Tutorials

The Best way to program an Arduino Microcontroller from the Linux Command Line Interface

2018-01-12 Dan

Updating arduino code over the internet hasn’t been easy for me before now. In this post I will show you how to update 200+ different microcontrollers from the Linux Command Line Interface (CLI) using PlatformIO. My specific example (see instagram video below) will be a Teensy 3.2 using a Raspberry Pi, but you can repeat it for many other combinations with a little effort.  This method is specifically for the times when you have no Graphical User Interface (GUI) What-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) into the remote machine such as TeamViewer and all you have a bare bones text interface to the remote device.

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News Opinion

CES 2018 Robots? Mostly Garbage

2018-01-08 Dan

Right! I’m in a bad mood today and the crap out of CES 2018 isn’t helping. My short review is “most of these are garbage, and the rest have some brain damage.” Here’s a quick run down of the big ticket items and why I do or do not like them. (more…)

Jigsolve

Jigsolve: see all the pieces at once with the new Google Map system

2017-12-30 Dan

Jigsolve project is running at Science World in Vancouver. I felt that it could be a little easier to play. Building on top of the existing camera code and movement code, I taught the robot a new trick: At the click of a button it moves the robot in a grid and takes photos of the entire table. These photos are then checked into the Github repository along with an index.html. If you surf to the index page you can see all the photos as a google map.

https://marginallyclever.github.io/Twitch-Jigsaw-Robot-Controller/googleMap/

Opinion

Why Artificial Intelligence Won’t Kill Everyone

2017-12-08 Dan

It’s great fun to wave your hands in the air and yell about the Terminators killing everyone, just as it’s fun to pretend the zombie werewolves are coming or the undetectable sky man has had enough. Today I’d like to make the case that the AI could prolong the human race – even prevent an apocalypse.

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