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The internet was off all weekend, made even more annoying by a) their customer service lines were also closed all weekend and b) it came back online first thing this morning meaning when they got into the office and saw the problem, a simple remote equipment reset or similar fixed it in a matter of seconds Still, least it’s working now. It gave me a chance to play with using IR detectors on the Boe-Bot to act as eyes for navigating which was pretty cool:

As opposed to using the wire ‘whiskers’ which have to physically touch an object before then backing up and moving away, and the light-sensitive photoresistors which weren’t really useful for navigating around objects at any great speed, using the IR sensors allowed it to continually send out pulses to detect objects and then react to them before they became an obstacle. This allowed much faster movement through a small maze (another USPS-sponsored event!):

I also set it up using basic code for a sumobot where it would lock onto an object and try to follow. Mia was not impressed! I was though, as it was able to successfully track a very fast moving dog

The rains this morning were obviously a sign of things to come – Kat + I got out for a walk with Mia earlier this evening whilst it was still quite nice, but now it’s heavy rain, thunder + lightning. Mia is not impressed! The sky was definitely threatening in places whilst we were out:

I guess the locals thought so too, as there were a lot of boats anchored up, obviously not wanting to get stuck out on the river in any bad weather.

Still, the fish hut right by the river across from the school has obviously been seeing a lot of use. The smoking hut was going, the outside wire-enclosed drying racks were full, and this was the rack used to hang the nets from I photographed a few times last winter. Must be running out of space to dry them!

And something else I photographed last winter – the abandoned yellow truck starting to get buried by the long grass. These past two photos ended up having the only bits of blue sky in the whole area conveniently right behind them!

The storm seems to be easing up a bit now which is keeping Mia happy. Really didn’t like the thunder! We had to get her booked in to see a vet first thing on the Tuesday morning after getting in to Anchorage to have them stick needles in for her booster shots to get into the dog resort kennels without any fuss. Thankfully we’re picking the rental car up right away on the Monday so will be easily able to move around town getting her sorted Don’t know whether she’ll be too happy about it though!

Two days of warm + dry weather gave way this morning.

After heavy downpours, it’s now back to 70F and sunshine.

Most Alaskans are probably lying if they say they have no difficulty sleeping during the summer. These photos were taken at 12.30a.m, and there’s easily another hour or so of this twilight period before the sun will finally dip below the horizon.

By 5a.m, it will be back. These are the houses around the lake silhouetted to bring the sky colours out. It’s no-where near this dark.

Not sure how the “red sky at night, sailor’s delight” idea works, since technically it’s already morning… But, hopefully today’s warm weather is a sign of things to come

Look, no rain! Up to 75F earlier this evening as we took a walk, enjoying the greenery here by the Russian Orthodox Church.

We were then swarmed by dive-bombing mosquitoes as we headed out across the tundra in search of close-up photos of a pair of beavers in one of the lakes, but a watering moose caused them to slap the tails and head under water, hiding out of sight

Bright red salmon are hanging up around all around the village and on racks along the river drying out ready to be smoked. Even though the locals are complaining they’re only catching 12-15 fish a day this summer, they all add up, and most huts + racks are already pretty full.

Just need the weather to stay clear and see if I can find someone to take me out fishing so Kat + I can enjoy some

A little more difficult working with the photoresistors rather than the whiskers as there’s so many windows in this house, it’s very bright at the best of times But, I played around making the Boe-Bot act like a scaredy-cat by backing away from a flashlight:

More useful was programing it to move towards light sources, such as exiting a dark area or room and moving towards the light – of course, Mia decided to come stick her nose in again! Think I need a subroutine called “DogAvoidance” (maybe use the piezospeaker to emit a high frequency tone!), but it seemed to do pretty well on this one anyways:

And one more project to have the Boe-Bot detect changes in the colour surface and avoid black areas.

One common robotics challenge is following a black line, so I’m guessing this is something the textbook will move onto using the same principles of detecting the colour changes and making adjustments as to the direction of travel. Next up though is using the infrared sensors for navigation and object detection.

This afternoon I worked through using ‘whiskers’ on my Boe-Bot so that it can detect when it’s touched an object and so backup and try again in a different direction:

It was a little more interesting than the first few chapters of programming it to move in certain directions, turn at a particular angle, etc. although probably worthwhile in the long run to be able to calculate what speed and durations of turn produce various distances and directions. After setting up a minor obstacle course (sponsored by the US Postal Service…), Mia decided to come and see whether anything good was happening:

Inquisitive little bugger…

Note: I’m switching some videos to YouTube as the media plugin I use for WordPress automatically starts downloading all videos displayed which is getting boring if there’s more than one video to load. For those at work, school, college, etc. where YouTube may be blocked, I’ll be including an alternative video link here on the blog below each YouTube clip, ‘cos I’m nice

This morning David Daniel arrived with an Amazon.com box – said he figured he had the right house as “I heard the man-eater when I came up the steps” That would be Mia… I think the fact that our house is the only one not boarded up gives our location away too! But, it was my new Fujifilm S1000fd digital camera. Today wasn’t exactly the best day to go play with it since it was still pretty miserable and overcast at times, but not too bad – this was on the boardwalk out to the new airport looking back on the community hall, with very moody skies behind it:

And yes, those guard rails run all the 2/3 mile out there! The boardwalk is also double-layered meaning the top boards can be replaced as they wear down without leaving a great big gaping hole like the current boardwalks do! Rated to carry 8 tons too, though what on earth weighing 8 tons would be doing driving round out here I don’t know!

Up by the airport, Mia decided to show off her newly-discovered swimming skills to Kat:

One cool feature on the new S1000fd is ‘Panorama’ mode where it will stitch together up to three photographs on the fly, creating nice wide panoramic shots. After taking the first photo, it blends it in on the left hand side of the LCD or EVF whilst you’re taking the second photo so you can line it up close, and then take the third photo in the same manner. With some automagical trickery, it then stitches them together and displays the final result for you to accept or reject. Works pretty well, and should make for some good photos this summer as I can never be bothered to do it manually. Check out this one in a larger format on flickr:

Another cool option on the camera is continuous shooting, or ‘fill your memory card up git fast’ mode Takes three photos a second which is great for capturing action shots, like Mia trying to snap at the bugs flying around her!

Back in the village at the intersection of the boardwalks, the stop sign leaning even further over after being weighed down with snow over the winter, and then a trailer upside down in the water – maybe someone missed the sign…

Very happy with the new camera, and for $215 (little under £110), it’s a steal. The major complaint in reviews about it is that there’s no optical stablisation, it’s software-based on the camera, meaning the 12x optical zoom is useless as shots turn out too blurry. Think they need to learn how to keep a steady hand whilst taking photos, as I took the zoom all the way to 70.80mm and captured Kat + Mia very clearly with no blur from over 100 yards away. All Fuji cameras including this one that I’ve used also have dual-shutter press meaning you can half-press the button to allow the camera to figure out what it has to focus on and correct, and when the LCD displays the shot correctly, depress the button fully, which I think would help some people too. When zooming right in, this helps reduce the camera vibration as the button is already have depressed and you’re focusing on the shot as much as the camera is. But, with some clearer weather and better lighting, I’ll get a better idea how well it captures colours and how sharp the photos are, but certainly seems to do a good job. The video recording move is very clear, and I like the option to add voice tags to photos so you can recall where you took it or what mountains you’re looking at – I’ve take so many photos over the years where I’ve then had a road sign or park service placard as the next photo as a reminder!

Robotics is something I’ve wanted to get into for years, pretty much since Robotwars appeared on TV and the idea of creating big machines with flames coming out the top that were designed to smash other machines sounded like fun I raced various forms of remote controlled cars on + off for a number of years, but that was mainly build the cars, then set them up from race to race. But, programming a microchip and building a robot to figure it’s way through an obstacle course or similar seems like a good challenge, and then there’s stuff like the RoboGames each year (along with smaller regional gatherings) which includes events for small sumo-bots or robosoccer (check the videos!).

Anyway, Parallax caught my attention a while ago with their Boe-Bot robotics kit based off a BASIC Stamp 2 microcontroller and mine arrived today. It seems a pretty good introduction to robotics, and the BS2 chip can be used for a bunch of other things too. Parallax make all their books available on-line in PDF format, so also I’ve worked through some basics with using the BS2 chip outside of controlling the Boe-Bot. With a number of projects included with the kit and components to allow the robot to make it’s own decisions based on position, speed, contact with objects, etc. it should keep me entertained for a while. When I have the rest of the circuitry built up and programmed for something slightly more advanced than moving backwards, forwards, and rotating around itself I’ll post some photos or videos

Using it within OS X was a little harder than inserting the CD and installing the software as Parallex don’t produce their programming suite for OS X or Linux, but others have written apps available for free online which work great. For anyone trying to use the USB version under OS X, download the FTDI VCP drivers here and then install MacBS2 by Murat Konar which is the equivalent of the Parallex programming tool for Windows. For code requiring user input using DEBUGIN, goSerial from Furrysoft works great for displaying the output the same as Debug Terminal does, but also capturing your inputs and sending them to the BS2 chip which MacBS2 can’t do yet. Simply select your USB connection under the ‘Serial Port’ option in goSerial, and then choose ’9600 bps’ for the connection speed and it should work just fine so long as you close down MacBS2 first otherwise you have both apps trying to connect to the same port concurrently.