1) Some people had succeeded in getting ROS working on Raspbian,

2) The hardware floating point instruction set was utilized in this port.

I therefore downloaded the raspbian image, installed it, did the resize thing, updated it and installed ROS – which took me all day what with compiles etc.

Another piece of software that I found incredibly useful was WiringPi – a simple library to let me program the GPIO pins in Arduino-like software, and a command line tool to test that everything was working. By that evening, I had a flashing LED working using this library and a breadboard.

Pi in a box

A peek inside

Contents laid out

Close up of the card

• Raspberry Pi – “brain” ✓
• Arduino UNO – nervous system ✓
• Adafruit motor shield – drive motor controller ✓
• Chassis – Rover 5
• Wheels – Mecanum (or initially simple temporarily)
• Sensors
• Location/attitude – ArdIMU 6 degrees sensor board
• Collision detection – Sharp IR Rangefinder
• Software
• (on Pi) – Arch Linux ✓
• ROS ✓
• Arduino – Basic sensor and motor drivers from various libraries + custom code

This is (I realize) a pretty ambitious shortlist. I intend to get the electronics up and running on a breadboard first, get the Arduino and ROS programming working to a first order (start, stop drive motors), then proceed to assembly on the chassis, get “drive to” type commands working, hook up the rangefinder and do some collision avoidance. Then work with the sensors to get dead reckoning. After that, mapping and layout stuff.

When the news broke about the Pi, I searched and found a UK manufacturer (Allied/RS Components), and tried to place an order with them. Their site was so sluggish and unresponsive that I thought my order was lost in cyberspace. I then found a North American distributor (Newark/Element14) and ordered two from them.

Then I heard nothing much for a few months. Then I heard that one (the other back-ordered) was shipping from Newark in Indiana. A couple of days later, the other one shipped as well. Then I received a DHL shipping notification from RS Components – so I will soon have 3 Raspberry Pi’s. Now I hear that my friendly local Arduino shop now has some in stock! I have agreed with a work colleague to sell him one of them once I have more than one in hand.

My first Raspberry Pi returned to DHL yesterday. They insist on trying to deliver again again (although I know I will not be home), and only then can I make arrangements to pick it up at their centre.

The other two I had delivered to Niagara Falls, USA – which means I can pick them up on Saturday.

Anyhow – on to what I will do with them. My enthusiasm is growing for building an autonomous robot. I have already purchased an Arduino board (UNO rev 3) along with an introductory kit, and last week I hooked that up to one of my Linux boxes and played around with some programming. It was great fun, watching those LEDs blink, dim and fade as they were programmed to (for the most part). I then spent most of my spare time over the last week thinking about what and how I would build my robot.

I considered various forms of locomotion. I would most like to have a bipedal walking robot, but I realize I should probably crawl before I can walk, so I will start with wheels or tracks. I then noticed Mecanum wheels on-line, and I was very impressed. I found a Canadian website that sells them for $62 for a set of 4 x 4″ wheels – I think an ideal size for my first project.

One of the more interesting (challenging) aspects of the project will be location determination. I plan to use dead reckoning, and I have done a little research on various methods. It seems that using an accelerometer/gyro combo will allow some clever mathematical tricks (Kalman filtering) to do some pretty good location adjustment of the basic wheel odometry.

My next blog entry will deal with the list of hardware and software I will bring to bear on the project.

So how did the global-warming predictions fared in the past? Let us look at the predictions made in 1990: they predicted an increase in temperature of 0.3C per decade, with an uncertainty range of 0.2C to 0.5C per decade. Yet less than 0.2C of warming per decade was observed. To be blunt, they got it flat wrong. Currently, they are predicting an increase of 0.2C per decade from this point forward (see John Baez, 2012). Will the predictions pan out this time?

Subsequently I noted:

Some here have commented that in fact although detection of this problem is a scientific problem, and though Daniel proposes that there are or will be engineering solutions, others have noted that nothing will happen without political will.

As always, we are entrenched in the status quo because those in power (and by in power, I mean with enormous money at their disposal) are inherently entrenched in the status quo. They make loads of money now – so they wish to keep things the way they are right now. Therefore, they press the political process as much as they can to maintain their advantage.

The huge sums spent on trying to bury the issue of climate change creates the polarization. If one “side” is spending billions on lobbying, advertising and outright buying science chairs at universities, then necessarily, the none-systematically funded opposition must fight back and take the other “side”. It is a canard of the first order that climate change scientists (by and large) are part of some well funded self serving lobby. Here in Canada, the Federal Government has taken clear aim at environmental science as something it wants to withdraw all funding from, precisely because that government is in the pay of big oil. Scientists are not some homogenous body of people. There are some (most) who are legitimate, ethical people who work with integrity and skepticism. There are some (a few) who work (mostly) for fame and notoriety. There are others who will take whatever money they can get, and select the facts to suit the audience. Big oil has little trouble finding at least a few obscure scientists to back up their lies.

As for your characterization of the numbers – you too are seeking sensationalism. To claim that a prediction of .3 is flat out wrong when the results came out to .2 is to misrepresent. Flat out wrong would (to me and other ordinary speakers of English) see the temperature go in the other direction. Which it patently did not.

In short – they predicted global warming of .3. They got .2. They were right, but the amount was off. They predicted polar shrinkage of a certain amount. They got almost double that. They were right, but the rate was off. All this says is that prediction is difficult business. It also says that the underlying models need refinement. However, governments of western countries are burying their collective heads in the sand and un-funding climate research like there is no tomorrow.

Just because a certain amount of global warming won’t be a disaster everywhere on the planet right away, or here specifically, doesn’t mean that we will not ultimately pay a very high price for ignoring the problem. Hoping that some super-hero scientist will save us at the last moment is not a plan of action. Especially when we are busy discrediting the very people you expect to solve the problem once it is truly out of hand.

This is in an era where on the one hand, almost everyone has a device on which they can play media such as music, TV shows and movies, and on the other hand, the “legitimate” producers and distributers of such content have almost completely failed at providing the content in a form the customers want to use.

Music was for a long time, not available in digital form unless you made it yourself. Even so, publishers pursued and continue to pursue draconian laws preventing you even from copying your own music CDs and letting a friend listen to it. Now music is finally widely available – and guess what – people buy it – a lot of it.

TV series are another problem. It seems the networks and producers are in collusion here to maintain a dinosaur model. TV series are sold at outrageously high prices (if at all) on Blue Ray, often unavailable on DVD, and broadcast via only premium channels for regular TV. I have news for you media companies – lots of people DON’T WATCH TV anymore. All they have are computers, tablets, game consoles and phones. What can they do? It would seem that pretty much all they can do (according to your own rules) is STEAL. It is not like they would buy it if they couldn’t steal it. They are completely unwilling to roll back their lives to the 1900s. There is a business opportunity going begging here. Few people want the inconvenience associated with torrents or other p2ps. Most of us would like to simply click on content, view it in high quality, and would be quite ok with paying a modest bill for the privilege.

Numerous start-ups are trying to break into the content delivery business. They understand the future. Netflix, Hulu and the like are poised to break big. The only hold ups are the big media companies themselves. All they will release to these new operations are their slow moving back catalogues. They refuse to release anything good or new IN THE VAIN HOPE of perpetuating their fossilised businesses.

If I had my druthers, all web distribution sites would be required to include a special attribution link on copyright content. It should probably be part of the html standard. That link would simply count downloads, or views, sending clicks to some central counter. Each view generated would accumulate a royalty amount for the owner. ISPs would pay these royalties on to the relevant media companies, probably via a clearing house of some kind – but much in the way that radio stations deal with royalties on air-play. ISPs would obviously want to collect payments from their customers based on their accesses of these attribution links.

Then a couple of things would happen. Any site with a link without attribution would be easily spotted and flagged. On the other hand, sites with the proper links would be generating revenue for the media owners. They might even negotiate payments for their services as advertisers / agregaters. Content owners would not have to carry the whole distribution load themselves – they would have the whole internet to sell their goods for them.

Obviously there would be some issues – poor copies etc, but these are details that could be worked out. Why are we still protecting a dinosaur business model when the business and consumer ecology have moved on?

Now Facebook and Apple are creating gated communities, where people can live their whole lives thinking they are on the internet, but they are not.

This is not ok. This is counter to the entire premise of the internet. The whole value of the internet relies on its standard protocols, its equal access, its freedom to search and be searched. The amazing tools that have fallen into our hands are a direct result of this absolute sharing. Wikipedia would never have been developed using Apple’s model (it competes directly with some of their products). I should not shoot just Apple and Facebook here, there are others seeking to cripple the internet by isolating their customers, and using proprietory formats.

I read this post over on ZDNet, and the comments to it just baffled me. It seems that fanbois overwelm the discussion space on any topic of any seriousness. What I don’t get is that it should be possible to like a companies product, yet be critical of things they do. Yet it seems that the world is full of people who because they have chosen a product, see fit to defend even the most indefensible actions of the companies they do business with.

They make every question into a false dichotomy. If a company makes a good product, they can’t do evil. Or if company (a) does something really bad, if they can find any least fault with company (b) it is magically equivalent.

We (society) must decide whether we want to live in safe but exploitative little citadels, or whether we value the freedom to surf, to go anywhere, to share data and to enjoy shared data. Do I own my list of friends – my roladex – or does it belong to a service provider like facebook? Do I own my pictures or old posts? Can I take them back?

For every service we give up something. In our race to get everything for “free”, we accept being advertised at, and for our demographic data being used to sell us for targeted marketers. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but yet I see many whine and complain about it. Facebook is no more innocent than google (if we assume some sort of giult, which I do not). We are the guilty here. We just have to choose what we give in exchange for services, and to whom do we give it.

Facebook and Apple are deliberately creating a system where it will be very costly to change services. A much more difficult version of denying you the ability to keep your phone number – they are trying to keep all your data, by making it difficult or impossible to export it, and the same for deleting it. This is anti-competitive behaviour at its worst. Nothing Google is doing amounts to a hill of beans compared to this – the worst criticism I hear is that they sell us to advertisers. Well, folks – I have news for you – this is what they do. Facebook and Google’s entire business model is based on this. Google, on the other hand does not intentionally wall off your world and your data from YOU.

Commenters – Google is no innocent, but it is not guilty of this either, so stop comparing Apples to Googles – it is not a valid comparison!

This is because the PC is heading towards its future as a business mostly, specialist device again. Other form factors (which are actually more personal) such as mobile are taking over sales numbers. Smartphones, tablets and netbooks are all growing in sales, whereas the traditional desktop is in decline. The fact that the CPUs are different will not help desktop prices as they are heavily subject to volume, and the volume is favouring ARM by a significant degree right now.

So – we can expect that desktop computers have bottomed in price, and will either stay more or less the same or even increase in price, whereas mobile devices will get ever more powerful and cheaper in the way we have come to expect from PCs.

Spending 20% of their time customizing the app to work on the various flavours of Android device isn’t the problem – it merely serves to put a price on the problem.

The REAL PROBLEM is stated in the developer’s blog. The fact that they only make 5% of their revenue from the Android platform.

Almost every poster and commenter points at fragmentation as THE problem. It is not shockingly bad. It could be better, but if the developer in question was making half, or even 20% of his revenue from Android, he would in all likelihood suck it up and continue developing for it.

The real issue here is the 5% number – why is this developer only making 5% of his revenue from Android. This is the unaddressed problem here – if indeed it is true (and I have no reason to doubt it). Is it because Android users expect a free lunch? Are they pirating his apps – or just not buying apps at all? The reason for this is not even considered.

I have heard it stated that developers make more money on the ad-supported versions of their apps than they do from paid apps on the android platform. Perhaps this developer does not issue an ad-supported version? These are all theories that need to be investigated, and typical of ZDnet journalism, the elephant in the room is being ignored in order to point at some supposed deficiency of one platform over another and shout nyah-nyah-nyahnyah-nhyah.

Perhaps the Google Market Google Play ecosystem is not strong enough, and the platform too weak and encouraging of Piracy as some have commented. Or perhaps Android is attractive to value purchasers who are not likely to buy apps other than their absolute needs? Has anyone studied this? I wish I had the answers – or the time to find these answers, and I wish even more that the journalists who are paid to delve into such questions would stop wasting my time with their biases and opinions, and get to the root of issues more often.

This is all just innovation stifling nonsense. Everyone at Apple and their competitors knows that it is extremely easy to change the unlock interface. Does anyone here actually believe that people would not buy an Android phone if it had a different unlock gesture?

Android 3 uses a circle. Android 4 uses face recognition. The stickling on the slide to unlock interface is just an intentional road-bump to sales, designed to cost a ton of cash and delay competitive products which are, under the covers, quite different beasts, with often very different interfaces, just to change the front unlock screen.

What should really be questioned here, is whether it is in OUR (the customer’s) benefit to have interfaces such as this patented at all. Clearly both Apple and Microsoft both benefitted hugely by the non-enforced patents on original Xerox interface work (mouse, windows, menus, icons) – as have the buying public, by getting an essentially familiar interface experience that has lasted 30 years. Should we be really be allowing any company to patent basic gestures in an interface? Especially one that has clearly stated it has no intention to use FRAND?

There are some gestures in the Xerox desktop way of doing things that would be un-imaginable to require each computer maker to do differently. Why would each company have to find a different way to drag a file between folders? Or to the Trash? Yet we have given Apple the sole right to describe a bunch of interface gestures that they absolutely refuse to share with anyone.

What Apple fans fail to recognize is that a world where only Apple gets to dictate what can be used on a small touch screen device, is a world where apple can and will charge whatever they want, and interoperate with whatever they want. If apple had their way (and they have literally stated this), they would destroy Android utterly, and reign supreme in the market. Then how much would your iPhone 5 cost you, or your iPad 3 – with no competition?