sat mar 1-5
I’m getting a late start to this month. Couldn’t get motivated to blog.
I’m working hard on an alternate image pipeline for c3pr, and Ball Color Calibration has been the latest headache. 1-dimensional openCV matrices turn out to be a little harder to visualize than 2-D images and it’s slowed me down. No show stoppers, though.
I replaced the valve shims on the motorcycle again. They should be very close to correct now. I couldn’t tell whether my shock absorbers were good or not, so I took them to the bike shop and the proprietor got to talking and wouldn’t shut up. A real gear head, and probably someone I need to stay friendly with.
I stayed away from the green house for a few days because it’s been cold, but I started working on pigtailing. When I took out the old wiring, I saved most of the longer pieces and re-used them when I re-wired. Those pieces are about 30+ years old and, while they’re still good, modern romex is ‘about a gage’ more pliable then the old stuff and, between working on my hands and knees in poor light, wearing bifocals, stripping the sheathing inside the boxes was difficult, and my fingers are feeling it this morning. Always good to put a difficult task behind me.
Devin wants some kind of a hopper with an auger feed for dispensing powder at Mary’s business, so I rigged up a spiral tent sake and some PVC fittings with a hand crank
I attached it to the bottom of a 5 gallon bucket and he gave it a whirl.
It didn’t work: The powder clogs in the reduced diameter and, after a couple handfuls, nothing comes out. Nice try.
wed mar 6-9
I picked up my new shock absorbers and took a close look at them. They’re an inexpensive model, and I wanted to see if they were cheap too. To my un-practiced eye, they look OK, but I see that the supporting eye and clevis are about half the thickness of the old ones, and the ‘eye liner’ is plastic instead of metal. This is surprising because it takes the full brunt of the bike’s bouncing weight, and I actually managed to break it when I tried to install it without grease. It’s also got a dual-rate spring on it, and it’s implemented with 2 springs and a plastic spacer. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not. Probably not.
Next door, I started pigtailing and I’ve got most of the upstairs and half the downstairs done. My knees hurt from kneeling. My back hurts from bending. And my thumb hurts from twisting wire-nuts. Which, I’ll admit, I cinch up tighter than I should.
I fixed a serious problem with c3pr: I had to make video mode utilize the circular history buffer so that the foreground image (from the background subtractor) would be available when I step back in time. It was a bitch, but at least now I can say it was a bitch.
We’re having a hot spell. 60 degrees today, and lows above freezing for 4 straight nights. The dirt road is really, really bad.
We read about a pop-up taco place 2 nights a week in Stowe, so we went. It was really good food in its own right, but there’s just something wrong when food looks like mexican food, but it’s got no chiles in it.
New and old shock absorbers. You get what you pay for, but it’ll do until I understand the tradeoffs a little better.
thu mar 10
There’s nothing worse than coming to a stop on your motorcycle and, because it’s good and warm from driving, it wants to idle really fast. There’s an adjustment for that, but it’s hard to get my hand into the cranny where the knob is, tucked under the gas tank. I want to fix that, so today I ordered a worm gear, and I’m going to route the adjustment screw out to the side of the bike, where I can get at it.
See that ‘phillips-head knob’ sticking up near the middle? That’s what I’m trying to replace.
I ran out of recessed lights to install next door. On paper, it looked like I had it all figured out, but when I started putting them in, it was obviously wrong, and I ended up needing 4 more. So I bought them, put them in, and wired them up.
I’ve spent a lot of time on c3pr’s ROI-based image pipeline, and it is starting to shape up. Now I can find the ball 2 ways, and the new way is 10x faster than my first try, and about fast enough for a fast ball, even without a gpu. This is very good progress. Way to go!
Mary made a very good spaghetti.
Pigtailing. Hard on the hands.
fri mar 11
I put the metal liners in the rubber washers and then I put the rubber washers in the eyes. Twice, because I screwed it up the first time.
I aligned the rear tire and tensioned the chain, but I think I was getting ahead of myself and this won’t be the last time I make any ‘final adjustments.’
I had a bowl of spaghetti and then did some more pigtailing next door. Coming along nicely.
And c3pr is coming along nicely too. My new method works really fast and well. I call it the cam method: Short for Convolve A Mugshot.
Removing the rubber grommet from the shock absorber eye. It turns out that, with a little dab of grease, they pop in and out easily, but I found that out too late.
I replaced the cheap, squashed plastic grommet liners with the metal ones from the old shocks.
sat mar 12
I didn’t mean to, but I worked all day on the motorcycle. I wanted to service the chain, and that meant taking off some covers, which meant taking out some broken bolts, wire brushing with solvents. Upside down. Lying on the floor. One thing led to another, and I decided to clean out the oil pan and check the sump. The gasket alone took me 2 hours.
And then, I tried to clean the sump screen, but couldn’t get the screws out, so I put a phillips bit into my pneumatic impact driver. This tool, alas, is not variable speed, and I stripped the heads of the screws in no time flat, and vise grips haven’t helped either.
I fucked it up, and I’ve got nobody to blame but me. And right now, I’m out of ideas.
I stripped the heads of the sump screen. Not once, but twice.
NOT a variable-speed tool.
sun mar 13
The easy thing would be to just put the oil pan back on and never mention it again. The stripped heads won’t hurt anything, and the sump strainer is fine. But it would drive me nuts, and some day, the sump strainer is going to clog up and I’m going to need to take these bolts out to clean it. And when I do, I’d rather not find that the bolts are still busted. So I spent the morning on my back on the floor with an angle grinder and a vise grip, and I got all the bolts out just fine. I suppose all’s well that ends well, but it ain’t over yet.
When stupidity gets you into trouble and finesse doesn’t seem to help, brute force always seems to work.
fri mar 14-18
Once I got the bolts off, the rest was easy, and I put it back together: oil plan, gasket, sprocket cover, rear suspension: all good as new.
My worm gear came in the mail, and I went right to work and made frame for it. I have to say this was some of my best work, and I spent some time admiring it and patting myself on the back. The worm is plain steel, and when I clamped it to drill for the set screws, I left a tiny bit of a squish mark on the teeth, and it ‘catches’ on the mating gear twice per turn, and totally screws up the buttery ‘feel’ of the mechanism. Looks great, works like shit.
My CAD skills need work.
New idle speed adjustment.
Compare to the March 10 photo.
I needed to thread a piece of rod and, to my utter disbelief, it turns out I don’t own a 10-32 thread cutting die. WTF? In desperation, I was looking thru Dad’s tool drawers, hoping to find one, and came upon two 1 1/2″ augers. Whoa! Just what I’ve been looking for, for Devin. So today, I spent the morning mounting an auger in a pipe at the bottom of a wooden hopper. It looks pretty credible, and it’s GOT to work better than my first one.
New auger, new hopper, new configuration. This one actually worked.
sun mar 20
We went to burlington to get cat food and use up a coupon at the Waterworks. We showed up and grabbed a table we thought was part of the bar, but wasn’t, and almost got kicked out even before we got seated. We watched the cooks cook steaks and fry fries. It was pretty entertaining. We went batshit crazy at Home Depot and bought $110 worth of lights and $30 worth of seeds so we can start our own seedlings. Not like we’re going to be eating cheap, huh? Mary seems to think she’s going to grow a little of everything, and why not? I’m going to try pumpkins and sunflowers, myself. Using worm turds from my compost pile.
I’m thrashing with c3pr, and it’s because the math is killing me. It’s a sad thing when I’m 60 years old and I can barely do matrix math any more.
The first crocus of spring.
tue mar 21-22
I made an attractive little guide for the motorcycle. It clips onto the carburetor and holds the worm drive rod from rattling around. And I shaped it so it looks like it’s leaning into the wind. It took me 3 tries to get it right, because … I don’t seem to learn from my mistakes.
I’m taking baby steps next door to get the PVC piping started. Drilling 3″ holes with a hole saw thru joists and floors.
I think I’ve got c3pr back under control and, for all the high-tech math in it, what’s really holding me back is an hour with some scissors and construction paper to make a test pattern.
Stabilizing bracket
wed mar 23
put the carburetor on the motorcycle
worked out – with a pencil – the equations for 3D uncertainty in the ball’s position per pixel of error on the image plane, and then coded them up.
Bought some giant pumpkin seeds.
Cut and primed a piece of wood for a new calibration chessboard.
Drilled and tapped the holes for the exhaust pipe thermocouples
Made enchiladas
Did not work next door. Fuck it.
I burnt my lunch
thu mar 24
Today, I wrote out the Master Plan for the PVC plumbing. Then I went to the store and bought $256 worth of pipe and fittings. That’s a $byte +1. That’s confidence.
I sprayed the black squares on the white plywood for my camera calibration pattern. In doing so, I figured out the answer to: “Is a chess board black squares on a white board or white squares on a black board?” In my case, it’s black on white.
Devin seems to like the powder dispenser I made, so I made another. I was getting tired toward the end.
Delicious big oily piece of salmon and beans.
The Master Plan. It didn’t exactly work perfectly, but nobody is surprised.
sat mar 25-26
I sprayed the rest of the squares onto my chessboard and, as I peeled the masking tape off of it, I was relieved to find that I’d done it right, and all the squares were where they were supposed to be. So this morning, I fixed some last-minute bugs and asked Mary to click the grab button while I cycled the chessboard thru a bunch of poses in front of the camera.
Et viola! Distortion coefficients that actually work! Very impressive. Nice job!
It was a nice day, so I went next door to put in the PVC fittings I’d bought. The problem is that I’d bought exactly what I thought I’d need. But I bought no couplings because, if you think about it, you only need couplings if you’re fixing a mistake. And I guess I didn’t expect to be making any mistakes. Big mistake. Nothing I can’t fix, though. Eventually.
I hooked up all the cables to the carburetor and then put on the air filter. I’m getting awfully close to getting the motorcycle running again.
My new, larger, asymmetric lens distortion test pattern.
Fisheye distortion straight from the camera
Same image, after lens calibration.
sun mar 27 easter
Nothing puts me in a blacker mood faster than vacuuming the house. But 3 of tonight’s 5 guests are allergic to cats, so I got it done. I can’t always tell when the motorized brush in the wand is running, so Mary had to stop me 3 times to point out that it wasn’t turning.
There is a Roomba in my future. Please.
I prepped the exhaust pipes for installation on the motorcycle. Yes, it makes them nice and shiny, and all the babes will love the brushed chrome, but what I really like about it is that I wasn’t taking off rust, but a blued oxide layer right up near the valves. I’m thinking this is nature’s way of telling me that the fuel mix is too rich, and combustion keeps going within the exhaust, making the pipes get too hot and turn blue. Little things like this make me feel like I’m learning something.
Mary says she hid 18 eggs for the kids, and I went looking for them, but I could only find 4. Stick to what you’re good at.
The kids and I went down to the pond to inspect the ice and of course we had to know how thick it is. It held me, so we put suri on the ice and I got back on and it was holding up pretty good, so sofia had to get in on it. Sofia was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and the ice cracked under us and we scrambled for safety. Every man for himself!
We had the fanciest ham and potato dinner you ever saw, and then I beat Suri at chess. But not by much.
See the dark color that’s been half-removed? That’s proof that the fuel mixture is too rich.
wed mar 28-30
Death and taxes. I suppose I should be glad I’m doing taxes instead of dying, but it’s not like you get to take your pick.
So I’m working on my taxes. Five college degrees, and I can barely do them. I have a 1099-misc for $1.00 and TurboTax doesn’t seem to like it. Neither do I.
People my age are having LTRs with their doctors and they’re not getting better.
More work on the motorcycle. Aligned the wheel, oiled the chain, mounted the rack, put on the peg, filled the oil. Looking good.
I put in a bunch of PVC fittings and then took them out. It looked good on paper. It turns out the key to putting in PVC pipe is to start at the septic tank and work toward the fixtures, and not visa versa. Sounds obvious, right? $40 is not the most expensive mistake I’ve ever made.
I made some trays for seed starting and used the compost from the worm farm to fill the pots.
I tell you: worms are the answer. 4 months into the program, we are getting a tray of fresh compost every 3 weeks. Black, moist, fresh-smelling compost.
I’m pretty sure I’ve got the ‘find the ball’ problem solved, but I’ve had a hard time with ‘how big is the ball’. Shadows make it hard to detect the edges of the ball, and it looks like taking the lagrangian and then running it through Hough gives a good result. If you don’t have any clue what I’m talking about, don’t worry: neither did I until a few days ago.
Finished compost from the worm farm. Really good stuff.
Starting seeds.
Shit flows downhill
Explaining my 1099-misc to the government