Cows and Chickens

Roomba and I have been getting along pretty well over the last few months. It has been cleaning my floor regularly, and doing a good job at it. It gets dust bunnies from places that I never did with the vacuum, and it usually makes it home to its charging base.

I recently rebuilt its battery pack… the batteries have a finite lifespan, and living in a Roomba is a hard life. They get depleted and fully charged regularly, and the little robot uses a lot of current.

I bought a rebuild kit off of eBay, which included a prepared set of cells (already connected together, with leads ready for the roomba) and the security screwdriver to open the pack. I’m not sure why they used security screws — the pack is also glued closed and required SIGNIFICANT effort to open. We’re talking violence here. But it did eventually yield to my screwdriver-and-mallet technique.

The new battery is working… run times are nice and long, the battery charges properly, and it hasn’t burst into flames yet.

A few weeks ago my macbook stopped talking to my Linksys SD2008 gigabit switch. No link at all. Other devices were still working fine, so I tried different cables, different ports, etc, in what I thought was a satisfactory diagnostic effort.

I booked a Genius Bar appointment, took in my Mac, and embarrassingly it worked fine when connected to their switch. I also tried it at work, and it worked fine there. Hmm.

A Google search (that I should have done in the first place) revealed this thread which says a failed capacitor in the switch is the root of the problem.

I opened my switch, and lo, the suspect capacitor is indeed swollen. Time for a replacement! I’ll let you know how it goes.

Update (24 hours later): I replaced the busted capacitor and the switch talks to my mac again! Horray! Total repair cost, $0.30 x 3 caps from Supremetronic/Honson/Home Hardware. I bought the extras in case I wrecked one. 470uF 25V, 105C.

This is a great project, and says good things about people:

http://www.tweenbots.com/

I’m currently on VIA Train 78 from London to Toronto after a nice weekend visiting my parents. I wanted to give props to VIA Rail for being an excellent, comfortable way to get around Ontario.

VIA Rail seems to go out of their way to hire excellent, friendly staff. The service people on my current train are very polite, friendly, and professional. They seem to enjoy their job, which is very important in my overall perception of the trip.

It’s easy to book the trip on VIA’s website, and you can just pick up your ticket right before you board the train, using an automated kiosk at the train station. There’s no need to wait in line to check in, or even talk to another human. On a recent trip I made a mistake and booked my return trip backwards, London to Toronto to London. VIA Rail fixed my mistake with no hassle or extra fees.

The train itself is quiet, has nice mellow lighting, good coffee and drinks, and generally is fast and smooth. Of course there are occasional problems due to the serial nature of train travel (trains can’t always pass each other), and sometimes there are mechanical problems… but the trains usually run on time.

Between driving, flying, or taking the bus, I would certainly choose VIA Rail for short distances.

I don’t usually review restaurants here, but I’ve had quite a few great meals at Free Times cafe recently and thought I would give them some props on my blog. I just had dinner there, the shishtawook platter, followed by a very nice piece of apple crumble. And a great glass of freshly made lemonade.
Excellent food, cheap prices, and nice atmosphere. I approve!

I got the opportunity to trade a bottle of nice bourbon for an under-utilized Roomba Discovery. A friend of mine recently moved to a new house which wasn’t friendly to the little robotic floor cleaner, and he offered it to me ages ago. I finally decided to take him up on the offer.
The robot is the white Roomba Discovery, and is a few years old. All of the sensors and battery were in fine shape, but unfortunately, Roomba’s speaker was not working. It couldn’t play its little songs, and thus had lots of pent-up emotion. I found a new speaker of similar size at Active Surplus and installed it. While I had the Roomba to pieces, I also cleaned out quite a bit of cat hair and carpet fuzz — the device isn’t as well sealed as it should be.
After a couple test runs to make sure Roomba didn’t find its way into trouble in my apartment, I let it run and left for work. When I got home, it was happily sleeping at its docking station, and the floor was very clean. It vacuums better than I do, and goes under the couch and bed with no trouble at all. My big green chair is a bit too low for the roomba to go underneath, but it’s something that I’ve been planning to replace for a while. Minimum ground clearance is now a furniture specification worth noting.
Running speaker cables along the baseboards can make roomba sad, so I’ll have to get some raceway or other cable management solution. Thankfully due to the small size of my apartment, it won’t be an expensive upgrade.
Once I’ve used the Roomba for a few months, I’ll make another post and let you know my thoughts, but so far, we’re getting along!

My friend Jonathan and I are starting up a new Java Users Group in Toronto. Our aims are consistency, relevancy, and socialization. The other Toronto JUG rarely meets and tends to have advertorial content in their meetings. Our JUG meets on the third Thursday of each month, and features short presentations, show-and-tell, robocode battles, and a social session at a nearby pub.

Come and check it out!

Get the details and join the mailing list at http://tjug.ca!

The documentation video for Blinkenlights Stereoscope in Toronto has been released! You can grab the video here:

Blinkenlights Stereoscope Documentary

Enjoy — and please don’t hotlink this, I don’t have unlimited bandwidth.

I’ve been having a lot of time lapse fun with my little Canon SD800IS and the excellent CHDK firmware. Shooting time lapses at several megapixels onto a 2GB card gives lots of options for cropping and scaling, and the ability to capture a lot of frames. The only limiting factors are battery life and the camera’s maximum shooting speed. With better tools, blending or blurring between frames and doing rostrum-camera effects would also be possible.

My current tools:

• Camera + CHDK
• mencoder "mf://*.JPG" -mf fps=10 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg -o movie.avi
• Apple iMovie ‘08

If you have any suggestions for improvements in this toolchain or how to use it better, I would love to hear them. I don’t want to spend the money on professional video software, so things from the free/open source software world would be ideal.

I’ve put up two small Youtube Videos demonstrating the awesomeness of the Blinkenlights Stereoscope installation. Check it out, and try to attend in person. It is quite the sight!