Blake Project: all power to the engines!!

Just a quick post,

The Blake Project is to be presented on Friday, all or nothing, do or die - this is the final push!!!

UPDATE:

It worked, it actually worked! We had a few final system integration issues which meant that the Radar was the only thing that was properly presentable, however this seemed to work for our audience who I don't think would have enjoyed the autonomous car as much.
In a flash of madness I had laser cut some props to use on the day which meant we ended up pretending we had Darth Vader stopping cars travelling too fast (we had a silhouette of him and it kind of made sense) - segueing into a discussion of the radar if we found someone who was interested.

We now have another set of dates to have the project ready for presentation on, hopefully with a bit more success.

One small glued joint for a student, a great leap for the Blake Project!

The Blake Project progresses. With pictures!

Work has been steadily progressing on the perspex track over the past month or so, but the past week has seen some major progress (not least because all lectures were suspended for a reading week). Because it was never going to be any other way, the first full completion of the track occurred this evening, just before the term resumes again. 

Shiny completed perspex track! (just imagine that the electrical tape holding the different sections together is not there)

 Why is this a 'first' completion?

1. There is some trouble with the spacing between the rails at a couple of points. Unfortunately fixing this will probably require replacing the perspex of one of the straight sections.
2. As seen in the photos the only satisfactory way to keep the track sections together at the moment is to use electrical tape - which is counterproductive in terms of making the race track look awesome. Ideally I would be able to glue all the sections together into one really large track piece. This might make the track difficult to handle and store so I will need to consult with the rest of the project team...
3. Some of the pylons need to be moved around as they have been attached randomly at the moment with no thought for where the ones with extra attachment points should be so that the speed traps can use them.

These issues have to be addressed soonish, we have been asked to complete the project for 6th December by our supervisors, and many of the other project elements are now waiting on the track to be finished before they can start proper testing.

Therefore there is almost certainly going to be a 'victory' post in the near future! 

Until then ...

Atmosphere shot, same as when only the first two sections were complete, but now with the whole track!!

Hmm, I was going for more atmosphere - being able to see the top track from below - but all I can see is the mess of loose wires!

When your problem is life ... and that infinitely repeating operation you programmed months ago

All right all right, I am the first to admit that in the grand scheme of things my programming ability is only slightly higher than that of a large twig.

However, my programs, in particular the growing gargantuan that is the Blake Project wireless network base station and autonomous car coordinator, do get to do some cool stuff.

The coolest of these is using my computer's full capacity. There is a certain joy in writing a program that takes so long to run that you can have a cup of tea while it executes ... if you ignore the fact that it is only relatively recently that this has stopped being a common occurrence, and that most of the delay is due to your inefficiency anyway. The Blake Project base station is a prime example of this pride's initial warm glow swiftly followed by agonising pain of n-degree noob programming burns.

In order to service both a GUI and several external serial links the base station implements multi-threading, executing multiple scripts 'at once' (not really it just fills in all the empty space that usually fills up a single thread of execution). While it means I get to use fancy terms like 'concurrent processing' when describing system behaviour, all this filling of idle operations also means that the CPU utilisation can get fairly high as well.

Unfortunately it got slightly too high as seen below, and the program started to lag.

Multithreading in python is only able to use a single processor core. We can see it maxing out the leftmost core until I swiftly kill it.

The primary reason for this was that one of the older threads had been allowed to request access to shared resources a quickly as it liked. This is BAD news, because it can ask as often as it wants (or can - if we have to insist that computers are inanimate), not getting the resource shortens the time the thread does other stuff for before asking again because what it was going to to do relies on the resource being given to it. Think annoying 'are we there yet' questions which are incessant until the answer is 'yes'.

The spoilt child analogy naturally develops when the thread's response to actually getting the resource is to look at it, see that nothing has changed since last time it looked (the data it was looking for only came through every now and then), and thus immediatly close the resource and release it for others to use.

Only to immediately ask for it back.

The solution is to teach everyone some manners, introducing delays into the loops of which the loops are a part, and re-enabling 'blocking' of the requests (pausing the program until it is successful, which reduces the number of requests enormously - there were good reasons for me disabling this I promise). This is going to have knock on effects later on which may or may not be irrecoverable, luckily that is for future me to work out.

Threads with manners, now using the CPU cores in a much more respectable manner. I don't actually know which one it is running on!

In fact, there is a large chance that that is what my next post shall be about, we'll have to see!

An Update

Silence for months must be followed with an update post, it is a rule of nature.

At the beginning of the (academic) year I listed some of the projects that I am working on at the moment. Question: how are they going? Answer: ummmmmmmmmm - I'll get back to you.

Immediately.

Blake Project:

Turns out not spending eight hours a day on a project can really slow progress. The AI has been semi constructed, the algorithm has been written, and so has the car driving code. All that remains is to plug it all together (which is always the longest part anyway!).

The track, is in pieces. Not as many pieces as it was, but it is many hours from completion. Luckily we have a reading week at the moment with many hours in it, many fingers are being crossed.

Its all there! Just not together.

 Telescope:

The updates that need doing have been identified, I really need to install a focussing mechanism better than a loo roll and friction. Also, upgrading the optical tube frame to be more portable, yet sturdier, is definitely on the cards at some point.

The telescope has had some good outings recently, trying but failing to see Uranus, getting a peek at Mars and a good look at the Orion nebula. I was going to try and point it at Jupiter and Venus on Tuesday, but the only place I could see them was from the middle of a road (I live in a city and they were close to the horizon), which I did not think was appropriate. They were awesome enough with the naked eye!

Solar Flare Detector:

Designed, the project decided to change the receiver to an SDR (software defined radio) based one, plugging the antenna (after a couple of filters and amplifiers) into a microphone slot and using a computer to do all the hard work. As it should.

Of course given that the solar flare detector should be running fairly constantly we have elected to use a Raspberry Pi as our enslaved processor - which means I have to relearn linux.

Also it got a name the GRand Assembly for Versatile Ionosphere Tracking and Astronomy of the Sun or GrAVITAS, a ripe source of puns, a source of gravitas (can't help myself), and of course an oblique reference to Iain M Banks. It looks very good in email headers.

The engineer at work, all four monitors in use. More screens = more work being done right?

Rubik's Cube Solver:

Good progress, but nothing of note yet. At least nothing worthy of photographing!

Lunar Rover Mk2:

Wow - got assigned to other projects within the space society for the moment, which was rather unexpected. The sneaky plan of the committee is to shuffle members around between projects as work amounts change. Ideally this means that some point in the future there will be much posting about rovers, the ideas coming out of the rover team so far are really rather cool.

Random Shiny stuff:

It always happens.

Robot Wars.

So the university electronics society run an ant-weight (150g, 10cm cube size limit) competition twice a year, so I should have seen this coming. Because this is going to be the fifth time we have entered, my team is going to attempt to build a cluster-bot, fitting multiple independent robots within the restrictions. This is leading to all sorts of fun and games trying to reduce the mass of the individual components of the robots which is likely to be the tricky bit.

This one also has a name, The Rock and a Hard Plaice, more details to come soon.

Who needs scales when you have string, water and a measuring jug?