Drop-Day 2010 Tech

I figured I'd start writing this up on the return flight from Drop Day, so I'm typing here at an odd, cramped, angle from my flight back from LA to Pittsburgh.

Drop-Day was a fine production, a victory for both hobbyist physical computing, and the forces of democratic freedom. I was impressed with the stark giant white cube dance floor with the, as Biff describes, lovecraftian monolith as a centerpiece. Something about the smaller size and the fog machine made people actually want to dance this year. The sensory rooms were excellent, although some of the code running the party never got off the ground. There is something uniquely appealing about a party that crashes, and requires rewriting of computer code and recompiliation on the fly. In addition to projected visuals ( Kanada, Perceptron, Cortex, Live and recorded video feeds, and other trippy renderings ), we had a few Alumni constructed blinkylights. Keegan completed a most excellent glowing octahedron, Suresh completed a rather nice modification of a commercial lamp, and I constructed several more pairs of goggles. I have spent most of my time travelling ( and very little sleeping ) this weekend, and it was well worth it. However, I doubt I'll be traveling back any time in the next five years. Others travel from much further away (London, Fairbanks) to go to this party, which should give you an idea of how important this party is to Dabney alumni.

RGB controlled diffuse illumination lamp :

Suresh successfully modified a modern style diffuse diffuse illumination lamp for controllable RGB color. He even designed and ordered a custom multi-layer board for the thing. I will try to track him down and see if designs and photographs are available anywhere.

CCFL octahedron :

This project was a wire-frame octahedron, approximately two feet on each edge. An octahedron can be viewed as 3 intersecting squares, once for each of the x, y, z, axes. In this design, each axis was assigned a specific color. The octahedron was constructed using two standard cold cathode fluorescent lighting tubes per edge, driven by black-box driving hardware that is powered by 12V DC. 12V is switched to the various edge drivers using darlington arrays controlled by an AtTiny2123(?), with 12V pulled from a modified desktop computer power supply. The skeleton of the octahedron itself was build by cutting wooden dowels to size, drilling a hole through each end, and joining the ends with zip-ties. The lights and driving hardware was also secured to the skeleton via zip ties. A great effect of the hue rotation on tie-dye style patterns is to cause the location of edges to appear to shift as the color changes and alternatively illuminates different parts of the pattern.

Revised goggles :

The goggles you see in these photographs still use the same old LEDs in ping-pong ball design, stripped down and controlled by an AtTiny13a. I would not recommend this design, as technically the chip is unable to source more than 60mA, where the goggles may require up to 120mA. Offhand the AtMega(4,8,16)8 chips are the only ones I can think of that can source sufficient current, and since they can hold more elaborate programs might be a better choice for future designs. Additionally, although the AVR micro-controllers can function at a range of voltages, the nonlinear V-I curve of the LEDs means that attempts to balance the white-point using resistors must be in the context of a well defined voltage ( preferably a constant 20mA current source, but that takes up board space ). Additionally, I was surprised that the internal resistance of coin-cell Cr2023 batteries limits them to approximately 0.3mA continuous draw. Although the much higher mean current draw of ~20mA for the goggles can be supported, this will cause the battery voltage to drop during operation and the LED white-point to drift. Eventually the voltage falls below the operating voltage of the AtTiny. The coin-cells will recover after about ~30 minutes of rebound. We're still seeing some problems with party-durability but hopefully refining the PCB board design and construction can improve on this. Building the goggles is incredibly annoying and I doubt I shall be constructing any more by the old methods for some time. I'm still a bit baffled as to how someone magically managed to repair solder connections and rebuild the connector on one of the goggles in the middle of the party, but ... thats Dabney house for you.

Laser Spirographs and Monolith-Monitor tower with EL wire :

I don't have good documentation on this at the moment, other than this system crashed a lot during the party, but was still super awesome.

Thanks to everyone who made this happen, it was great to see you all again.

 

 

1: my mind is full of information-particles !
2: gnoson?
2: that is an excellent development

Meet Kyle Munkittick

Very rarely, my wanderings in the blogosphere bring to somebody impressive. Well, today is one of those days. Meet Kyle Munkittick, graduate student and multiple daily updater. He needs some love, so our readers (all six of you) should go over and comment on his posts.

Now for some content. I went to a talk at the Brookings Institute by Intel CEO Paul Otelli on rebuilding American innovation. To summarize, barring major structural changes, we are screwed. Decades of dysfunctional education have caught up with us, while the patent system is "if not broken, very close." We are 40th out of 40 countries in innovation growth. There are not enough engineers and scientists, yet the job market remains unstable. Businesses, instead of adapting to the economic crisis, are hunkering down. In short, we have a problem, now how do we get out of it?

There are of course no simple solutions, but it strikes me that the common thread here is science and technology. We need to spur investment, and bring new people into the field. Positive incentives are a good start, direct federal R&D spending and science scholarships, but perhaps we need to start applying a little stick as well. Cash for clunkers for dead technology, punitive measures for industries with little R&D investment (R&D in the power industry is basically nil). One great idea I heard is that in China, the top 10% of science fair participants automatically get into the university of their choice. Imagine that, instead of stacking, athletics, arts, and community service extra-curriculars, our bright students aim for #1 for science fairs. Now, I never did one, closest I came was robotics, but I guarantee that if science fairs were a surefire shot to college, my school would have sent people. In terms of inculcating the scientific mindset, science fairs are probably more efficient than anything else you could get a high school student to do.

Algorithmic Thinking

Welcome back Chris Beck!

You asked for comments on the Princeton essay, so here they are. Professionally, every field of science has been bemoaning how it must explain its fundamental methodology and importance to public, starting with Galileo and the Catholic Church. Computer science is unique in that it is the most intimate form of technology, the one we interact with the most on a daily basis. Yet, the basic paradigm is not to show people the code, to lock software down as much as possible. Programming is a trade, making little trinkets, and programmers are mere tradesmen.

Computer Scientists should distinguish their field from the mechanics of making a computer work. I am not a computer scientist (but I do play one on TV), and it seems to me that the paradigm of CS is an algorithmic understanding of phenomenon. An algorithmic view of reality can be incredibly power, by reducing complex systems to discrete steps, we gain insight. Keegan once said that he finds programming very humanistic, he imagines himself as the computer, and acts out the steps he would take to solve a problem. What kind of complex systems would we reduce if we looked at them from the level of basic agent, and developed a simple fool-proof algorithm for solving them? (I'm thinking healthcare here, but there should be other examples.)