Writing and a Chromebook

It was the first day of class. I broght a pad of paper, pen, pencil and my laptop. 2-1/2 hours into a 3 hour class, and my battery conks. This is a CAD capable machine with a monsterous GPU, and appearently it was hungry for juice.

I knew that the machine was overkill, but I really thought I would have 3 hours of charge in the battery.

So I am changing direction.

I have a lousy windows minimal machine, loaded it it with what I needed bare minimum, deleted the bloatware, and it was still non stellar.

So I dumped $140 into a chromebook (minus store credit and I was out of pocket for about $30)

I have a few little utilities on it, a browser, and that is it, and I love it.

And it gets at least 5 hours on a charge.

Suck it windows

Thoughts of the day

I often find myself making a new camera or lens when I am lacking creativity.

I thought it was a crutch, but now I think it is a drive to find images that nobody has ever made before.

I see a lot of striking images on Flickr and Instagram, but a lot of those striking images are images that I have seen 1000x before.

I want to make images that are unique.

Work continues

No pictures, just code, code, code.

Lat weekend, I put in about 48 hours of C coding in for work, and found some lucidity. Continuing on this tradition, I pushed forward on Wheatley.

1) I reconfigured my notions of how to do some of the tasks.

2) I found a library called easy transfer that makes things a little easier. Though I am using it inefficiently, I still have enough resource to get the job done.

3) implemented an exponential rolling average on the A/D converters.

So presently, I am grabbing 4 channels of A/D conversion, smoothing it, pumping it into a bunch of INTs and Easy Transfer sends them across with a checksum.  I transfer across on a timer interrupt, and run the receiver as fast as it will go. I then I take the values and jam them into servo settings.

The inefficiency is in the fact that I have a heartbeat which is 4 bytes, 9 servo values which only need 10 bits, but use 16 each. This is a waste of  6-3/4 bytes, but I can afford the bandwidth.

I am also relying on floats for my rolling average, and will continue to do so for my inverse trig functions.

I also have an Arduino Nano, and a small 5V 3.A amp switcher I plan to use for the power for the servos. I will be building a small power distribution board, and should have servos running soon in a system that more directly resembles the final form.
woot