Wow, I want one! what do they have, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8 inch guns with a loader on each? It would bring our crew size down to just the lead pyrotechnician and a few security guys. How do they Ignite the time fuze and verify it's lit?
We have that now. The racks are made from aluminum angle with HDPE pipes the electrical slat sits in the center and is connectd with either a 36 pin centronics or a DB-25 connector depending on the manufactuer.
We just drop the shells in and connect the wires to the slat. There is a "module" that connects to the computer through a 2 wire interface and breaks out to 36 cues.
Check out Fireone or Pyromate for some of the systems we use.
Ease of use is a plus, most of the help we get are people that only do this one time a year!
When I set up a show, I bring mortar racks, shells and a firing system. The press release was kind of sketchy but I'm assuming I would need to bring a high pressure compressor (a Home Depot 175PSI compressor is not gonna launch a 5Lb shell 1500 feet with any reasonable mortar length). I would also need hundreds of feet of high pressure tubing (A finale rack is at least 100 feet from the main guns), and lots of fast (read expensive) air solenoids. It would take forever to set up a show like that.
Then there is the safety problems, thy don't say how they ignite the time fuze and verify it's burning before a tubeload of rapidly decompressing, cooling air hits the shell. I would like to see some dud data.
For a recurring display where you can leave the equiptment and just drop shells in the same tubes every night or week, this sounds like a dream though. I just can't see it coming to a municipal 4th of july show near you any time soon though.
The only thing new in regulations since the bombing and 9/11 is an "Employee Possesser" questionare that needs to be on file with the display company.
You seem to be referencing a "user limited permit" The timelimit you reference is 24 hours WITHOUT an approved explosives magazine to store it. They also require a CDL with hazmat since any quanity of class B (professional display shells) have to be placarded.
There have always been "a lot of permits to be filled out" (That's why there is usually a firetruck and ambulance there). Most of the issues revolve around insurance, 1e6 is generally the minimum that most municipalities want, and it is slowly increasing. I somehow doubt that is a result of terrorism or any other political issue, probably just the result of judjements.
You can see the actual forms for yourself at the ATF website
#!/usr/bin/tclsh set fd [open bin r] set bin [string trim [read $fd]] close $fd for {set i 0} {$i < [string length $bin]} {incr i 8} {
puts -nonewline [binary format B* [string range $bin $i [expr $i+7]]] } puts ""
Yep, still use it! I do embedded code for single chip processors. We use an AM radio to listen to the loops - You can actually hear the A/D sample loops, main loop and other stuff. Once you get used to it, you can hear if something goes south much faster then it's going to show up in the device.
I went through a bunch of "propriatary" headphones for watching tv. After problems with batteries, interference and the expense (if you step on the headphone, you need to buy a new transmitter). I decided to go with a real FM Broadcast band transmitter. I got me a Ramsey FM 25 kit (it has to be a kit, FCC rules) and have been loving life since. Some of the bennifits include:
You can use any headphones that receive FM
I can use a little pocket radio around the yard playing CNN
Much more development effort and cost reduction goes into a mass market item than the big clunky "wireless" headphones
It's "open source" (grin)
It took about 4 hours to build the kit and was not difficult (all components are through hole). At $130, it''s not cheap initally, but you will wind up saving money in the long run.
As a hiring manager and coder for a small company, I think you have it slightly wrong. We have a large cache of nerf toys, killer nerf, and freeze spray but it only comes out when we are:
Shipping product
Working 18 hours a day
Overworked to the point where we go nuts
I've found that when we spend 16 or more hours a day, 7 days a week working with the same people, trying to stay ahead of marketing and being sucessfull, the "core group" (the guys with the sleeping bags at work) tend to go a little crazy after a few weeks. The Beer, Nerf, and Estes rocket moters taped to a stick release the tension and allow a few more days of coding before the cycle repeats. Yes its fun, but there is quite a bit of pain before the crazyness starts.
I see and have gone through a bunch of people that expect work to be a toy filled experience from the morning to 5:00pm and then they expect to leave and repeat the process the next day -
It don't work like that It's just what you happen to see because it's the cutest "sound bite" when someone talks about the company.
I'm guilty of this myself, I tell my friends all about the nights the police come, but omit the gory details of:
Trying to get an I2C serial chip to emulate a RS-232 port over a weekend because the customer told us on friday that they needed it on monday.
Creating our own distribution of linux that boots from eeprom on a PC-104 card in 2 days
EPLD designs in 12 hours
P.S. Looking for a few good Tcl/Tk and Hitachi 2200 series programmers in a new startup. If you want the gain, you will have to live through the pain. mdrop23@yahoo.com
I did something similar in another life. We needed to digitize 4 still images and send it through an analog cell phone. Make sure you turn off the error correction internal to the modem, then write your own packet driver that accepts packets in any order and acks each one. You are going to get "stored fragment 'o packet" from the cell, so make sure you ignore incomplete packets.
It's a mess and its slow (1200 to 2400 baud was the best we got)
You can also try using amateur radio packet, If this option is available, use it! You probably won't get great coverage but it least you get to stay digital and don't have to worry about modem compression and correction.
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Real time devices is the high price spread, they run around $500 for the processor card. WinSystems Sells stuff alot cheaper (Around $200 two years ago).
remember, Slackware runs on a 386. There a probably a ton of 386/486 PC-104 cards out there that somebody wants to unload.
We have been Shipping PC-104 linux boxes for the past 2 years. All it took was a Slackware rescue floppy, a bootdisk and an EPROM burner.
The procedure for making the EPROMS for the RTD PC-104 card is as follows:
Fire up the card with +5 and 12 volts
Create a freshly formatted floppy with the included Datalight DOS 5.0 on it. I know, it's sad but we had some DOS setup code for the card.
Drop loadlin and the kernal You DID build a baby size kernal for this with initrd right? on the floppy
Create a ramdisk on you development system to build the root image for your new card
umount the ramdisk
Set the ramdisk to zeros with:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ram0 count=4096
Make a filesystem mke2fs -vm0/dev/ram0 4096
Mount the ramdisk and copy your root filesystem in: mount -t ext2/dev/ram0/mnt
cp -pxR/projects/snmp/root_fs/*/mnt
unmount it again and squish it down with: umount/mnt
dd if=/dev/ram0 bs=1k count=4096 | gzip -v9 >/projects/snmp/eprom/root_fs.gz
Now, use sneaker net to move the floppy to the DOS machine running the RTD supplied EPROM image maker and tell it to make the entire floppy into an EPROM image.BIN file(s)
Burn the files into EPROM, plug 'em into the card, apply power and open a beer as you watch Linux boot on a 4 inch card
Try TCP/IP Illustrated Volume 1 by W. Richard Stevens.
For the cable, Look at a pinout (Blackbox or other sources). Notice there are 4 pairs:
Brown (outer pair)
Orange (next pair in)
Green and Blue (interleaved)
Swap Brown for Orange (Pair 1) and Blue for green (Pair 2) and you just made a crossover cable. You just wired the Transmit of one machine to receive of the other.
Actually, for most stuff the outer pairs (Brown & Orange) are not used.
I'm not sure you are going after the right target with Gun Control. As I remember the story, the Columbine kids had a few 20Lb bottles of propane set to explode also. I think a 20Lb bottle in a confined area with lots of things that breath is probably a worse thing then the guns.
If someone is gonna snap, there is not much you can do until we get a functioning mind reader (and submit of course). I had a guy drive into my lane a few years back at hit me head on (like a test crash, headlight to headlight - he aimed). The police called it drunk driving, but basically the guy tried to kill himself using my mv**2. There is no protection against that now or ever. You just hope you survive and put the blame where it belongs - on the individual.
Has anyone checked out SRL?. They have the Flame whistsle Boeing Jet flamethrower and other seriously dangerous stuff. Almost all of this stuff is computer controlled and some of it is controlable from the web. Thet are even looking for people.
Also there is Pumpkin Chunkin Delaware's annual "Lets see how far we can launch a pumpkin out of a cannon"
With all of the problems (and commercial attemps) with robot wars, I think it needs a few years to mature to something that is viable in the long term.
You probably have more security on line then in real life anyway. Its much easier to read the numbers off a recipt (and alot less technical) then to crack a system. About 10 years ago I worked for Radio Shack, there was a POS update to remove the name and address on a credit card recipt. Just imagine how much someone must have had to cause the update, hell, the only thing missing was a social security number.
The only time I've been a victim of fraud was when I applyed for a mortgage, a month later someone was ordering Lands End and shipping it to Camden.
I had to add SNMP to our rs-232 8 bit 68HC11 based product as soon as possible (2 months max development time including hardware). I wound up using a PC104 linux box with NE2000 add on card.
Development time was 1 week to make linux work out of eprom, 3 weeks to write SNMP client, 3 weeks to make a pretty 1U package.
It's overkill, but total time to market was 4 weeks from customer request to delivery.
Any "Internet Appliance" will probably need A/D, D/A and digital IO to do anything useful. What does the UID buy you other then the drivers for the neat LCD, buttons and the included modem?
PC104 stuff has been around for years and has a good complement of add on cards for IO, ethernet and analog.
check out http://www.pc104.com or (sorry about the name, but they're in the same $300 price range) http://www.winsystems.com
It's not that difficult to roll your own with a boot/root image and loadlin. Most included software will take a floppy image and create a bin file to burn into eprom. If you are willing to do an initial M$DOS boot you don't even need any special drivers or kernels, a standard distribution boot/root/rescue works fine as a starting point.
Re:"Long uptime is evil" or "gee isnt my system op
on
Server Uptimes Ranked
·
· Score: 1
An old version is not necessarally bad. I have some old versions that are on an intranet. Here is what I get:
bruser:~$ uname -a ; uptime ; date Linux bruser 2.0.27 #7 Fri Oct 9 14:25:53 EDT 1998 i586 8:24am up 382 days, 18:31, 18 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 Thu Dec 30 08:24:29 EST 1999
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, I want one! what do they have, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8 inch guns with a loader on each? It would bring our crew size down to just the lead pyrotechnician and a few security guys. How do they Ignite the time fuze and verify it's lit?
I'd want the remote starter option though...
We have that now. The racks are made from aluminum angle with HDPE pipes the electrical slat sits in the center and is connectd with either a 36 pin centronics or a DB-25 connector depending on the manufactuer.
We just drop the shells in and connect the wires to the slat. There is a "module" that connects to the computer through a 2 wire interface and breaks out to 36 cues.
Check out Fireone or Pyromate for some of the systems we use. Ease of use is a plus, most of the help we get are people that only do this one time a year!
When I set up a show, I bring mortar racks, shells and a firing system. The press release was kind of sketchy but I'm assuming I would need to bring a high pressure compressor (a Home Depot 175PSI compressor is not gonna launch a 5Lb shell 1500 feet with any reasonable mortar length). I would also need hundreds of feet of high pressure tubing (A finale rack is at least 100 feet from the main guns), and lots of fast (read expensive) air solenoids. It would take forever to set up a show like that.
Then there is the safety problems, thy don't say how they ignite the time fuze and verify it's burning before a tubeload of rapidly decompressing, cooling air hits the shell. I would like to see some dud data.
For a recurring display where you can leave the equiptment and just drop shells in the same tubes every night or week, this sounds like a dream though. I just can't see it coming to a municipal 4th of july show near you any time soon though.
The only thing new in regulations since the bombing and 9/11 is an "Employee Possesser" questionare that needs to be on file with the display company.
You seem to be referencing a "user limited permit" The timelimit you reference is 24 hours WITHOUT an approved explosives magazine to store it. They also require a CDL with hazmat since any quanity of class B (professional display shells) have to be placarded.
There have always been "a lot of permits to be filled out" (That's why there is usually a firetruck and ambulance there). Most of the issues revolve around insurance, 1e6 is generally the minimum that most municipalities want, and it is slowly increasing. I somehow doubt that is a result of terrorism or any other political issue, probably just the result of judjements.
You can see the actual forms for yourself at the ATF website
Looks like an urban myth. The Straight dope delt with this a while ago.
Yep, still use it! I do embedded code for single chip processors. We use an AM radio to listen to the loops - You can actually hear the A/D sample loops, main loop and other stuff. Once you get used to it, you can hear if something goes south much faster then it's going to show up in the device.
FM 25 kit (it has to be a kit, FCC rules)
and have been loving life since. Some of the bennifits include:
It took about 4 hours to build the kit and was not difficult (all components are through hole).
At $130, it''s not cheap initally, but you will wind up saving money in the long run.
- .100 P/N A26228-ND for 9 cents
- .200 P/N A26232-ND for $0.49
- and the 2mm mircoscopic finger confusers
All Prices for 10 each2mm P/N A26244-ND for 0.26
from digikey
I've found that when we spend 16 or more hours a day, 7 days a week working with the same people, trying to stay ahead of marketing and being sucessfull, the "core group" (the guys with the sleeping bags at work) tend to go a little crazy after a few weeks. The Beer, Nerf, and Estes rocket moters taped to a stick release the tension and allow a few more days of coding before the cycle repeats. Yes its fun, but there is quite a bit of pain before the crazyness starts.
I see and have gone through a bunch of people that expect work to be a toy filled experience from the morning to 5:00pm and then they expect to leave and repeat the process the next day -
It don't work like that It's just what you happen to see because it's the cutest "sound bite" when someone talks about the company. I'm guilty of this myself, I tell my friends all about the nights the police come, but omit the gory details of:
- Trying to get an I2C serial chip to emulate a RS-232 port over a weekend because the customer told us on friday that they needed it on monday.
- Creating our own distribution of linux that boots from eeprom on a PC-104 card in 2 days
- EPLD designs in 12 hours
P.S. Looking for a few good Tcl/Tk and Hitachi 2200 series programmers in a new startup. If you want the gain, you will have to live through the pain. mdrop23@yahoo.comIt's a mess and its slow (1200 to 2400 baud was the best we got)
You can also try using amateur radio packet, If this option is available, use it! You probably won't get great coverage but it least you get to stay digital and don't have to worry about modem compression and correction.
Good luck
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Real time devices is the high price spread, they run around $500 for the processor card. WinSystems Sells stuff alot cheaper (Around $200 two years ago).
remember, Slackware runs on a 386. There a probably a ton of 386/486 PC-104 cards out there that somebody wants to unload.
- put chip in burner
- hit "copy" button
That is all we have to do for units 2 thru nThe procedure for making the EPROMS for the RTD PC-104 card is as follows:
- Fire up the card with +5 and 12 volts
- Create a freshly formatted floppy with the included Datalight DOS 5.0 on it. I know, it's sad but we had some DOS setup code for the card.
- Drop loadlin and the kernal You DID build a baby size kernal for this with initrd right? on the floppy
- Create a ramdisk on you development system to build the root image for your new card
- umount the ramdisk
- Set the ramdisk to zeros with:
- Make a filesystem
/dev/ram0 4096
- Mount the ramdisk and copy your root filesystem in:
/dev/ram0 /mnt
/projects/snmp/root_fs/* /mnt
- unmount it again and squish it down with:
/mnt
/projects/snmp/eprom/root_fs.gz
- Now, use sneaker net to move the floppy to the DOS machine running the RTD supplied EPROM image maker and tell it to make the entire floppy into an EPROM image
.BIN file(s)
- Burn the files into EPROM, plug 'em into the card, apply power and open a beer as you watch Linux boot on a 4 inch card
Have fun.dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ram0 count=4096
mke2fs -vm0
mount -t ext2
cp -pxR
umount
dd if=/dev/ram0 bs=1k count=4096 | gzip -v9 >
For the cable, Look at a pinout (Blackbox or other sources). Notice there are 4 pairs:
Swap Brown for Orange (Pair 1) and Blue for green (Pair 2) and you just made a crossover cable. You just wired the Transmit of one machine to receive of the other.
Actually, for most stuff the outer pairs (Brown & Orange) are not used.
If someone is gonna snap, there is not much you can do until we get a functioning mind reader (and submit of course). I had a guy drive into my lane a few years back at hit me head on (like a test crash, headlight to headlight - he aimed). The police called it drunk driving, but basically the guy tried to kill himself using my mv**2. There is no protection against that now or ever. You just hope you survive and put the blame where it belongs - on the individual.
And no, nobody sued Need For Speed.
Almost all of this stuff is computer controlled and some of it is controlable from the web. Thet are even looking for people.
Also there is Pumpkin Chunkin Delaware's annual "Lets see how far we can launch a pumpkin out of a cannon"
With all of the problems (and commercial attemps) with robot wars, I think it needs a few years to mature to something that is viable in the long term.
You probably have more security on line then in real life anyway. Its much easier to read the numbers off a recipt (and alot less technical) then to crack a system.
About 10 years ago I worked for Radio Shack, there was a POS update to remove the name and address on a credit card recipt. Just imagine how much someone must have had to cause the update, hell, the only thing missing was a social security number.
The only time I've been a victim of fraud was when I applyed for a mortgage, a month later someone was ordering Lands End and shipping it to Camden.
Corporate deadlines.
I had to add SNMP to our rs-232 8 bit 68HC11 based product as soon as possible (2 months max development time including hardware). I wound up using a PC104 linux box with NE2000 add on card.
Development time was 1 week to make linux work out of eprom, 3 weeks to write SNMP client, 3 weeks to make a pretty 1U package.
It's overkill, but total time to market was 4 weeks from customer request to delivery.
Any "Internet Appliance" will probably need A/D, D/A and digital IO to do anything useful. What does the UID buy you other then the drivers for the neat LCD, buttons and the included modem?
PC104 stuff has been around for years and has a good complement of add on cards for IO, ethernet and analog.
check out http://www.pc104.com or (sorry about the name, but they're in the same $300 price range) http://www.winsystems.com
It's not that difficult to roll your own with a boot/root image and loadlin. Most included software will take a floppy image and create a bin file to burn into eprom. If you are willing to do an initial M$DOS boot you don't even need any special drivers or kernels, a standard distribution boot/root/rescue works fine as a starting point.
An old version is not necessarally bad. I have some old versions that are on an intranet. Here is what I get:
bruser:~$ uname -a ; uptime ; date
Linux bruser 2.0.27 #7 Fri Oct 9 14:25:53 EDT 1998 i586
8:24am up 382 days, 18:31, 18 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Thu Dec 30 08:24:29 EST 1999
I even have a 1.2.8 running (It's standalone)