Since Slashdot is now 100% robotics stories,
you might be interested in building your own
autopilot
kit for model airplanes and helicopters. It isn't perfect yet, but we're getting there.
why not allow the teams to equip their subs with short-range torpedoes? [...] This would be even more badass if they used
this instead
It would be more like BattleBots, but tell you what --
build your own autonomous helicopter
and then see if you want to risk losing so much effort in a midair collision. I wouldn't want to lose my helicopter and sensors in such a display of pyrotechnics.
Or you can build your own UAV with Free Software and a soldering iron... We're not quite ready to fly autonomously, but we do have a working inertial measurement unit, GPS navigation and control board. It's all GPLed and kits for the control board are available.
If you're interested in experimenting with these sorts of things, check out http://autopilot.sourceforge.net/.
We're building the inertial sensors (IMU, GPS+INS) and writing the software to control autonomous helicopters.
If you just want to try flying one, we have also have written an OpenGL
simulator.
Here's your change to try it without signing up for the Marines.
Interesting enough if anyone cares, iridium the element was discovered when dissolving platnum using aqua regia (acid).
Iridium
has an atomic number of 77, which is how many satellites were in the Iridium(tm) initial design. It was later reduced to only 66 birds, but the name Dysprosium doesn't have the same ring.
My iBook's fan has *never* turned on since I bought it about a year ago. It has gotten warm, but the fan hasn't ever needed to turn on. tiBooks have G4 chips, which are less "cool" while running, so PowerBook G4 fans turn on more often.
I tested the Ti Powerbook G4 @ 667 and found that during compiles the fan would come on and stay on. It is very, very loud, almost to the point of being disruptive. The solution, of course, was the use the wireless to ssh to a remote compile server and do the CPU intensive operations there.
Does anyone have an idea for a "user-friendly" name for the CBDTPA?
My favorite so far is "The Crippled Computer Act". although perhaps to be politically correct we should call it "The Differently Abled Computer Act". You could also refer to the DMCA as "The Snake Oil Protection Law".
They could be concidered a terrorist target too; you have to wonder how well a power station would stand up to someone flying a plane or two into it.
Why wonder when a
government contractor has already
tested it? Scroll down to the "Footage of 1988 rocket-sled test". My previous employer did this and other fun things.
You can! Check out
autopilot.sourceforge.net.
We're building a GPLed helicopter autopilot stabilization system and can use help with coding, flying and other stuff.
We hereby grant to you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to use the Player and Content on your personal computer solely for your own personal, non-commercial use
Does this mean that used CD sales are no longer allowed? And that Universal can remotely say "No, you may no longer listen to that disc."?
you may not attempt to separate the Player or Content from the CD on which you received them.
Player or content. Does that mean that audio tape copies are vorboten?
The Content has been encoded using software that incorporates the LAME encoder;
Does that mean the MP3's are already on the disc? That would be useful, should you want the tripe they're selling.
Perhaps I should have selected "Technology" rather than "Science". Anyway, I found it at robots.net, another
mod_virgule
site. Get your robot news there first!
Is it just me, or does anyone expect this thing to jump around the desk trying to find a ball?
Do you remember the
NeXT
Black Hardware systems? Also produced and designed under the effect of the
"Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field",
the monitor
looked like it had tank treads and could drive around your desktop.
Will this end up like the VHS market where VHS recorders started intentionally mis-recording Macrovision protected content,
Any video recording device is required by law to either be affected by the sync signal corruption or to detect it and intentionally degrade the recording quality. Unfortunately, Macrovision has all of the patents on this technique, which means that you must license it from them if you want to comply with the law.
Yet another problem with the DMCA... Perhaps we will soon see legislation that requires cameras to superimpose clothing on the emperor so that citizens may not document his lack of clothes.
I used to have my entire home theatre automated. Much of the work went into reverse engineering the specs and control protocols for Sony S-Link devices. The hardware and software are no longer supported by me -- I've moved and sold my house with the theatre. But you can still download the code, drivers and schematics for the small hardware interface:
Interfacing to grip, lame, etc is fairly easy. It has FreeCDDB interfacing and can grab the TOC from the disc. It also will write the title information back to the jukebox so that you can easily select discs from the front panel.
You are very unlikely to see much CDPD deployed on NA soil
(I demo'd CDPD 5 years ago at a conference in Vancover.. if I'm wrong, someone let me know:)
It's been available for at least five years in the US. I had flat-rate service via
Go America for several years for only $50/month. I even hacked my Novatel Minstrel
to work with Linux so that I could use it with my laptop.
Re:A/V R/C Helicopter w/ long range capabilities
on
Geek Gift Ideas 2001
·
· Score: 1
I personally would really enjoy a high-powered high-tech remote control helicopter myself.
I suspect that if today's software patent mass-acceptance had started in the 70's... No Pkzip -> Winzip,
Perhaps you forget the story of the creation of PKZip. The
recently deceased Phil Katz
created an enhanced version of SEA's arc program called pkarc. SEA filed suite in 1989 against Phil who dropped the arc format. He then created the ZIP format, patented it and released it into the public domain with the exception of SEA.
BBS users and Sysops converted enmass and now no one knows of SEA. PKWare continues without Phil.
It's more than a couple of days old -- well over a month has past since this was made public. It was buried at the bottom of the
press release from TurboLinux, dated 21 Feb 2001 and picked up by
LWN in
their Commerce section from the next day.
Should car makers include displays for compression per cylinder? Mixture? Exaust spectralnalysis? All of these items
would be educational to the user and give the user a better understanding of how and why his car works, but it would not
help him get to work in the morning.
Aircraft, even small general aviation ones, typically have a full set of gauges for this sort of thing. The fancy set is an exhaust gas temperature (EGT) gauge and per-cylinder head temperature readouts. The standard set consists of manifold pressure, RPM, oil temp, oil pressure, fuel flow, and fuel pressure. And these are just the engine related ones. There is a whole set of other gauges that deal with just flying and navigating.
Many of these are adjusted with manual controls -- mixture, manifold pressure and prop RPM affect all of them. And all of the controls must be used, as well as all of the gauges monitored in order to get to work in the morning.
The trend with automobiles is to reduce the complexity -- no tach, no oil pressure gauge, no water temperature readout, no extraneous dials to distract the driver. Just idiot lights that come on randomly (or not at all; who knows if it is burned out?). Plus it is less expensive to manufacture.
The big difference between the pilot and driver is that the pilot has received extensive schooling in the operation, navigation and emergencies. Understanding the aircarft is a base requirement. Meanwhile, on the ground, the driver was given a set of keys and told to go drive.
Intel made a supercomputer, the Paragon I believe, which used 386 processors.
The Paragon models were based on the i860 RISC processors. The next version, called The T-FLOPS, was originally built with Pentium Pro's. Recently it was upgraded to use Xeon's.
It's not a great leap from MPP to partitioning
Actually, it is. Full virtualization does require some level of hardware support. The Paragon style MPP's were partitioned, but it was a split along CPU's -- each CPU could be dedicated to one function in the system. Those roles were defined as System, Compute and IO. The System nodes ran OSF/1, the Compute nodes ran Puma / Cougar and the IO nodes ran a specialized operating system that I forget.
The S/390's partitioning/VM scheme kicks serious ass, but the CPUs and architecture are more than adequate to handle the overhead - x86 CPUs would slow to a crawl.
The overhead in a fully virtualized environment with proper hardware support is quite minimal. In fact some older architectures did exactly that to make the machine appear faster -- if some number of other jobs run between every instruction then the memory access latency is masked. Tera doing this with a modern processor, too.
I've also written a discussion of different wireless access methods. In short, CDPD is a more widely available solution than the Ricochet and also works while the vehicle is moving. Ricochet is faster and more reliable if you can get service.
Slashdot Mirror
The hardware design and source code are all GPLed and available. The most recent releases have an OpenGL helicopter simulator for you to play with as well.
But, if I had a sponsor, I might reconsider...
http://autopilot.sourceforge.net/
If you just want to try flying one, we have also have written an OpenGL simulator.
Here's your change to try it without signing up for the Marines.
Unlike the academic projects, you can download our code and contribute!
Perhaps I should have selected "Technology" rather than "Science". Anyway, I found it at robots.net, another mod_virgule site. Get your robot news there first!
Yet another problem with the DMCA... Perhaps we will soon see legislation that requires cameras to superimpose clothing on the emperor so that citizens may not document his lack of clothes.
http://jukebox-control.sourceforge.net/
Interfacing to grip, lame, etc is fairly easy. It has FreeCDDB interfacing and can grab the TOC from the disc. It also will write the title information back to the jukebox so that you can easily select discs from the front panel.
Your wish is granted. Check out: http://autopilot.sourceforge.net/
It has that. It runs Linux and all the source code is GPLed!
It's more than a couple of days old -- well over a month has past since this was made public. It was buried at the bottom of the press release from TurboLinux, dated 21 Feb 2001 and picked up by LWN in their Commerce section from the next day.
Aircraft, even small general aviation ones, typically have a full set of gauges for this sort of thing. The fancy set is an exhaust gas temperature (EGT) gauge and per-cylinder head temperature readouts. The standard set consists of manifold pressure, RPM, oil temp, oil pressure, fuel flow, and fuel pressure. And these are just the engine related ones. There is a whole set of other gauges that deal with just flying and navigating.
Many of these are adjusted with manual controls -- mixture, manifold pressure and prop RPM affect all of them. And all of the controls must be used, as well as all of the gauges monitored in order to get to work in the morning.
The trend with automobiles is to reduce the complexity -- no tach, no oil pressure gauge, no water temperature readout, no extraneous dials to distract the driver. Just idiot lights that come on randomly (or not at all; who knows if it is burned out?). Plus it is less expensive to manufacture.
The big difference between the pilot and driver is that the pilot has received extensive schooling in the operation, navigation and emergencies. Understanding the aircarft is a base requirement. Meanwhile, on the ground, the driver was given a set of keys and told to go drive.
I ran the same experiment, but used www.hotmail.com for the hostname rather than the one that you selected (how did you come up with that one?)
My results:
240 Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b
15 Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
94% Apache, 6% IIS. Much closer to the 5% numbers quoted in the article.
I've also written a discussion of different wireless access methods. In short, CDPD is a more widely available solution than the Ricochet and also works while the vehicle is moving. Ricochet is faster and more reliable if you can get service.