Personal projects status dump

Open Source CAD (CAD extensible toolkit): Backburner (eta re-opening: Nov 1, 2015)

Relationship / Sex Ed Prototypes: Backburner (eta opening: Jan 1, 2016)

  • Role-playing games to establish healthy, inclusive, non-judgemental models of asking someone out / responding to that / dealing with that response
  • Can it be not corny? Even if it’s corny, can it still be effective?
  • Filling whatever gap PUA fills for guys

6.01 robots: Backburner (eta re-opening: Oct 15, 2015) — potentially escalate to Sept 5th, 2015

Feminist Apparel: Backburner (eta opening: Dec 1, 2015)

  • Snarky tshirts, IUD/LED earrings, elegant dresses with feminist quotes, stickers, necklaces, henna art, nails, pocket sewing kits, feminist bread and cake,

Hobbyist-Priced Small Waterjet: Backburner (eta re-opening: Feb 1, 2016)

Grad school: Active

Swarmbuddy robots: Active

  • co-conspirators: Ethan B., Chris A.
  • shift to nrf51822 chip (breadboard the circuit)
  • new board: nrf51822, 1s battery, usb charging,
  • new mechanical layout: with actual wheels, cheaper continuous rotation servos (or steppers? for easier zeroing than using a screwdriver), and an origami case
  • servo with pot broken out? $$$?
  • App Inventor + Android programming
  • New Android application

Hack4Fem: Active

  • More workshops
  • More speakers
  • More participants

Boatwork: Active

  • hook up solar panel to small lead-acid for bilge pump
  • Sand and urethane the gunwhals
  • Attach stern pieces
  • Take underwater pictures
  • Test generator and bring on board
  • Cut hole in engine compartment to diagnose leak
  • Call admiral and Crystal about winter haul out to fix keel leak
  • Hook up small battery and solar panel to bilge
  • Machine rope clutches from picture, two
  • Machine running rigging blocks, around four
  • Buy spring line cleats for mid ships
  • Make a roller furler for jib out of bike parts
  • Climb the mast install weather station and Masthead lights
  • Find radar?
  • Install red lights and wiring
  • also make a solar cabintop! diy solar panel, ?diy charge balancer?, diy battery pack? (no, get lead acids)

Youtube Channel: (backburner, eta May 2016)

 

Things to learn:

  • more math: 18.06, more statistics
  • electronics: power electronics, 6.302
  • sewing / fashion (ask on craigslist)
  • drawing / animation / video work (ask on craigslist)
  • makeup / cross-dressing / cosplay (ask on craigslist)
  • how to make html5 webapps easily and quickly
    • skillswap
    • website for house (splitting rent, household items shopping reminders, utilities, landlord contacting, parties, guestbook reviews :])

Restarting Cinnamon after freeze without losing session information

Whoo! For some reason, cinnamon freezes extremely often (multiple times a day) on my desktop, and I had been resorting to “ctrl-alt-f1” to get to a terminal and running “killall cinnamon-session”, which brings me back to login screen. Fortunately, there is a better solution, aka “ctrl-alt-esc”.

Here’s the relevant excerpt from the Cinnamon blog (http://segfault.linuxmint.com/2015/06/cinnamon-2-6/):

Desktop freezes

In case of a freeze or if you need to restart Cinnamon for any reason, you can now do so via a keyboard shortcut. The default key combination is Ctrl+Alt+Escape. Pressing this combination of keys restarts nemo and cinnamon-settings-daemon in case they had crashed, and launches a brand new instance of the Cinnamon desktop. Unlike Ctrl+Alt+Backspace which terminates your session and brings you back to the login screen, Ctrl+Alt+Escape simply restarts Cinnamon itself, which means your session is exactly as it was, you don’t lose any work and all your windows and applications remain open.

 

NRF51-DK and Ubuntu 14.04: pt2, UART BLE Loopback with Android 4.4.4

NRF Toolbox UART log showing sent and received messages
NRF Toolbox UART log showing sent and received messages

In the previous post I described three quick steps (well… sometimes mbed is pretty slow) to get started with NRF51-DK on Ubuntu 14.04.

Yesterday I was able to get the NRF51-DK to talk to my phone, which was pretty exciting.

In short

For NRF51-DK:

  • Open mbed compiler
  • Import > Click on “programs” tab instead of “libraries”
  • Search for “BLE_LoopbackUART” > Import
    Note: Do NOT check “update libraries”, unlike what this Evothings post suggests, checking “update libraries” actually threw errors and failed to compile in the next step, whereas if I went back and re-imported checking “update libraries”, it compiled fine
  • Compile and save file
  • Copy to JLINK to upload.
    Note: Make the NRF51-DK is turned ON and connected to laptop

On Android:

  • Using Google Play, install NRF Toolbox from Nordic
  • Open and click on UART
  • Click Connect (say “yes” to turning on bluetooth if you haven’t already)
  • Click the “…” > Show log
  • Write “hello” > SEND
  • Click “↵” on your android phone or scroll to the bottom of the log
  • You should see it say “hey” sent and “hey received” 🙂

In Long (with screenshots)

  • Open mbed compiler
  • Import > Click on “programs” tab instead of “libraries”
  • Search for “BLE_LoopbackUART” > Import
    Note: Do NOT check “update libraries”, unlike what this Evothings post suggests, checking “update libraries” actually threw errors and failed to compile in the next step, whereas if I went back and re-imported checking “update libraries”, it compiled fine
    Screenshot from 2015-08-27 11:39:13
  • Compile and save file
  • Copy to JLINK to upload.
    Note: Make the NRF51-DK is turned ON and connected to laptop

On Android:

  • Using Google Play, install NRF Toolbox from Nordic
    Screenshot_2015-08-27-11-25-04
  • Open and click on UART
    Screenshot_2015-08-27-11-25-58
  • Click Connect (say “yes” to turning on bluetooth if you haven’t already) and select the “BLE UART” device near you
    Screenshot_2015-08-27-11-26-44
  • Click the “…” > Show log
    Screenshot_2015-08-27-11-27-02
  • Write “hello” > SEND
  • Click “↵” on your android phone or scroll to the bottom of the log
  • You should see it say “hey” sent and “hey received” 🙂

    NRF Toolbox UART log showing sent and received messages
    NRF Toolbox UART log showing sent and received messages

Tada! That’s it.

Next, servos and robots! Then, many hours of porting code from Arduino to ARM.