0mto rue_house: PLC for what? robots?
01:43 kd0mto Or your heater system?
01:46 rue_house well, I thought about making a plc a few times,
01:46 rue_house and its an interesting logistical challange
01:46 kd0mto *nods*
01:46 rue_house but this morning I think I figured it out
01:46 rue_house so I'm trying my ideas
01:47 kd0mto oh cool!
01:47 kd0mto Oh, do you have any advice how to start programming with atmega328's?
01:47 kd0mto I can't find documentation that seems as nice for them as other AVR's
01:47 rue_house start witha flashing led
01:48 rue_house the avr itself dosn't matter
01:48 rue_house its not like pics
01:48 rue_house almost any m32 m32x code should work
01:48 rue_house or m16 or m8
01:48 rue_house or m16x or m8x
01:50 kd0mto really?
01:51 kd0mto So... they Atmega's should be like regular AVR's?
01:51 rue_house yup
01:51 kd0mto Have all the same counters and PWM modes and stuff?
01:51 rue_house it varries a little
01:51 kd0mto I want to know specifics for the Atmega328P's that I have.
01:52 rue_house read the datasheet
01:52 rue_house the tutorials will help you with the basics
01:52 rue_house shoul do anyhow
01:52 rue_house <--- he's faking being awake
01:52 kd0mto the datasheet seems a bit vague
01:52 kd0mto lol
01:52 rue_house vauge about what
01:53 kd0mto thanks rue, get some sleep and we can talk tomorrow or something if that's easier
01:53 rue_house na, have to cook supper and there's a code window open infront of me
01:53 kd0mto atmel.com/dyn/resources/prod_documents/8271S.pdf
01:54 kd0mto ahh
01:54 rue_house vauge about what
01:54 kd0mto counters, PWM modes, etc..'
01:54 rue_house ok, what is vauge about pwm modes
01:55 kd0mto which ones are available?
01:55 rue_house you can use any of them you want
01:55 rue_house they list about 6 yes?
01:55 kd0mto How do I set the register for Fast match, CTC, etc..?
01:55 rue_house I always use fast
01:56 rue_house they have a table that tells you what bits to set
01:56 kd0mto I assume that'll work nicely for servo control?
01:56 rue_house I think they also have a code example of how to do it
01:56 rue_house kd0mto, servos DO NOT USE REAL PWM
01:56 rue_house they use timed pulses
01:57 rue_house its like saying forks are used to cut stuff
01:57 rue_house its not false, but not true
01:58 rue_house you can use pwm to control a servo if you keep the duty to within a fraction of the range of the register
01:58 rue_house your better off using timers
01:58 rue_house you can get more resolution for the pulse
02:03 kd0mto right.
02:03 kd0mto Ok then... looks like I'll have to work with some timer functions.
02:03 kd0mto ISR's for the win.
02:29 rue_house a) set up your clock source
02:30 rue_house b) set up your count number
02:30 rue_house d) enable to thing
11:56 Tom_itx rue_house what did we do yesterday?
12:03 kd0mto yay! my shop ubuntu machine is finally fixed!
12:14 exiff good times
14:20 rue_house today
14:33 rue_house boiler did great yesterday
14:33 rue_house robotics went good today
14:33 rue_house we got the rest of the sensors hooked up, we can display the posisiton sof all the axies
14:34 kd0mto nice
14:35 rue_house the one kid is working on coding up a 'save' and 'restore' position function
14:37 rue_house nwo that Ihave some automation ont eh boiler, I'm able to have it auto stop the house circ pump when the house dodn't need heat, which caused a 5x improvement in wood consumption
14:37 rue_house (as in the wood lasted 5x longer)
14:38 rue_house I have to ship out zhanx 's package now...
14:39 rue_house oh, and the plc software is working sofar
14:39 rue_house now I just have to write the recursive path compiler
14:40 rue_house but first I need to fix a laptop
14:57 zhanx i am trying to get my laptop to play games. no workie
15:13 Tom_itx you got work to do, no time for games
15:21 zhanx what work....
15:42 rue_house zhanx, $7.50 sound ok?
15:48 zhanx sure
17:54 zhanx yep
17:54 zhanx stress testing the pc is working good
17:55 zhanx d/l a huge file, installing a massive game, burning a dvd 25 webpages open and tons of programs
18:05 exiff start rendering a scene in blender...put lots of raytraced materials...
18:07 zhanx i can barely move the mouse as it is
18:09 exiff you're probably only stressing your hard drive,not your processor
18:42 Tom_itx run one of those prime number programs
20:55 Zhanx_phone Fun
21:28 rue_house I was junking a bbq today that had a temp guage I took off and put in the exhaust manifold of the boiler
21:28 rue_house I can now get an idea of the exhaust gas temp
22:13 Tom_itx good idea
22:17 thylyne is anyone here an op in #ai?
22:17 Tom_itx ai taking on a mind of it's own again?
22:23 thylyne some guy named 'xs' banned me
22:24 Tom_itx he's an op
22:24 Tom_itx maybe he had a reason
22:25 thylyne Well i post links to Jurgen Schmidhuber lectures. I post links to Ben Goertzel Lectures. I post links to POMDP websites. I post links to AGI lecture series.
22:25 thylyne I should be allowed to speak in there on these topics
22:41 rue_house ok, fire-not-doing-well is 150c, doing ok is 275c
22:41 Tom_itx rue_house have you got repairs done to the boiler yet?
22:42 Tom_itx or was it just the plastic lines?
22:42 rue_house they dont know what ai is, I gave up on the channel when they couldn't give me any goals or measures of success for it
22:42 rue_house yea, I reaplced them with $70 of pex lines
22:42 rue_house have we had people in here asking about using avrs with modbus?
22:43 Tom_itx is pex better than poly?
22:43 Tom_itx i dunno
22:43 rue_house people have wanted modbus code for avrs since 2004, and I still cant find any
22:43 rue_house yea, pex is better
22:43 Tom_itx stay flexible in the cold?
22:43 rue_house dunno
22:48 rue_house tommorow I'm gonna see if another bbq is still in the bush, maybe pull off its temp guage too
22:49 Tom_itx did you have class today?
22:51 rue_house yes
22:51 rue_house we got all the position sensors on the arm working
22:51 Tom_itx the balloon thing?
22:51 rue_house started work to make a 'save all positions' system
22:51 rue_house no, arm5
22:51 Tom_itx or something else?
22:52 Tom_itx find any sensors for your balloon?
22:53 rue_house hu?
22:53 rue_house you mean did I make the force sensors?
22:53 rue_house no..
23:10 thylyne rue_house I am disturbed by the number of people on freenode who are interested in chat bots.
23:10 rue_house hi
23:10 rue_house hi
23:10 tobbor Hello rue_house
23:10 rue_house why is that thylyne
23:11 rue_house !seen the show fall in summer
23:11 tobbor I have never seen the show fall in summer
23:11 thylyne rue_house There are too many people around here who beleive that IBMs watson understands english.
23:11 rue_house heh
23:12 rue_house it depends, with the incredibly loose definitions, almost anyhting is possable
23:13 thylyne rue_house everything I point out to people in #ai, they incorrectly assume that I am somehow claiming such a thing is "impossible". That is never my point.
23:14 rue_house so you thing emergent intelligence is possable with existing hardware?
23:14 thylyne No, let me give an example.
23:15 rue_house k
23:15 thylyne http://99chan.org/sci/res/8370.html
23:16 thylyne Human beings are dangerously accurate at identifying what is behind the black rectangles
23:16 thylyne And then I say things like "All previously existing machine vision algorithms cannot do this."
23:17 rue_house haha I didn't notice them for like a min
23:17 thylyne My point is that human vision is also considering context in order to measure relative sizes of objects. And these contextual clues are USED by human brains in order to identify objects.
23:17 rue_house yes
23:17 rue_house agreed
23:17 thylyne Yeah see. You totally understand what I just said.
23:17 thylyne If this were #ai, they would be attacking me for making some sort of claim about impossibility of a computer to do this.
23:18 rue_house heh
23:18 rue_house I havn't worked out vision yet
23:18 rue_house but I believe that emotion plays a REALLY important role in determining the level of learning
23:18 thylyne "feature extraction" is only 50% of human vision.
23:19 rue_house its interesting cause people can see things that quite aren't there
23:19 rue_house lanugage has an interesting feature
23:19 rue_house in that way
23:20 rue_house if I say "I saw a red car driving down the street" the image generated by all those who hear it varies by an incredible amount
23:20 rue_house looking at that fact, its amazing communications works at all
23:20 thylyne The brain in fact, is considering context and size as a means to quickly eliminate large categories of millions of possible objects.
23:21 rue_house I think that context is what makes it easy
23:21 rue_house if you took the image of the guy on the bike and put it over the water, people woulnd't neccissarily be able to tell you what he was on
23:21 thylyne The black rectangle is covering all the information about a bicycle or a basketball hoop.
23:22 Kimlaroux there are bikes that float on water
23:22 rue_house I'm a being who can derive quite heavily from context, I'v found that there are a lot of people who cant make 'ass meaning' of anything without tonnes and tonnes of context
23:22 thylyne Kimlaroux And yet our brains do in fact contain things such as "people playing in water dont wear button-up shirts and backpacks"
23:22 Kimlaroux but given his position, on water it would look like he's water skiing
23:23 Kimlaroux Ah, true
23:23 Kimlaroux I forgot that point
23:23 rue_house I know context is really important, thats why I'm trying to persue chaotic state machines
23:24 Kimlaroux like, air?
23:25 Kimlaroux what purpose would such a machine serve?
23:27 rue_house chaotic state machines work opposite to normal state machines
23:27 rue_house normal state machines have a single active state
23:27 rue_house chaotic state machines are many simotanious active states
23:28 rue_house chaotic state machines are, to a degree, error tollerant
23:28 Kimlaroux like a quantum computer?
23:29 rue_house hmm I havn't looked up quantum computers
23:30 rue_house anyhow,its also relativly easy to make chaotic state machines self-learning
23:30 rue_house I was playing around with some code that would learn text strings, results were iffy, but it seems I misplaced the code
23:31 rue_house I'm working on recoding it, but I dont remember quite how I did it
23:33 rue_house so I minimized the window and switched to working on a ladder logic PLC core, which I'm doing rather well on
23:33 rue_house I just found out there are ethernet modbus devices, and linux has a modbus library, so I'm looking for some avr code to make a slave modbus device
23:35 rue_house as I pick apart the human sychie, the simplicity of what we think of as intelligence scares me
23:36 thylyne Well, the "master algorithm" of the human brain is just blindly associating co-occuring stimuli.
23:37 thylyne Pavlov's dogs.
23:37 rue_house no
23:37 rue_house well
23:37 thylyne Neurons that fire together, wire together
23:37 rue_house ok but you can look at it from the other end too
23:38 rue_house compare a baby crying to a 45 year old construction worker smashing something
23:38 rue_house tell me why some kids find computer programming addictive
23:39 rue_house and why some are addicted to destroying things
23:39 rue_house I dont have my facts gathered, I cant take you for a walk thru what I'v learned
23:40 rue_house but right now I'm playing with PIC modbus code, so, whatever
23:41 thylyne The brain does not know what it's supposed to know before it knows it. So it just associates co-occuring stimuli, whether or nto they are analytically related. This is dirty, roughshod, non-optimal, all that jazz. But it works in the real world. It's dirty but it works.
23:42 thylyne We are definitely not 1) Not a bayesian inference machine. 2) not a quantum computer. 3) not a Solomonoff INduction machine.
23:42 zhanx_laptop ok mint is up and running
23:42 rue_house thylyne, agreed
23:42 rue_house zhanx, mint?
23:42 zhanx_laptop its deb based so i am good
23:42 zhanx_laptop linux mint
23:43 zhanx_laptop 12 is out today
23:43 zhanx_laptop fixes all the issues with ubuntu and keeps gnome
23:43 rue_house ...ok
23:43 zhanx_laptop gui issues mainly
23:44 zhanx_laptop and the fact my laptop sound and stuff works with out messing with it
23:45 rue_house zhanx, you familiar with modbus?
23:45 zhanx_laptop a little
23:47 rue_house http://ideone.com/183ct < look for functions readRegResponse and writeRegResponse does it look to you like their just taking the rs232 modbus commands and shoving them out to an i2c device?
23:48 zhanx_laptop just a sec
23:48 zhanx_laptop compiling is stressing out my laptop
23:49 rue_house I'm trying to clean up the code, it was written by more than one person with bad habbits
23:50 zhanx_laptop yep i think your right
23:50 zhanx_laptop yep they are
23:51 zhanx_laptop i hate people that think comments are optional
23:53 zhanx_laptop who coded this, i know its not you, Tom_itx was that you?
23:54 rue_house no its PIC modbus code
23:55 rue_house it seems to be pretty popular on google
23:55 rue_house I indexed it, deleted a fn not used, ....
23:55 rue_house trying to work out whatit does do
23:56 zhanx_laptop looks like spi? tp i2c
23:56 zhanx_laptop to
23:56 zhanx_laptop now that i am reading more of it
23:56 zhanx_laptop but the problem is the RS function with serial commands
23:57 rue_house I think, from it, I can infer what to do if writing from scratch
23:57 zhanx_laptop and the ISR is is serial of course
23:57 zhanx_laptop serial to I2C / SPI?
23:58 zhanx_laptop or is it gpio code?
23:58 rue_house I cant find any record of what device their pushing the i2c to
23:58 rue_house I dont see why not mod the pins on the micro
23:58 zhanx_laptop i bookmarked its weird
23:58 zhanx_laptop i know
23:59 zhanx_laptop TRISB = 0xE0 = gpio
23:59 zhanx_laptop in the main
23:59 rue_house ok... dont know much on pics anymore