Topics

My current electronics project is to take a toy RC car and turn it into a web-controlled Robo-car using a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino.

Luckily for me other people have already accomplished this task so I won't exactly be blazing any trails with this project. Seems like a good stepping stone towards more advanced robotic vehicles.

I'll be using the Raspberry Pi as a Node.js server which handles all the user interface and communication. The Arduino will be connected directly to the steering servo and the DC motor. There is a handy module already created for Node.js called Johnny-Five which enables communication between the Pi and the Arduino out of the box. For a psuedo-real-time experience I'll be using socket.io for communication between the client and server.

The Pi will also be equipped with an RPi Camera for video/photo taking.

I've chosen to use a toy car so that I don't have to worry about building a chassis, getting steering working, etc... It cost like $12 at Wal-Mart anyway.

So far I've stripped the RC car down to it's body and base electronic components. Most of these components I'm going to strip out too. Photos are attached.

Next step is starting on the base Node.js server, creating a server which can take and display photos from the RPi camera. Also, I need to practice wiring up the Arduino to a servo.

PS. I would have made this a blog post but attaching photos there is too much work (no upload option) so I didn't.

I played a game this week that I think would be perfect to take on a camping trip. It is called Munchkin. Unlike board games it only requires a deck of cards and a single die.

The point of the game is to kill monsters, get treasure and backstab your friends. It is basically an RPG without all that roleplaying crap. Also it is humorous and easy to learn.

So I just got an arduino uno for Christmas. I guess this means it's time for the web controlled pi/arduino robot.

Just have to figure out how to use this thing first... Guess I will make some LEDs blink or something.

So my father-in-law is building basically a near-life-size pirate ship in his backyard as a play structure for the grandkids. It is going to be amazingly cool. He has asked me if it is possible to wire up a "sound effect" system connected to a couple button "control panels" which would play sounds like a cannon blast, or sailors saying "Land Ho!" or whatever. I told him yes this is possible... so now I have to figure out how to do it so it will be reliable and not crazy expensive.

Been doing a lot of research on sound playing integrated circuits. I would MUCH prefer to buy a completed PCB as opposed to creating my own. Especially as there is the possibility of needing more of these in the future.

So far after an hour of so of googling I haven't been able to find exactly what I am looking for. I've found a couple relatively cheap PCBs which can play back a single 25 second sound either from flash or EPROM. They only are only capable of playing a single sound each though. I did find one PCB which played multiple MP3s. The board only cost like a $1 each too... of course they ship from China and the minimum order is 500 units.

Got any recommendations or suggestions for me?

So I've finished the first phase of my Javascript A* pathfinding algorithm. It is viewable here http://game.randomland.net/astar/.

After I get back from yurting (is that a verb?) at the beach I'll continue on my next phase where I add weighted tiles (for such things as areas which are more difficult to travel through), making it so that you can't fit diagonally through two blocking squares, and influence mapping!

The last one is pretty cool because you can use it to make the AI be less dumb by influencing their mapping. For example if you were creating a strategy game and the AI units kept getting killed at a certain point, you'd influence the calculated "cost" of that area so that units would start taking longer but safer paths.

All that stuff is relatively easy, so I should have some more soon (after yurting).

So I created this HTML5/Javascript Mother's Day card/Centipede clone for my Mom. Due to time constraints some features didn't get completed in time (sounds is the major one) and there are a couple bugs but overall it's the most "finished" thing I've accomplished in quite awhile.

I learned HTML5 canvas controls and Javascript OOP while building this game over the last two weeks. 'Twas a good learning experience if nothing else. Hopefully my Mom likes it too.

Check it out at http://alturl.com/jfpkr.

So I got a new phone because apparently having a phone which locks up 30-40% of the time whenever somebody calls you and having a pregnant wife are not compatible situations.

About 50 what-if situation lectures later, I headed down to the Verizon store. Crying (on the inside), I changed my plan over from a grandfathered "Unlimited" to a 2gb limit plan. No cost difference whatsoever. This was necessary because the non-subsidized rates for cell phones are crazy ($699???).

My new phone is the Samsung Galaxy S III, which is the same thing Melissa has which I rather liked.

I promptly installed ScummVM on it and am now playing adventure games in the 90s. Most of which have the word "Quest" in the name. I've tried out Police Quest, Space Quest, and Goblins Quest 3. Next up I'll going to play some of the non-quest games like Hugo and Day of the Tentacle. The good old days of computer gaming when gameplay mostly consisted of walking from room to room trying to use every single item in your inventory on every object in the game until you figured out the correct combination to move to the next room or were killed without any warning.

I'm sure it says something about me that I'm using a device with all the latest technology and huge amount of computing power (for something that fits in my pocket) to play games which where designed for a 286 almost two decades ago.

I've come to the conclusion that normal tags (as in the words you attach to pictures and the like to make them easier to search for later) are not enough. Using only tags doing some things which you would think would be simple are in fact annoyingly difficult. For example... say you have a database of photos and you want to get a list of all the people who attended some event. With the standard tag method you'd tag the event name and one tag each for every person in the photo. Suppose however that somebody also decided to tag some non-people data too. Like maybe the type of photo (portrait, macro, wide-angle,etc), random objects in the room (wedding cake, car, pizza, bowie knife,etc), and more. How are you supposed to be able to return a list of all of the "people" tags associated with that event? With normal tags it's pretty freaking difficult.

Tags need types. At least for people like me who like to tag the crap out of everything. If you could assign types to tags all of this would be much easier. It would make browsing soo much easier. Rather than looking through a giant, annoying, nearly useless tag cloud you could actually browse the list of people or the list of places or events or objects or whatever in your database.

This would complicate the UI for adding tags of course. No more single text box with a comma delimited list. You'd have to add tags individually and have a list of different types to choose from. But with that minor increase in inconvience when adding tags you'd gain a lot more power when searching tags. And it isn't like this would seriously complicate a tagging database. The tags themselves now just given a single bit of meta-data (crap I just thought about what it would be like if you could assign tags to tags... sheez.)

There are no major photo sharing/storing sites/software out there which does this (that I am aware of.) Not Flickr, not picasa, and not Facebook. I have seen it at least once before on some foreign language image board I stumbled upon though.

I'm not sure I want to be restricted to web based though. In fact... I'm not sure I want to be restricted to tagging just photos. Any type of file which you have a large collection could benefit from a tagging database. I'm thinking like a library of sound effects used in game development.

Also... what about photos that you've backed up and maybe you don't actually want/need always to be accessible on your current computer. When using an offline storage method like usb hard drives, dvds, blu ray discs, usb sticks, wax cylinders,crystals etched by red laser beams... whatever the storage method it would be great to be able to take the tag database with you.

That brings up another point... the tag (really meta-data) database needs to be lightweight. I'm looking at you Picasa... This shouldn't be a problem until you start thinking about storing thumbnails in the database. Then you need to make a bunch of decisions about the size and quality of these thumbnails versus your desire for a small database.

All of these design choices however seem to make me the enemy of sharing. Because if you make a database that can go along with the pictures on a USB stick it isn't exactly central or accessible by other users. The only real way I see to remedy this is to use some sort of distributed synchronization approach. You'd have to create a modified version of the database program (web-based of course) where the other non web-versions of the program could upload the pictures to and synchronize the meta-data. Thus giving you local and remote copy of the photos both with the same meta-data. This also helps if the photo-server goes down in flames; you've still got your local copies with their meta-data. Which photos get uploaded to the centralized server would of course be up to the individual users. Also the central server would be able to restrict file types and sizes and require login authentication.

Anyway that's my rant. If you were able to suffer all the way through it then let me know what you think.

Have you ever discovered something mildly interesting and/or unexpected in a game?

While playing Skryim I discovered that if you pickpocket a Forsworn Briar Heart (those forsworn that cut out their own heart and replace it with a briar heart) and take his briar heart he immediately falls over dead. The "pickpocketing" is actually reaching into the guy's open chest cavity and yanking out his heart... which is fatal of course. I think this is the only case where pickpocketing actually has any real effect on the victim (other then poisoning them with appropriate perk).

If you weren't playing a stealth character trying to build up your pickpocket skill you might never discover this (all Forsworn Briar Hearts are enemies that will attack you on sight.) Just thought it was kind of a clever touch Bethesda added.

So I'm going back down to Disneyland this year in October with Melissa's folks (they go nearly every year). In October there is a Halloween party event thing were you can get tickets and spend extra time in the park at night and all the adults can were costumes as well as the children (normally only children are allowed to wear costumes in Disneyland). So everybody in the family is going to dress up.

Due to the rules of not being able to cover your eyes, carry weapons which could be mistaken for real, or have any type of gore, blood, etc... and also due to time constraints I ended up being a "Jedi" for Halloween. Ya know with a big brown robe/cloak and a tunic and funky shoes. This is actually Disneyland themed. They have Star Wars rides, sell Star Wars merc, and do a Jedi Academy thing for kids at Disneyland.

As Melissa is working on the robe and tunic I decided to create a prop lightsaber hilt for myself. I could just use one of those toy ones with the retractable blade but everybody has one... and they are kind of heavy and don't hang on your belt very well. Also they've got that piece of the blade always sticking out which makes them kinds of long and bulky. This leads to me deciding to create just a prop hilt out of parts from Lowes/Home Depot.

There are tons of resources on this web and even people which sell customized parts so you can get an EXACT REPLICA of the movie saber. However I am cheap so I'm going to make one out of like $20 worth of hardware store parts. The simultaneous best/worst resource for this on the web is Lightsabers from the Big Yellow Box. Make sure to have NoScript enabled when visiting this site. It has a ton of different saber designs and detailed parts lists and instructions on how they were made. The site design and hosting however are some of the worst I've seen in a long time. If you don't have Javascript disabled some of the ads can actually redirect you to a different website and hitting the back button will not take you back to the same place you left (problem with the frames).

This post is getting too long... The kid and I hit up Lowes and Walmart and got most of the parts I'll need. I will be taking pictures along the way of course. The whole thing has to be completed in just a couple of weeks. Hopefully it won't take that long.

This is my attempt to make somewhat generic book related topic.

Anyway I just started reading Stephen King's Dark Tower I - The Gunslinger. However I've heard this series has many ties to other Stephens King books including settings, characters, and events. I have read basically 0 Stephen King. Should I read some of his other work first to get the full enjoyment out of the Dark Tower series?

So if you've checked Facebook lately (and you are also my Friend) you may have noticed that my car has some structural integrity issues... basically the rear-end is crunched.

I won't find out until later today whether it is officially totalled (insurance guy has the final word) but the mechanic has indicated that is a likely conclusion.

So I may be in the market for another car! Yay! Going from a fully paid off car with only 100,000 miles on it to having 4-7 thousand dollars is really not a good trade off. I can't actually buy a comparable car for that amount of money. Time for another car payment! Woo-hoo!

I need something reliable that gets decent gas mileage. So no cheap beaters. I actually drive this around for work so it has to look semi-professional. Any suggestions?

I feel a need to have a hiking trail database. Not to duplicate all the information that is available on other hiking websites... but to add some personal information and to track which ones I've been to and when I was there.

I'd need to be able to link to a hiking website with a url, store gps coordinates of the trailhead, add tags, notes, rating, associated images, etc...

You'd be able to log your trips there so you could tell when the last time you where there was. Also useful in case you want to visit in a different season.

I haven't been able to find anything like this available for free and I think it would be really nice. It would be best if it was mobile friendly too.

Alright, now that I've got a working prototype I feel like sharing what I've been working on.

I've been creating  a Side Scroller game engine in C# using XNA, I've been calling it the Mediocre Side Scroller Engine. Basically it's a side scrolling platformer game which allows drop-in custom characters, enemies and levels.

The idea was to take unique game mechanics from a bunch of different games, program generic versions of the in the game engine and allow you to recreate the way a specific character from another game plays just by changing variables in a character file.

I'll start with just the basics and then add more and more different game mechanics allowing me to properly emulate many different characters. An example of the different type of actions I'm taking about: ranged & melee attacks, double-jumps, running, crouch movement, charge attacks, carrying and throwing objects...

So far I've got basic movement, jumping, gravity, and player vs tile collision detection completed. The scrolling camera works... but is still pretty annoying.

I've set up three different characters so far: Mario, MegaMan X, and Commander Keen. All of differing sizes and number of animations.

The source code is stored in a private Mercurial repository on Bitbucket. This also gives me a bunch of other tools like a bug tracker and wiki. If you'd like I'll send you an invite to get access to the source code.

I was going to upload an actual video of the "gameplay" but I didn't so you just get screenshots, sorry.

Eventually, I am going to need some assistance setting up some characters to try and match up their game mechanics to act like they do in their source games. No programming experience required, just have to edit some numbers in a config file and be willing to play old games to get a good gameplay match.

Gonna need to upgrade my desktop soon. I want to be able to edit HD videos and play games like Skyrim decently.

I've already got a decent video card... just need motherboard, cpu, ram and another HDD.

I'm so out of the loop though... not sure who is on top as far as CPU goes. Are we up to octo-core processors yet?

Have you tried mari0? It's the original super mario game with a portal gun! Includes all the various gels and whatnot from Portal 2.

Original Mario style gameplay plus puzzles and portal gun gameplay.

http://stabyourself.net/mari0/

So... animated sprites used in games.... if the frames are not all the same size and the sprite/object is represented in the game world by (x,y) coordinates which is better:

Making the origin for the sprite by the bottom left rather than the upper left (which is not the default for anything) because most things grow up rather than down. Someone crouching and uncrouching, makes them go up from the ground not into the ground. Bottom left is not defualt for anything though and lots of logic must be changed.

Or...

Leave the (x,y) in the upper left but adjust the y value everytime the sprite changes frames so that the bottom of the sprite remains at the same point (ie on the ground).

How is this done "in the real world"?

So I just lost an entire programming project to accidental deletion. I have been working on the sequel that no one has asked for "HIPPOS!". This was the sequel to Pickles the Hippo. It was written in C# using XNA.

I'd just finished the collision detection, sprite animation, level loading and was working on the screen scrolling and "cloud" and "water" type collisions.

Yeah, I never resetup SVN since the last time we had a server swap so it was all stored in a single folder on the hard drive. Which got accidentally deleted. Like 3 weeks ago.

This was my project to learn XNA and write a whole bunch of libraries which I could use for other projects. Losing my work on collision detection and the multi-layered tile system particularly sucks. I estimate about 20 hours of work lost total.

At this point I don't think I'm willing to go rewrite all of that again, so "HIPPOS!" is pretty much dead. Temporary stop on all my XNA development too. Can't blame anybody but myself though.

So I've stumbled upon this fighting game engine called MUGEN. It's been around for awhile actually, but I've just discovered it.

What it does is allows you to (or other random internet people) to create customizable fighting games of about 90s arcade era quality.

What I plan to use it for is to do a couple of setups with a bunch of different characters from different games that can play against each other. Also to create one with really crazy/absurd characters.

There are quite a few packs with like 700+ characters... but they all seem to be about 100 good characters and 600 really crappy ones. Also they have the problem of having no conistency in art style, character style, character size or anything even remotely approaching game balance.

I have found a couple of good ones other people have made with consistent art styles and some resemblance of balance. But I'm also going to try and create a couple of my own using characters and stages I can find on the internet.

So far the roster for my random/crazy fighting games is:
Stinkoman (Homestar Runner)
Bender (Futurama)
Ronald McDonald (Japanese version)
Yoshi
Optimus Prime
Luigi
Solid Snake (Metal Gear Solid)
Homer (The Simpsons)
Elastigirl (The Incredibles)

There are some other really awesome ones out there but they seem to be buried in a sea of crap (of course).

Crazy multiplayer, sidescrolling, building, adventuring game. I am getting addicted to it I think. And I haven't gotten into the complicated stuff like wiring traps to levers or pressure plates, lava, grappling hooks, giant eldritch monsters (cthulu's eye?) or goblin invasions.

We should get a Randomland server so we can start working on a giant castle base.