Nosy Monster alive and well

The Nosy Monster has been sitting on my desk idle for a while now, I’ve always wanted to work on it a bit and make it more reactive to web input. Finally, I bit the bullet and it’s now a lot smoother to operate. Instead of clicking for pre-timed commands, the start of a key press actuates and the end stops. With a websocket communication layer and a socket python command server, the commands find their way from keyboard to motors super fast.

To account for wireless imperfections and AP hopping, I also wrote the logic such that there isn’t a “start” and a “stop” command. Instead there is only a “start” command which gets sent every 200ms and if it isn’t heard every 300ms, Nosy Monster stops. This ensures it won’t be locked in a state of actuation which could lead to perilous situations.

I intend on polishing the code & publish a tutorial that hopefully a 7 year old could handle.

The Nosy Monster was deployed at the Dartmouth Thayer School of Engineering’s open house. I didn’t know how robust it was going to be under sustained kid use.

It turned out to be a huge hit, I let the kids drive it around a bit and then I’d throw the Nosy Monster in another room where they would have to find their way around with no visibility other than the camera. It performed flawlessly through the evening.

It’s always an enormous point of satisfaction to see kids get into something you made. Once I sent the RC car “to Mars” (the other room), the kids were really focused.  All but one got stuck and never came home. I should have had a prize for the one, but what’s next, participation trophies?

With a much more usable and reliable toy, I decided to setup the same kind of maze in a house room under construction.

I moved the camera up on a stick for a better angle of vision, the next model will have a fisheye camera.

Without a reverse, it takes a few tries to get through the maze without getting stuck. He had to learn to be careful.

I’m bubbling up with ideas  of cool things to do with the concept and acquired techniques. From a solar powered exterior land rover, to battle bots.

Tessellationgaba

Very intense 2 months coding marathon to bring into the world the new version of Mandalagaba.

I completely rewrote the symmetry engine to be universal. When I coded the first version, I only wanted to scratch a specific radial symmetry itch and had to expand on narrowly conceived code to accommodate for features that came up from the tool’s success. With this new version, I instead gave myself a broad framework built for expansion, I can translate any penstroke at any angle in any location. Beyond mandalas, it makes possible tessellations and even the 2 combined.

I used the opportunity to add many features which were lacking: zooming, forking, lines, color picker, et cetera. With many more to come. The interface was rethought to be more accessible. Doing so took much more time than building the core engine.

There is an obscene amount of math that goes behind every pen stroke you draw in the tool. It was kind of fun to go through it again in my life, 20 years later. Even though I had forgotten about it all, it came back nicely. It’s amazing to have the internet as a tool to look up methods, to be able to describe the problem in plain English and have potential solutions thrown at you. It used to be that you needed to know what you needed precisely to find it in a book.

 

I love that Robin copies what I do no matter the understanding level, we’ve had lots of talks about what is going on.

It’s not just the math but also algorithms, languages & infrastructure. Not to toot my own horn but in my 30s, I’ve never felt so intimate with every aspect of an idea’s implementation. It’s extremely enabling to know exactly where to go to achieve X. Honestly though I’m a little burnt out at the moment, something that was supposed to take 10 days took more than 2 months of coding every single night.

My hope is that the new tool becomes a reference online for this type of work. And it’s all 100% free; well… we’ll talk about that in the next post.

Lower tech fun found in a thrift shop