Take that Babbage! A *working* mechanical computer. That’s right, I said it. Come check out the Turbo Entabulator at the upcoming NYCResistor Interactive Show this coming Saturday! This is the latest diabolical machine to come out of the labs at Fenton Heavy Industries. Its lack of speed is only surpassed by its unreliability and general mechanical shakiness. But hey, it’s probably the only computer you can print out yourself.

While the Delta-V of the simulator space craft was optimistic for its era, the basic acceleration, velocity and position model is reasonably accurate. If the ship passes too closely to one of the space rocks, it is destroyed and the simulation restarts. Once the ship runs out of fuel (measured in hexadecimal in the upper left corner since the CPU can’t perform a DIV/MOD operation fast enough to display decimal numbers), it is stranded and unable to continue its mission.

We were not able to locate an original controller, but the interface is similar enough to more modern analog joysticks that we could wire it in. Have your own vector display? spacerocks.c is the source for the Teensy to drive it.

This is just so you’ve been alerted… that the facilities will be clean for our 4th Annual Interactive Party this coming Saturday June 15.  We’ll have great projects, wine, a DJ and dancing under a great big LED illuminated arch.

Go get tickets now, as they are moving and we’re not sure we’ll have any left to sell at the door… http://interactiveshow2013-eorg.eventbrite.com/#

Both the high voltage and the custom baud rate issues are a bit cumbersome, so I thought there must be a better way. USB ports will output about 5 W, so I figured that would be close enough to drive the magnet if I could produce sufficiently high voltage. Using Adafruit’s boost converter calculator, I came up with some rough numbers and built a circuit that handles both the slow baud rate and voltage required to interface with the teletype. It shows up as a normal USB serial port and handles the 7-bit ASCII to 5-bit Baudot translation, including tracking which of the two rails is selected, outputs the bits at the correct baud rate, and runs the PWM charge pump to generate the high voltage with the inductor. A second MOSFET is used to switch the high voltage through the current loop, allowing the holding magnet to turn on and off.

It’s fully self-contained, fits in an Altoids tin and works with any software you want to run on the interface computer. If you want to run it with a Raspberry Pi, be sure to use a powered hub to avoid overloading the Pi’s weak USB power circuitry. The schematics and source code are posted to 45baud.net and you can see it in action as part of Future Crew at the digital archeology themed 2013 NYC Resistor Interactive Party.

If the font looks familiar, that’s because it was inspired by the Asteroids video game, with additional characters for the rest of the ASCII subset. The source code is available asteroids-font.c for your own oscilloscope or vector display hacking. Depending on the bandwidth of your scope and the speed of the cathode ray tube, you might need to set CONFIG_SLOW_SCOPE to give the beam time to catch up with the image.

As is de rigueur, all the code is available on github.

The Minitel/Tumblr Time Tunnels will be on display at this year’s NYCR Interactive Party. Be sure to come by and see the internet the way it positively demands to be seen!

Since the theme of the party is “Digital Archeology”, all of the control stations are being built from repurposed dead hardware. There’s a patch panel, push buttons, strobe lights, more push buttons, quadrature knobs, oscilloscopes, and maybe even a teletype to keep score.

Each console will have a Raspberry Pi with Wifi to talk to the other consoles, some number of Teensys to talk to the real world, and some sort of glitchy way to communicate to the operator (like an NTSC TV or a Minitel). If things don’t work right, that’s part of the fun. And, of course the source code will be available for you to build your own Future Crew Consoles.

Tickets for the party are on sale now!

The IK solution uses the DH Parameters to compute the three joint angles for the major axes (the rotation around the stalk, the upper-arm angle, and the fore-arm angle) such that the center of the spherical joint will be placed at a given XYZ position. There are two binary additional binary parameters for this configuration: RIGHT/LEFT controls the orientation of the arm on the right or left side of the stalk, and OVER/UNDER for the configuration of the elbow pointing up or down. See figure 5 in the paper for a diagram of the four possible combinations of these two parameters.

Once the first three theta angles are known, the second phase of the IK solution computes the last three wrist joint angles given the third binary parameter UP/DOWN, and three vectors: the “approach vector” a[] that points in the direction of the tool, the “sliding vector” s[] that points in the direction of the grasping joint, and the “normal vector” n[] that points towards the top of the tool. Figure 4 from the paper shows the relationship of these three vectors in the hand coordinate system.

This video shows the IK iterating between two points (in RIGHT and OVER mode) and generating a piecewise linear path that holds the tool (a cheap pen) mostly level on a constant heading aligned with the X axis. It is a little jerky since the motor controllers don’t have a way to chain commands between points and my calibration on the joint lengths and angles isn’t perfect. Also note that the wrist joints are cross-coupled and require proportional adjustments based on the other joints positions, so the code has some fudge factors to try to account for this behaviour. There are also some corner cases to be sorted out when the “best” joint angles switch quadrants, which will swing the tool around in a circle.

The code isn’t super clean and can use some refactoring to move the DH parameters into a config file, but hopefully you’ll enjoy the human readable code compared to the machine generated ikfast output.

Rapid prototyping tools are great for quick hacks, but their real power lies in their ability to allow you to quickly iterate and refine a design. Earlier this week I hacked together a primitive nine-channel punched paper tape reader, but it had a number of limitations: the LEDs that I was using to read the bits were noisy and slow, the materials used didn’t mask the light well enough, the tape wasn’t mechanically aligned well, the electronics were a mess and the entire mechanism was difficult to use. This Friday, I decided to do what my third-grade teacher would tell me to do every time I half-assed something: go back and do it right.

This time I used proper phototransistors and IR LEDs I scrounged up around the space (thanks, Miria and Raphael!). Because they’re 5mm in diameter (and the spacing between channels is only 2.54mm), I had to come up with a new sensor packing. This one reads bits from four separate columns over a space of five columns, requiring an internal buffer of five columns to reconstruct a single column of data. Even so, the spacing was tight, and I had to sand down the flanges of the phototransistors and LEDs to make everything fit. I milled simple PCBs for both sides to keep things nice and neat, and used a small surface-mount potentiometer to limit the current to the LEDs in case the paper wasn’t thick enough to block enough light. The light mask is made of black acetal this time, and the spacers include runners to help keep the tape straight. There’s still no automatic feed mechanism, but we now have a reader that’s fast and reliable enough to read tapes in earnest.

The updated code, mechanical drawings, and PCB designs are all up on Github. There are still a few tweaks we’d want if we were going to scan more tapes, but this version works very well. Now we just have to figure out what to do with all these PDP-8 binaries. Any ideas?

(Note to time-travelling computer conservators: in the past/future, please do not store your paper tapes in damp basements. These programs are stinky. The Fortran compiler, in particular, is exceptionally foul. Yours truly, phooky.)