![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lego madness
Sep. 17th, 2013 10:50 pmi'm still trying to sort out my vast pile of little plastic bricks.
dïe überblönde is not helping. she gave me all of her remaining sets. they'd been sitting in a corner of the basement for over a decade, untouched.
+ two egyptian adventurer sets (5958 and 5988), one meso-american adventurer set (5986). all three are definitely not, uh, "illinois jones™" sets. (i already had a bunch of those.)
+ one big ninja-and-samurai-flavored set (3053).
+ they're all being broken down for parts: the sand-colored bricks will help build the pharoah's temple, the skeletons have been merged into the horde, and the ninjas have been inducted into the clan (woodcut school).
- it's another 2,000 or so pieces to put away.
- some of them are large, custom pieces of little generality.
also, in a fit of madness years ago, i bought three bags of white 1x* plates, ranging from 1x1s to 1x12s. there's over 250 of them. i have no memory of why i wanted so many of them. regardless, i've sorted them by size. ugh. but they're now more useful, and i have a "white box", containing nothing but sorted white pieces.
i got some new toys to kitbash. the insectoid vehicles from "galaxy squad" sets 70700 and 70702 are being rebuilt into lego insects, and the spare parts are being thrown into the pile. lots of interesting bits for the buck.
lego thru in a vw-brand van set as a freebie (40076). i assume vw paid a small fortune for that, rather than the other way round.
+the sonar transceiver for the mindstorms set arrived too. now it's worth programming the silly thing. one of the persistent problems with the mindstorms designs is that they're so bandwidth limited. the ARM9 CPU has more than enough power to handle the little bit of i/o the curent mindstorms brick has (4x 1kHz x 8-bit inputs plus 4x servo controllers with 1° resolution axle encoders). but it should be up to even simple image processing (visual flow, image segmentation by color, etc), if i(t) only had an eye...
the sonar is the closest the system has to an imaging sensor, and it's got the most useful output, since it returns an 8-bit range in cm. the light and color sensors have such short range i'm not sure what do to with them. maybe with some simple optics...
so, first up -- in my copious free time™ -- will be to rebuild the old free-roaming robot i had, this time with sonar. the old one was clever enough to avoid getting stuck in corners and to avoid falling down stairs. i even taught it frustration, which ruined its enlightened state, but made it far more effective at dealing with real objects. (as the number of impacts per unit time increased, it increased its maximum turn angle. i also set the onboard speaker to beep whenever it hit something, with the pitch and volume increasing with impacts per unit time. if i boxed it in, it sure sounded angry.)
the new one should be able to avoid getting into corners, period. i need to fiddle with the sonar a bit to see how badly it suffers from multiple reflections and how well i can dampen them with baffles. it will hear multiple echos from complex shapes, but i should be able to reduce its field of view to get rid of trivial ones. i'd like to get another sonar transceiver and play with "synthetic aperture sonar" -- stereo sonar, more or less -- but i need to look up what's been done already in the field.
dïe überblönde is not helping. she gave me all of her remaining sets. they'd been sitting in a corner of the basement for over a decade, untouched.
+ two egyptian adventurer sets (5958 and 5988), one meso-american adventurer set (5986). all three are definitely not, uh, "illinois jones™" sets. (i already had a bunch of those.)
+ one big ninja-and-samurai-flavored set (3053).
+ they're all being broken down for parts: the sand-colored bricks will help build the pharoah's temple, the skeletons have been merged into the horde, and the ninjas have been inducted into the clan (woodcut school).
- it's another 2,000 or so pieces to put away.
- some of them are large, custom pieces of little generality.
also, in a fit of madness years ago, i bought three bags of white 1x* plates, ranging from 1x1s to 1x12s. there's over 250 of them. i have no memory of why i wanted so many of them. regardless, i've sorted them by size. ugh. but they're now more useful, and i have a "white box", containing nothing but sorted white pieces.
i got some new toys to kitbash. the insectoid vehicles from "galaxy squad" sets 70700 and 70702 are being rebuilt into lego insects, and the spare parts are being thrown into the pile. lots of interesting bits for the buck.
lego thru in a vw-brand van set as a freebie (40076). i assume vw paid a small fortune for that, rather than the other way round.
+the sonar transceiver for the mindstorms set arrived too. now it's worth programming the silly thing. one of the persistent problems with the mindstorms designs is that they're so bandwidth limited. the ARM9 CPU has more than enough power to handle the little bit of i/o the curent mindstorms brick has (4x 1kHz x 8-bit inputs plus 4x servo controllers with 1° resolution axle encoders). but it should be up to even simple image processing (visual flow, image segmentation by color, etc), if i(t) only had an eye...
the sonar is the closest the system has to an imaging sensor, and it's got the most useful output, since it returns an 8-bit range in cm. the light and color sensors have such short range i'm not sure what do to with them. maybe with some simple optics...
so, first up -- in my copious free time™ -- will be to rebuild the old free-roaming robot i had, this time with sonar. the old one was clever enough to avoid getting stuck in corners and to avoid falling down stairs. i even taught it frustration, which ruined its enlightened state, but made it far more effective at dealing with real objects. (as the number of impacts per unit time increased, it increased its maximum turn angle. i also set the onboard speaker to beep whenever it hit something, with the pitch and volume increasing with impacts per unit time. if i boxed it in, it sure sounded angry.)
the new one should be able to avoid getting into corners, period. i need to fiddle with the sonar a bit to see how badly it suffers from multiple reflections and how well i can dampen them with baffles. it will hear multiple echos from complex shapes, but i should be able to reduce its field of view to get rid of trivial ones. i'd like to get another sonar transceiver and play with "synthetic aperture sonar" -- stereo sonar, more or less -- but i need to look up what's been done already in the field.
