It has been about a year, time for an updated picture, but I couldn’t stop at one. Here is one serious and one goofy.
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Bob Update
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Old business cards make great bookmarks. But if you run out of old business cards, it hardly costs anything to custom print business cards specifically for use as bookmarks.
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Egg Decorating Bot
I started this project in 2017. My original goals were:
- Don’t use a 3d printer or laser cutter.
- Build the frame out of foam core.
As you can see in the thumbnail, I gave up on the foam core, but I stuck it out on the no 3D printing or laser cutting, just to prove I could.
In 2017, I made a foam core frame (that I failed to take pictures of) that couldn’t really hold up to the pressure of holding and egg. Specifically the back pressure of the spring kept pushing the hot glued bearings off axis.
After solidly missing Easter of 2017, I decided to move to a wooden and threaded rod frame shown above. I started it in 2018 way to close to Easter to have a chance to have it done. After that, I tended to work on it a few hours a year in the few weeks before Easter. I had a hard time finding something to hold the egg nicely. Mostly I tried using suction cups and different wants of holding them. That is what I spent 2019, 2020, and 2021 working on (although, remember it was only a few hours each spring really).
For 2022, I was sick of not completing this and was determined to do whatever it took to get it done, and if I failed, I would abandon it. In the end, I cheated and ordered some aluminum with spongy material and grip tape pieces from a place selling parts for knock off egg bots. These worked nicely finally. I can’t believe it took so long.
Then it was a race to finish the electronics. I just used simple off the shelf stepper controllers and an ESP32 module. The ESP32 was programmed with the Arduino IDE. There was no G-Code interpreter or fancy control system. There were just different generative Arduino sketches to move the pen.
It turns out that the frame didn’t really allow the arm to move back and forth across the egg enough to let you do more than a fairly narrow stripe around the center. Oops. I’m still calling it done.
I have ideas for the future, but I don’t know if I will pursue them. I am certain that if I decide to try again, I will start over with a design someone else made as a starting point.
Really the only 2 ideas I am interested in trying out currently are:
- Using LinuxCNC instead of the more common GRBL.
- Finessing how generative sketches can be created and previewed.
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New Arrival
Back on October 22, we were joined by Bob.
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Bye Izzy
She passed yesterday. She was such a good girl.
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Running Raspbian in image on Ubuntu desktop
While the title says Raspbian on Ubuntu, the steps will be nearly the same for any ARM linux distribution on any AMD64 Linux desktop. For me, and I suspect most people, what combination is likely to equal Raspbian on Ubuntu.
Download and extract your Raspbian image. In this case I will be using Raspbian Lite and this is the filename of the image: 2019-04-08-raspbian-stretch.img
First, setup: sudo apt install qemu binfmt-support qemu-user-static systemd-container
After the setup, run the following steps every time you want to run a Raspbian image on Ubuntu.
sudo kpartx -v -a ./2019-04-08-raspbian-stretch.img
That will print something like:
add map loop11p1 (253:0): 0 89698 linear 7:11 8192
add map loop11p2 (253:1): 0 8392704 linear 7:11 98304
The first line is the raspbian boot partition, the second will be the rootfs partition.
udisksctl mount -b /dev/mapper/loop11p2
After the prior command, a rootfs mount should appear in /media/<your_username>/. You can copy files into either and they will be placed into the image file you mounted.
sudo systemd-nspawn -D /media/<your_username>/rootfs/
Ctrl-D to exit.
udisksctl unmount -b /dev/mapper/loop11p2
sudo kpartx -d ./2019-04-08-raspbian-stretch.img
Note, a more advanced use might be to copy some sort of initialization script into the image after mounting the image and before running systemd-nspawn. Then, invoke that command something like: sudo systemd-nspawn -D /media/<your_username>/rootfs/ /bin/bash /home/pi/your_script.sh
This mostly for any Linux system using systemd, albeit the make_ssid.sh script will need adjusted for where you want to get the ID from. In the example, it uses the Raspberry Pi’s serial number. Mac address could be another good source to use.
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Avid MBOX 3 Teardown
http://www.dream.fr/pdf/Serie3000/SAM_Datasheets/SAM3308B.pdf
ST-Micro ISP1582BS
max4477
cs4272
akm AK4114VQ
ahc02
hc595
This is aimed more at using the Raspberry Pi with a touch screen for embedded uses, and is not relevant to using it in the Raspbian desktop environment.
Unfortunately, it seems that to just pip install kivy appears to work, but then when you run an example, it complains about missing libraries, and installing those eventually gets you to the point where you need X11 because of the dpkg dependencies being overly broad.
If you build Kivy from source you can avoid that.
apt install python-pip python3-pip gir1.2-glib-2.0 libdbus-glib-1-2 libexpat1-dev libgirepository-1.0-1 \
libpython3-dev libpython3.5-dev python-pip-whl python3-cffi-backend \
python3-crypto python3-cryptography python3-dbus python3-dev python3-gi \
python3-idna python3-keyring python3-keyrings.alt python3-pyasn1 \
python3-secretstorage python3-setuptools python3-wheel python3-xdg \
python3.5-dev evtest libmtdev-dev zlib1g-dev libfreetype6-dev liblcms1-dev \
libopenjp2-7 libtiff5 libjpeg62-turbo-dev git git-man liberror-perl
pip install virtualenv
git clone https://github.com/kivy/kivy
virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python3 kivy_build
source kivy_build/bin/activate
pip install cython pillow
#cd kivy
#USE_SDL2=0 CFLAGS="-I/opt/vc/include/" make
USE_SDL2=0 CFLAGS="-I/opt/vc/include/" pip install ./kivy/