What's been on my mind lately? Read on...
Of course I have more time to catch up on email and posting photos when I’m in Taipei. Makes perfect sense. Sure.
Whether it makes sense or not, it’s true. I’m back in Taiwan and happy to have a little downtime after the work-week (which was also pleasantly full of good food and friends), which in turn followed a lovely long weekend in Los Angeles.
Without much more comment, some photos from the past couple months’ travels:
Plenty more up at PicasaWeb…
It was a while back now (last year!), but my friend Megan and I hosted a modern dinner — at least that’s what we called it. We tried to create a menu that incorporated some newer, more unusual cooking techniques while still including approachable, delicious food. We served:
Along with plenty of wine, of course. I’d call it a success!
It was a great chance to give the new sous vide cooker a workout, and it performed admirably. The salmon was just perfect — cooked quite rare & delicately, all the flavor captured inside. The lamb was a little less spectacular, having given up most of its juices in the 24 hour cooking process (and we did little to add them back), but still quite tasty.
With some feedback from an expert, I’m now armed with the knowledge that I can easily daisy-chain six of the aforementioned motion control boards to drive each of the motors in the robot arm. And my old USB-to-I2C board actually has a number of general purpose IOs, making it easy to engage/disengage the brakes on the larger motors. Getting a lot closer…
My barber & I got a lot closer, too, recently. This is pretty much the shortest my hair has ever been. Period.
As promised, the robot arm has not languished in the living room. Thursday afternoon, in fact, was spent getting a new motion control board talking to the arm, with great success. Sad as I am to take my custom-made PCB out of the equation, it seems the surest way to actually bring this project to completion in a reasonable time-frame.
There’s a bit more work to do before I’m ready to order 5 more of these boards (one per motor in the arm) — for example, solidifying how the boards will communicate with a computer (RS232? RS485? something else?) and figuring out how to engage and disengage the electromagnetic brakes on three of the motors (the boards don’t seem to have any general purpose I/Os) — but with $85 and a few wires, I’m now significantly further along than I was designing my own circuit board.
2011 – year of the robot bartender?
Following up on my recent post about ongoing projects, I finished one! Check out the chair I refinished and the ottoman I built to go with it:
It’s been great to get back into woodworking, and things are going well setting up shop in my friends’ basement, conveniently just a few blocks away on Capitol Hill. Some more details on the chair/ottoman are up on the project page here.
You might notice the robot arm, lurking in the background of that shot. I haven’t been slacking entirely on that project, either, having ordered an off-the-shelf motor control board to try out. If it works like I think it does, I should be able to hook one of these up to each motor in the arm and control them via a shared serial bus. But the woodworking has taken up most of my project time, so I haven’t had a chance to play with the controller just yet.
Also, I put up some pictures from my whirlwind, 36-hour trip to New York for a very fun wedding — check them out here.
