I decided to give up on ping pong.
There was a time when I had a real shot at being the first or the best or whatever the heck I was trying to accomplish. But that was a long time ago, and by now, I’m way behind.
I give up.
When I retired, I wanted to see if I could solve “the hardest problem I could think of that I thought I could solve.” It was a personal challenge.
I picked robot ping pong, and I gave it my best shot.
Several things killed me:
–GPUs. They promise more than they deliver, I/O is a bottleneck, and they’re incompatible with an RT kernel. It took me way more than a year to figure all that out.
–I lost code, data, and momentum in a disk crash. It cost me a year.
–B3pr’s mass distribution was just embarrassing. I did not get that right.
–Computer vision is hard enough without cheap lenses. I wish I’d paid top dollar.
–I’m easily distracted, and I set the project aside for months at a time. That should probably be at the top of the list.
In the end, it is a really, really hard problem, and to take it to the next level would take all my time.
My guess is that the best robot won’t beat the best human before 2030.
And it won’t be mine.
A3PR, B3PR and C3PR, posed for posterity.
Without ping pong to pursue, I’ve suddenly got a lot of extra bandwidth on my hands, and I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Pushing 70, my outlook is a little changed. Instead of aiming impossibly high and falling a little short, I’m gonna try something that’s merely difficult, and nail it.
I’m going to get rich. Quick.
The way to do it, I decided, is to sell expensive baubles to billionaires.
If I can make one bauble a week for a year, and sell them cheap for $20 thousand bucks a pop, that’s a million dollars! All I need is the right bauble, and a way to pump them out.
And that’s where my spiral dresser comes in.
Everybody loves my spiral dresser. People admire it out loud, and I lap it right up.
If I were filthy rich, I would want a spiral dresser.
If I had good taste, I would want a spiral dresser.
If I had really bad taste, I’d want ten.
If I were a playboy, I’d want one for my playmate.
If I were a kid, I’d want one for my toys.
Every bigwig, billionaire, and Arab sheik will want a spiral dresser when they go viral, and I need to be ready.
Fifteen years ago, I built my first robot. It was a big gantry router table, and I used it to make some bowls, some party favors, and a coffee table. It worked great, but I moved on, lost interest, and took it apart when I moved. I put it in a pile and I moved the pile more than once. It gathered dust and a little rust.
Fifteen years later, I was walking past that pile when I realized it’s got almost all the parts I need to make a mill to make spiral dressers. All I need is a motorized rotary table and a frame to mount it on, and I’ll be good to go.
What can go wrong?
A good, cheap Chinese rotary table with a crank goes for $800 bucks nowadays. I have one for machining, but it leaks and seizes, and it’s worth maybe ten bucks because I trashed the top of it one day by mistake. It’s perfect for what I need, though, so I cleaned it up, scrounged up a motor, mounted it, and I even got it moving with the 15 year old software on the 15 year old computer in the fifteen year old pile.
Total cost: $74 for the coupling.
I strapped a 2×6 stabilizer to the top of the cab of my truck so I could bring home some 24 foot pieces of steel, and I welded them into a frame. I mounted the gantry and cross-slide on top, and put the rotary table on a shelf that goes up and down. I sewed some bedsheets into dust protectors, and …
Et viola. Instant spiral mill.
And that’s when the trouble started.
My fifteen year old computer was the cheapest computer money could buy when I bought it, and it served me well. But if I’m going to be running a million dollar business, then I need to run a recent Linux, on something beefier than a Pentium.
I need a new computer.
So I bought the cheapest computer money could buy. $75 refurbished, with no OS.
It had a damaged disk, though, and I took my refund and bought the next cheapest computer money could buy.
Waiting for FedEx never got so old.
If I were smart, I would have formatted the disk the minute I turned it on, but I let Windows power up, and it confused me thoroughly. I even had a hard time getting rid of it.
But now I’ve got the latest Debian and the latest linuxcnc, and my jitter is 2.7 microseconds. For what I’m doing, I’ve got the perfect machine.
After another week of cellar dwelling, my motors finally work with my new I/O board. My kinematics work, and my pendant is showing signs of life.
Feels like Frankenstein all over again.
Suddenly, it was Thanksgiving, and the whole crew went to Manchester.
Hats off to Celia and Monte for hosting their first big holiday.
Everyone enjoyed the gravy volcano
Mary and I went to Boston for a couple days afterward.
It was colder than a witch’s tit on Halloween.