vertical challenge | observations from an outlier
Here is a short video of us testing the elevation wheelchair with the disk brakes we designed. This project has been both frustrating and rewarding. The tiny details add up quickly. The disk brakes require a bit of extra chair width, and this can be deal breaker for most users. It can make getting into older buildings, especially bathrooms, impossible, but outside all that matters is stopping force and…
arduino data acquisition Arduinos can be used in real products, they just aren’t teaching tools anymore. I cut my teeth on 68HC11 using C and the BUFFALO bootloader, mostly pain and not so much fun. sure the paid tools and IDE’s for this chip were pretty good but the were expensive and not hobby grade. if one wanted to experiment, the (oopic and the basic stamp and pic were…
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 (many pages and browsers hide scrollbars now also), but this is easy fix with css. First enter this command into a terminal window (might need sudo): defaults write “Apple Global Domain” AppleScrollBarVariant DoubleBoth For…
disk brakes for wheelchairs it’s been a braking with software (on board arduino or android). As a quadriplegic I don’t want to take my hands off the wheels to apply the brakes because this throws off my balance (especially on uneven ground or with muscle spasms to contend with). When adding power assist motors, a user must have the ability to stop even if that motor is malfunctioning. So…
wheelchair as a gopro dolly 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. youtube’s on stabilization took out most the bumps, pretty…
So I was interviewed on a topic other than climbing and/or boosting on Maureen McGrath’s radio show. I couldn’t help but talk about boosting and autonomic dysreflexia, but they are in fact, very much related. I chopped out the segment I’m in, following tips for premature ejaculation, and posted in here. I think I’m the worst person to ask about dating in Vancouver. I think she missed my dragon…
I was recently interviewed here in Vancouver about the boosting that will be going on in the coming paralympic games. No one actually participating in these events would ever discus performance boosting obviously, so Sky News in London found my blog and got in touch. They wanted to know how it works and “is this cheating”? This is a loaded question in my mind. There are many ways to…
c4 meet the superhumans from envy post on Vimeo. About bloody time I say. Please no more of the warm and fuzzy videos of Paralympic games. In the past these ads have been simply vomit inducing and don’t do the athletes any justice. Finally the marketing people are getting it — these athletes are badass. They work hard for years to get to the games and then they throw…
Jonah Lehrer: The Origins of Creative Insight & Why You Need Grit Do we sometimes pay too high a price for our dreams? Or worse, pick the wrong ones to follow? I remember having many conversations like this while making all the gear for rock climbing. It was NOT at all a practical goal (given all my limitations) to be spending tones of time and money on — pretty…
I am finally 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 was adding water wheels down stream and asking my Dad about how our electric lights stay…
This page will hold data and evaluation of “boosting” experiments that I’m doing in order to get my heart and blood pressure to respond appropriately while climbing. See ramp wheeling tests to learn more about post exercise hypotension (EH) , and why this limits performance in most quadriplegics. First some background on what “boosting” is and why Doctors are trying to STOP this in sports. Basically put, Boosting is…
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 box. Further, the zephyropen framework can send data directly to the cloud on event…