sun jan 1-3
This is what happens when I go a few days without writing anything down: I forget what I did during that time. Mostly, it’s been the usual suspects: c3pr and the green house.
That doesn’t sound too exciting until you ask: where do you want to be with these projects a year from now? Hey, it’s the first of the year. Now’s a good time to speculate.
The green house should be heated, plumbed, and sheetrocked. That was easy.
For c3pr, the gui mostly works, and I’m ready to start on the image pipeline. I should be able to get ball tracking, calibration, and hal working by spring.
Who knows? I might even build a deck and take an epic motorcycle ride.
Or not.
mon jan 4
Today was the first cold day of winter. It was zero degrees and breezy out when I got up. So I worked in the shop for a bit and then dressed warmly for a trip to the dump. Shit’s been piling up over there, so I loaded up 4 big bags, 5 full shopvac bags, and the old flooring from the downstairs bathroom, which had nails in it every 8″. When I was unloading at the dump, one of those nails caught on my glove and they both went flying into the waste pit.
Fucking zero degrees out and I’m down to half a pair of gloves and there’s still half a load I gotta unload! Fuck! So I ran to the office to ask if I could jump in the pit to get my glove back. “Permission denied,” but there’s a pole with a hook I could try to use. So I ran back, found the pole (a 10 foot pole, no less!) and looked for my glove, but they’d started the hydraulics and half the load was gone, munched to smithereens, and no sign of my glove! I hooked some plywood out of the way, and there’s the glove!! I snared it just as it was being gulped down by the hydraulic ram! I pulled it up, shook it off, and put it back on! It was very exciting!
exhaust ducts for the bathroom fans next door.
I set up space and lighting for re-building the motorcycle. It makes a big difference, compared to doing it ‘in the way’
The frame to hold the strings of beads on the bathroom window is very ugly.
Here’s hoping nobody gets up on a chair and looks down at it.
tue jan 5
The other day, I was thinking to myself that this book I’m reading is really long and fairly slow. Suddenly, after 750 pages, it’s gotten very interesting, and this morning, I did something I’ve never done before: I brought my kindle into the bathroom and read it on the toilet. A little TMI …
It was another cold day, and I stayed home. I figured out how to use and link to openCV’s utility modules and got the backgroundSubtractor class to work. Fist bump!Yesterday, I put up fluorescent lighting in the area where I want to work on the motorcycle, and today, I got to work. I removed the pipes, the kickstand, the air cleaner, carburetor, valve cover, cams, cylinder head and piston block. It only took a couple hours. Now that I know (better) what I’m doing, I made some sense of the amount of carbon buildup on each piston based on the setting of the air pilot screw. There really is method to the madness.
thu jan 6-7
I chucked my attachment for honing the cylinders, and it’s a lot meaner looking in person than it looked in the catalog. There is no way to try it out in a hidden corner of the cylinder: You either hone the whole cylinder, or you don’t. So I fired it up and then stopped in a hurry, because it was taking off surface at an alarming rate. For a minute there, I was afraid I’d ruined it! But as long as I’d already ruined one, then it can’t hurt to ruin them all. So I gave them a vigorous hone, and now they all have a nice cross-lapped finish.
I’ve been spending a lot of time on the gui. There’s always something that doesn’t work, but there’s never anything I can’t fix.
If you look close, you can see the scratches in both diagonal directions inside the cylinder. This surface used to be pretty much ‘glazed,’ and I’m pretty sure this step is going to nearly double my compression.
fri jan 8
Another day too cold to foam. It’s getting old, but it’s nobody’s fault.
Worked on c3pr, trying to decide how to make the image pipeline produce an actual number for the position of the ball. It’s hard.
I went to town, thinking I could find a piston pin spring clip at any old auto parts store. As if! I went to 3 stores, plus S&S, and they all looked at me like I was crazy, so I ordered a few online. One more example where a $3 part brings the whole project to a halt.
sat jan 9
Nice weather, and the foam guys are supposed to show up at noon, so I laid low and worked on c3pr, getting edge histograms to work, only to find that they’re not as useful as I’d hoped. Ah well… I had to try.
It was 3:00 and we’d given up on the foam guys showing up, so we headed into town, only to pass their truck, incoming. So we did a U-turn and I got them set up. God, I’d hate to have to work for a living like those guys have to do.
Powerball is up to $900 million, and I want a piece of the action! It’s stupid, I know, but we headed into town and bought two tickets. Two losing tickets, it turned out, and I expected that. What really irks me though, is that, out of 12 numbers picked on the 2 tickets, not a single one of them was among the 6 numbers that got picked. What are the odds of that happening?
sun jan 10
If you excuse the thunder and lightning and strong rain and winds, today was the nicest day since Christmas Eve. It’s been above freezing for 2 days now, so finally they can foam next door. And since the snow has kept the ellipse from freezing, I put on my grungiest clothes and went and played in the mud. Let me re-phrase that: I finally planted the tulips. Right up to Christmas, I was busy next door or downstairs, and I never managed to get to it, but today, I got it done. Nick of time.
C3pr image pipeline, football, kindle … A slow day.
It was either do it or stop talking about it.
Two hours later, a cou0ple hundred tulips were in the ground, and my fingertips were nowhere to be found.
wed jan 11-13
It’s been cold. The guys next door have been showing up for brief spells, and not staying for long, so I assumed the foam was not foaming, so they left. Today I went over and they’d done quite a bit, but they’ve got another day to go, easy.
So I’ve been staying home, working on c3pr and beads. I decided to weave a subtle message into the window screen I’m making out of the butternut beads, and somehow convinced myself it would be easier to make custom beads for the lettering than to buy them. They’re a lot of fucking work, but I like them a lot, and their sheer weight will help each string fall straight. In c3pr, I changed the ball color calibrator, and I like the way it looks and feels. This was actually a pretty big deal, because now I’ve got a way to sustain user input without interrupting acquisition.
Mary’s motorized bed got delivered. It doesn’t look very comfortable to me, but she’s happy.
I drove into town to attend Juliet’s subdivision hearing, but the building was locked and empty. Apparently I missed the tiny ‘tomorrow‘ when my phone reminded me about it.
Since Mary won’t be going anywhere but to the bathroom for the next couple weeks, we went out to dinner. It was good.
Foam at last!
3/4″ steel nuggets, about to become beads
Last time, Mary slept in a recliner that hurt her as much as it helped her. This time, she’ll be resting in style.
fri jan 14-15
The foam guys showed up, set up a heater, sat in the truck while the house warmed up, tried to foam, and then left. Apparently, it’s too cold to spray foam.
I’m chipping away at the image pipeline in c3pr. Sooner or later, I’m going to get it right, but it isn’t going to be today.
We’ve got to be at the hospital at 6:00am friday, so we had a baked potato for dinner and retired early … And got shaken awake moments later so we could get there on time. It was no problem, once I got some inertia going, and when we got there, we had our pick of the prime parking spots. Check-in went fine, and I’m not sure whether to be impressed or appalled by the number of times we recited her birth date. I passed the time reading The Expanse, and the doctor said all was as expected. Maggie showed up with a big baggie of little baggies of munchies for me, and for the rest of the afternoon, I secretly salivated about the baggie full of Ruffles. Thank you dear! We got her home, into bed, and medicated, so … Mission Accomplished. Of course, that’s what George W. Bush said, too.
sun jan 16-17
We had a rope strung across the room so Mary could wake me up if things went south. It never got used, though, and by the time I woke up, she’d already fed the cat and made coffee. That’s a good sign.
You might expect that, if I don’t kill Mary with my caregiving, then I just might kill her with my cooking. And on saturday, I almost did just that. The mushrooms Mary’s got growing in the bathroom are ready to harvest, and Mary had picked out a recipe for me to cook. I salted the mushrooms to taste, I salted the pasta water, I used salted butter, and I used real live pancetta. Throw in a little salty language and, yup, it came out real salty. Like: Salten Sea salty. Like: the mushrooms had been grown in the great salt desert. Not good. Sorry about that. Other than the salt, I really liked it.
I went next door and found they’d sprayed the basement on friday and the little heater in the basement was making it 3 degrees warmer than the kitchen.
I made 86 steel beads, and it felt like it took fucking forever. I measured, and it actually took 4 minutes to cut, grind and drill each bead, for a total of 5.7 hours (plus a lot of repairs because I broke 4 bits) At $2/bead, that would be about $30/hr. Which is more than my day job pays.
I worked a lot on c3pr, and coded most of a gui for image pipelines.
Simone came by with a casserole and, at one point, Mary sent a text that said: “Too comfy to move. Could I please have a cup of mint tea?” So I must be doing something right.
Back in Victorian England, you’d pull a rope attached to a bell, and the butler would come.
Same idea.
Fresh, home-grown oyster mushrooms. They have a very different texture from button ‘shrooms. Too bad I ruined them with salt.
A big batch of steel beads.
mon jan 18
First thing in the morning, right out of bed, I put on a tee shirt and groped toward the bathroom, and Mary’s got a bowl on her lap, a miserable look on her face, and she says “I’m sick.” Something kicked in overnight, and she’s going to have a really bad day. I do what I can, but that amounts to changing her ice, doling out her meds, and scrambling her eggs. I suppose if job 1 is ‘do no harm,’ then I’m doing good, but if I’m supposed to make it better, I’m not.
I did the final cleaning of the pistons, installed the rings, and pinned them onto the rods.
I coded snsNames buttons for the c3pr image pipelines.
I mounted a hinge in the closet so I can put a sawed-off pingpong table in my office. There’s a piece of green plywood leftover from the soffits next door, so I’m making a miniature table out of it. It’s free, and it’s good enough for development.
After dinner, I strung some beads, and I think the pattern is going to look good.
tue jan 19
Mary is feeling better. Thank God. We went to her first PT session this afternoon, and it was an adventure getting her there and back in the bad weather, but we made it, and apparently it went well. We stopped at Harvest Market on the way back and got baked goodies.
I’ve been getting a lot done on c3pr lately and today’s project was rowColHistogram(). It took a couple tries, but it seems to work, and it’s going to be really handy to have.
I painted white stripes on my ping pong table.
I strung 8 more strings of beads, and it looks like I’m going to have to make more steel ones.
A subliminal message in the bathroom window.
It’s interesting that, at a time when I’m using state-of-the-art robot vision equipment and techniques, I’m also coding up a bitmapped overlay for the window, using pixels gnawed by squirrels.
The Terminator
thu jan 20-21
I took a break from c3pr for a day, and now I can’t remember where I was. It’ll come back to me.
I added stiffeners and legs to the ping pong table, and attached them with screws. Note to self: Next time, do the screws and fill the holes BEFORE you paint it. Jerk. Whenever I take a ‘make my own’ approach to a project, I think to myself: “I’m saving a little money” but, really, I never do. For once, though, this ping pong table really, truly, cost me nothing. I had the hinges, the plywood, the green and white paint, the lumber, screws, bolts, epoxy, hinges, levellers, and floor pads all on hand, left over from one project or another over the years. Plus, it’s miniaturized so it fits exactly into my closet, so I don’t have to move my office downstairs. Can’t buy THAT in a store!!
I bought more leather cord for my bathroom privacy screen, cut it up, and mounted the nuts’n’nails on the ends.
Charon came to visit Mary and she brought cookies for me and chicken soup for Mary. Charon is putty in my hands.
It’s not perfect, but it’s free.
sun jan 22-24
A couple of slow days. Mary’s doing a lot better and weaning herself off of pain pills and constant bed rest. Way better progress than last time.
Constant progress on c3pr gui. Working on session save/restore.
I finished and installed my mini-ping-pong table. Now that I’m making progress on the image pipeline, having this set up in the closet of my office will let me debug ball tracking without having to move the whole desk/computer/office down to the basement.
I ran out of steel beads and made another 2 dozen. It’s not that I don’t know how many I need, but I ran out of steel rod. Twice. Right now, it looks close. I’ll either have 1 extra or be 1 short.
Made a batch of enchilada sauce to bring to Charon & Marshall’s. We’re going to put beans in it and call it chili and watch the Patriots game.
Murphy table UP
Murphy table DOWN
mon jan 25
A month since christmas. Or 11 months until. PTSD for all!
I got up at the crack-ass of dawn because I wanted to have a chance to talk to the foam crew. I feel like part of the reason there were so many problems was because I didn’t do a good enough job of riding herd. Not that, in a perfect world, I should have had to at all, but if I had, I wouldn’t have had to be up at the crack ass of dawn this morning. I showed them what needed to happen, and they did it.
As it turns out, I wasn’t 1 bead short: I was 7 beads short. WTF? So I scrounged up yet another piece of 3/4″ round and made another 10 beads out of it. And I was done by noon.
I’m trying to add session persistence to c3pr and I got 90% of it working, but that last 10% is killing me.
I finished reading the 2nd book of The Expanse. It’s called Caliban’s War, and I don’t remember any characters named Caliban.
thu jan 26-28
Doctors appointments. Lots of doctors appointments. Physical therapy. Surgeon post-op. More PT. It’s not so bad, actually, but it takes a lot of time, and dominates your day.
I worked on the motorcycle. I’d done my due diligence: I’d read the service manual, watched you-tube videos, and generally thought it through, and I’d bought all the tools and supplies I neededFor that matter, I’ve even done this before, so I figured that getting the pistons into the cylinder block would be easy this time.
No. The piston ring compression tool I’d bought was too wide, and the wrong tool for the job. Kiss that money goodbye. I convinced myself that the workaround was to put it back together in a different order than I’d taken it apart. Naturally, it didn’t work, and I ended up doing a lot of extra work, and then un-doing it, and then finally doing it right. Sounds a lot like how I did the roof next door, huh?
C3pr is working better and better, but it’s not there yet. Sometimes, I see what needs to be done, and sometimes, I do it. But rarely at the same time. So the plan is to break it and then fix it. Hey, it worked for the roof and the motorcycle!
My home-built piston ring compressors (eventually) worked really well. Waaay better than store-bought.
I used a chunk of wood to keep the crankshaft from turning while tapping on the pistons.
It dislodged, and fell in, and I panicked, thinking I’d have to shake the whole motorcycle upside down to get it out.
I got it out.
sat jan 29-30
After a lot of head scratching and nail biting, it looks like c3pr’s play/pause/record/step/forward/back/video/camera gui works. To look at it, I’ll bet anyone who’s played a video on the web would not be impressed. But when I look at it, I’m impressed. Good job!
I’ve pretty much done nothing on the green house all month long, and I’ve enjoyed my time away from the project.
I decided not to re-grind the valves on the motorcycle because even now, I don’t know of anything I did wrong. So for once, I decided not to make something more difficult than it had to be. I re-used the gaskets, though, and I bet it comes back to haunt me.
We were in burlington for a Dr visit and bought beads at Michaels. As it turns out, the colored ones all have holes too small for the cord, and I don’t have the technology to drill them bigger because they’re made of stone. Mark my words: the tool is going to cost more than the stones, and I’m going to break it before I’m done with it. Because that’s what I do.
sun jan 31
And the month went out with a whimper.
I dug out my set of diamond bits, and it’s a variety pack: Out of 30 bits, only 2 are the right shape for drilling beads. So I set myself up with a pot of water and a dremel tool, and I broke the first bit. I managed to not make that mistake again, and I got thru the rest of the beads without breaking that last bit. But hey, it ain’t over till it’s over.
I want to mount my cameras over the ping bong table, so I need some kind of a gimballed mount so I can point them where I want them. Something simple and elegant.
The holes in these beads looked big enough when I bought them.
As if !!
My adjustable camera mount has only 2 degrees of freedom, but they work really nice.