Journal99 feb
From Simreal
February 1999
Wed, 10 Feb 99
More machined parts are in the shop thanks to Rick. I now have a total of 18 cylinder brackets and backing plates, 12 body flanges, 12 spider-to-body flanges... with more on the way. The industrial supply house called this morning; my bushings and couplings are in! Just a few minor mounting hardware items left....
Last weekend I finally welded the base for the hip spider (though I haven't attached the flanges yet). Tuesday, with the truly appreciated help of Glenn Currie, we reinforced the main leg frameworks; there were some welds that I found very difficult with the Oxy/Acetelene and Glenn stepped in and did them with his arc welder. These projects are so much easier when you have help!
I'm in a new budget cycle now, so it will be time to order the rest of the circuit boards and additional electronics... as soon as the Fuzbol language is operational on the board I have. I just want a chance to exercise the hardware some more before I commit to it.
The last two weeks have been a weird combination of frantic rush and dead slow crawl at the day job -- we are in a cleanup-and-release cycle, so most of my time has been in a "reactive" mode. Today, we finish that cycle and move on to another cleanup-and-release cycle on another product... so it may be more of the same.
This is good, though, because it has left me with the time and energy to work furiously on Fuzbol. This language, in its initial release, is more like hardware than software (more on that another day)... and I've chopped out great heaving stacks of features that are just too complicated for such a short-term release.
It is designed, however, to grow... it could become a full blown object-oriented language if need be. Anyway, yesterday I finished the parsing and symbol management tasks plus the basic language statement management.
Today I start into the code generation, which should actually be extremely simple compared to the fancy parser stuff I had to learn. After that, I need to build the interpreter on the Atmel.
One other project I haven't mentioned for... for... hmmm, why haven't I mentioned it? Anyway, I have a contract with Prompt! Publications (an imprint of Howard Sams) to write a book on Robotics for hobbiests. There are a bunch of good books on the subject already, to be honest, but the approach I am taking is different (I like to think) and uses both hard-wired robot techniques (a few) and the Atmel chip (which is under-represented in the book market).
It also gives me a chance to leverage my experiences with Boris into some money! Of course, I go through the "who am *I* to write a robot book?" anguish from time to time; there are zillions of more experienced builders out there... and several of them submitted proposals.
I guess Prompt! liked my writing style. Anyway, it should be done well before the June deadline... and I suppose it will be published in time for the 1999 Christmas market. I also intend to have hardware kits for sale, matching the major projects in the book. Stay posted!
Fri, 26 Feb 99
I've been putting off this update, because I've been expecting new parts from Rick "any day now"... they are in transit, but UPS seems to be a bit slow this week.
I have a nice in-circuit programmer working now, and I'm extending it to also program the static RAM. With the Fuzbol code generator beginning to work, I am starting to work on the interpreter for it.
It doesn't look like Boris will be operational for the March 13 show, so I'm going to try and get the prototype leg back into operation using the new computer and stuff... it has been a busy couple of weeks!
My next goal after March 13 is August; Boris had *better* be walking around for Burning Man or I'll be one unhappy robot builder. After two years of planning, design, building, re-building, and all that, it is about time to reap some rewards -- or at least be able to show off!
