Massive Geek-out! a.k.a this is how mad-scientists get started.
5 Oct
Howdy, world. Apologies for a massively neglected blog. I bring you tidings from the world of dastardly dangerous dragons and deadly delectable damsels in distress (more commonly known as business and life).
I have been doing a little too much running around for my own good, but hopefully, things have achieved a semblance of calm and the chaos has subsided somewhat.
Disclaimer: I think on some subliminal level, I’m trying to make up for the weeks without blogging. a.k.a this post is LONG. You’ve been warned.
Now, having thus dispensed with the niceties, I shall let you in on the single most momentous occasion in my extremely faceted life ( we’re talking about the geek-facet of me this time).
First, though, a little history. Okay, it’s not so little, but bear with me, aight?
As a kid, I loved taking things apart to see what made them tick, much to the chagrin of my long-suffering father. It didn’t matter if it was wooden, plastic, metallic, electronic… If I could reach it, it was going apart. And of course I’d try to put it back together, and most times, it would fail to work again.
As I grew older, I began experimenting more with making my own stuff. That made life a little easier for dear old dad, but the neighborhood suffered in turn. See, these things I was building needed parts, and the parts they needed most were wires. The kind of wires that chain-link fences and barbed wire are made of. So my cronies and I would traverse the neighborhood, roaming far and wide, armed with pliers, all sorts of metallic accessories, and most importantly, teeth. In our wake, we left countless homes defenseless and property owners seething with righteous indignation.
I made wire cars, wire bulldozers, wire bicycles, wire helicopters (with real motorized blades that spun earnestly and vibrated frightfully, but despite their sincerest efforts (and mine), never quite managed to leave the ground.) The cars worked though, and I am proud to say that for miles, I was the only kid whose car moved under its own power. It was supercalifragilisticexpialidocius cool, dammit!
And all this before I left primary school.
When I joined my senior school (and sadly hit puberty – that period of long lanky limbs, a voice that never quite knew its place in the world and a beard that has never quite caught up with the demands life places on facial hair), I upgraded to spending what little pocket money I had buying superglue, batteries and scrap electronics. I’m not really sure how many cornflakes boxes I tore apart, but everyone in my dormitory kinda knew that as soon as they were done with the cornflakes, the boxes belonged to me. Those boxes were the building blocks for circuit-boards and packaging.
I moved up to building imitations of hovercrafts (it floated just a few millimeters off my suitcase) and of “computer” power units (for a friend). I rigged up my room door with a very cool (analogue) card reader that the rest of the school thought was pretty cool (especially my room-mate, coz he got his own “electronic card” key). It even got featured in the school news. A few weeks later, I was back in the school news with a radio-watch, pimped out in royal-paper-blue, and held together by enough superglue to stop a small army in their tracks.
I remember giving my physics teacher a fright when I asked him where I could get a three-phase power supply to try out some linear motor stuff I’d seen in Eric Laithwaite’s “The Engineer in Wonderland” (a brilliant book that was gathering dust and moth balls in some obscure corner of the school library, a book that got me hooked onto electromagnetics and their applications in transportation… and advanced killing equipment, more politically-correctly called weapons).
It was a long and wild-eyed journey, and I enjoyed the long days of solitude cooped up in a room dreaming up some monstrosity that would rain terror upon this unforgiving world. I’d work feverishly, burning plastic and soldering circuits, drilling holes using a hammer and nails, and a few days later, I’d end up with something as immensely useless as a gaming control pad that had no logic to it. So much for raining terror…
So, anyways, why am I telling you all this? To what end this vanity? This pompous blowing of trumpets and marching down a deserted alley with only a stray dog for audience?
Here’s the thing:
I moved up a notch, to the magical world of robotics, and that, sadly, is where my downfall began. This was in my S.6 vacation (about 2001). I discovered the internet, and for the first time in my life, I had access to computers for hours on end, soaking in more information than I’d ever seen before. Marvin would’ve been very proud.
I was fascinated by robotics, and autonomy and embedded electronics. But the more I read, the more I discussed, the more I learnt… the more I knew I was on a futile path.
Why?
Everything I wanted to do required electronic components that I had never held, or seen in real-life. And it was prohibitively expensive to get them into the country (especially for a bright-eyed extremely broke kid from Uganda). The cheapest chip ( that sounds daft) was like $25, and that was before you got the programming kit (another $100) and accompanying electronic components like sensors, relays, transistors, etc. Add it all up, throw in shipping and you’re looking at more than $300. My salary back then was 60,000/= (about $30) per month.
You get my drift.
So… I kinda quit. Shut down my “lab”, got distracted by drama like dropping out of school… Got lost in the world of computer hardware, networking, design, 3D (hmmm… why isn’t there a capital “3″?), web applications, business, world domination and blogging.
And that, sadly, is where this story ends.
Until two weeks ago.
The Present… Continuous
I’d kept looking for alternative chips and shipping firms, prices had been dropping steadily (my to my unabashed delight), and I’d been keeping a close eye on component prices (some dude at Master Electronics even gives me a baleful look these days coz I walking, notebook in hand, look around for ages, ask for prices for ages, and walk out without a single purchase). One lazy Saturday, I decided to make a few calls, a few followups, one thing led to another and I ended up meeting with a friend I’d last seen years ago. And guess what?
He gave me practically everything I needed! He gave me several PIC16F8XXX micro-controllers (16 and 32 pin) with a programming board AND a development board. He gave me books on PIC Applications, Robotics and Stepper motors, he gave me breakout boards and he practically said… “knock yourself out”.
Like WHOA!
I’ve been in a state of massive stupefaction since. I was in totalabsolutegenuineunabashed shock.
For the huge majority of you who do not know what the heck I’m talking about, see the picture below. It shows two of the things I go. The Controller is not the exact one, but similar. I do not expect it to be of much use, but none-the-less, just see it, it may help.
So now, I needed a low end computer for interfacing with the programmer and development board. I was broke, didn’t have the 500,000/= (about $250) for a tired old machine and I couldn’t exactly raid one from the office. (Honestly, what kind of business owner would I be? *grin*). Again, I tried my luck with some people, one call led to another and guess what?
Someone offloaded practically his old stock of computers on me! We’re talking an old celeron Acer, two monitors, a barebones CPU with a motherboard, UPS, speakers… the works!
Like WHOA-ER!
The computers might sound old (and God-help-me they ARE old. We’re talking Windows ME, 600Mhz, 256 RAM), but they are more than enough for what I need.
So yeah, I spent most of the last weekend setting up my “lab”, re-organising stuff, splurged a little buying a few things from Master Electronics, and now… now…
*wipes a tear*
My LAB is complete!! MUAHAHAHA. The world shall see terror like…
Well, it’s not fancy (pics will come later), still has some stuff missing (like a death-ray gun for those pesky mosquitoes), but I can finally continue on a road that I’d walked off years ago.
The learning curve is going to be steep and massively painful, I need to learn two new programming languages (including the dreaded ASSEMBLY) but it will so be worth it in the end.
So yeah, if you don’t see me around again, I’ll be somewhere in a dark room lit only by the glow of computer monitors, surrounded by dis-embodied robot parts, blinking lights and whirring motors, plotting world domination, one line of code at a time.
Offtopic:
Pinky: “Gee Brain, what do you want to do tonight?”
The Brain: “The same thing we do every night, Pinky—try to take over the world!”
Memoirs: Broken lights on the freeway, left me here alone. May have lost my way now, I haven’t forgotten my way home.
Rogue FM: Ramin Djawadi – Iron Man (Iron Man Soundtrack)
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Socks and thighs. Indeed the Iron man soundtrack is appropriate you mad scientist geeky lover of femme fatales. In the words of the most famous cartoon scientist….
“today is a great day for science” Dexter
Aaah Dexter. That lab…
You got cool robot stuff for free! masseltof (sp)!
Yes I did, YZ. How you doin?
Good to have you back…
Dude, I give you assembly language skills, you let me code on your shit.
As in, you let me code some ‘bot stuff there, and you, in turn, have unbridled access to the code – with real-time explanations. Cool?
I don’t do PIC assembly, and it is weirder than other assembly languages, but I’m the middle of writing a MIPS32 assembler. Suffice it to say that I’ll be kicking PIC assembly in no time flat. Indeed, I’m taking home a tutorial to write a simulator-ish thing so I can freak you out by being excellent before I even touch a board.
And, no, assembly isn’t harder. It is easier to get a small instruction set (like the basic parts of MIPS, or all if PIC, whichever you are using) into your head – all of it – than to get all of the PHP you need to make a simple site. You’ve done the later, you can do the former.
(And there are no semantic tricks in assembly. PHP’s magic_quotes, for example, present an unsolvable semantic problem, yet people manage. No such thing in assembly. Point is: contrary to the common chant, assembly is easy.) Sorry, I ranted. Never post Pinky and the Brain again.
First off, you’re writing your own an assembler? Much props my friend. Much props.
I zeroed in on PICS mostly for the price and support factor. They’re insanely cheap these days. And think about it, those “limitations” mean nothing to someone who’s never coded at machine level.
Actually, we should hook up so you can give me a primer on processor architecture. What say you?
And you’re the second person today to tell me Assembly is easy. Maybe I’ve been listening to the wrong crowd!
Writing an assembler is easy, actually.
In MIPS, which I’m doing, it is easiest. (I did it to lean MIPS well, and ended up liking my little ideas enough to pursue them for their own sake.) My neighbour said something about giving it to his students as an assignment (building an assembler, that is). Now, if a Makerere person can do it, it is easy. 
No offence to anyone intended.
Eh, we shall have said primer.
) We shall. It’s actually easy on the lower levels. It’s just harder to debug rogue code (pun !intended) but not hard to create the code in the first place. As this guy says, low level is easy.
The discipline required to keep programs from ending up too complex is what creates the illusion of difficulty. (One learns it as one goes. The rules are basic. Like “Don’t do too much in one place!” and “Divide the problem and conquer it!” and “Write helper scripts!” and “Don’t repeat yourself!” Et cetera.) It’s not, therefore, the assembly that’s hard, but rather the discipline. My way of approaching assembly has always been to learn it once so that I don’t have to keep knowing it (and exercising such discipline) ; that is, by learning it so that I can write a higher-level program to generate it for me (since programs are always going to be maximally-disciplined). Usually, they are not advanced enough to be called by the correct name: compilers. But if one is doing tiny bots, even this should be unnecessary. We will just kick assembly raw.
It is not hard.
Hiya King! (Its been too long since I said that *grins*)
So lost me a little on the technical stuff..but I so get the enthusiasm from your post…plus I liked the journey back to the school days..
And Pink and the Brain rocketh majorly!!!!!!
Heya Val! (*grin*)
1. You have the Sylar element.
2. Dude, that was a loooong post.
3. I am blown away…and now all I can say is
go have fun with your lab.
1. Thank you.
2. Thank you.
3. Thank you!
Electromagnets, huh? Interesting. If only I had 3 extra IQ points, I’d have solved our electricity problems by now. But, I haven’t given up yet. Will have to do without them for now.
In the meantime, “You can call me ‘Commander.’”