tech rant

I own two drobos and they cause me great pain. Why buy two of them then? Well, drobo won the american business awards for best product, and many more. The problem is that it’s simply underpowered hardware and that the hard drives can’t be mounted by any other system. Now I can say a few…

So, things break and need repairs. My Dad has always said.. “don’t repair, fit the spare”, but this part hasn’t been available a long time. I looked, made calls, sent emails, got calls back.. but no luck. The board is simple, just a few AC Power relays, but it is the controller for bed and…

Arduinos can be used in “real products”, they just aren’t teaching tools. I cut my teeth on 68HC11 using C and the BUFFALO bootloader.. all pain and not much fun. I am sure I’d get better, faster and more productive with the paid tools and IDE’s for this chip if using it for a job,…

For people with poor hand function the gesture recognition on most laptops is impossible to use. I have to turn the two, three finger and swipe commands off all together. This makes scrolling a pain, and double sets of scrolling windows as seen in this example image where I’m using WordPress on a small screen….

testing the camera on the seawall. this is simply the goPo handle bar mount attached to my wheelchair. I imported into final cut and shared to youtube directly. I did the colour balance step after a few basic edits. be sure to try it in different resolutions. the 720p and 1080p version look really good….

I am finally ready and wanting to learn again. No papers and exams, but learning for fun. Remember when that was true? As a kid, my friends and I would create small dams with sand and mud, then upend the buckets of water to see if our design actually worked. A few summers later, I…

Here is a simple class to send yourself a gmail from your Arndoid phone. You’ll need mail.jar in your eclipse project, but the rest is just this one class below. We are using this to test on the chair bot (OpenPAW). It is very useful to send all the debug files right to your email…

My friend Colin has project that I’ve been helping him test for the last few months.. and now oculus finally ready for market! Colin has made bikes and my custom climbing rig in the past, but he has always wanted to make affordable wifi robots. The key to oculus is the low cost but fully…

Solid state sensors and high torque servos are getting cheaper all the time, but it is the software methodologies that needed to change for walking to be considered a “primitive behavior”. Any kids learning about robots would, and should, assume that we have walking sorted. Getting back into standing from an unknown state, say on…

In past posts, I’ve ranted about resistive vs capacitive screens for typing. Apple’s phone and tablet are great, but as a quad with poor hand function, most will prefer to use a finger nail to type. On my Nokia 5800 this works well and the new firmware has better smooth scrolling (inertia in the flicking…

I enjoyed the Asimov books my Dad has collected, and very much want to believe that people want to learn. That, in general, people prefer learning to passive entertainment because engaging. Game designers leverage this all the time to get us to strive to get to the next level of a game. Only when we…

It’s now 2010… So, where’s my jet pack? Disability research integration is not happening. Not like it needs too. I’ve seen the problem from several points of view now and feel justified in a little rant. Scientists generally hate mixing with business, but this is the reality. The business of keeping a lab open and…