Recommissioning the hardware
Posted: October 20th, 2009 | Author: josh | Filed under: progress | 1 Comment »The first step in restarting the Muralizer Project is recommissioning the existing hardware. I bought all the parts for a full prototype when we were working on it at noisebridge, which we assembled a couple of times. Yesterday, I dug all this up, gave it a plastic tub to call home, and wired it up.
Next up was a test rig. At the moment, I’m testing on a little toy whiteboard in my apartment: it’s a lot cheaper than paper and paint pens when trying things out. This took a little adjustment, but I finally found a solution to setting things up. I’m pleasantly surprised, and love that my 10 pound freeweights are getting use again.
Freeweights make excellent, well, weights. Here, they hold the motors in place.
After a bit of hacking, we had awkward, jerky test motion! This is pretty exciting, but the real fun (for me) was getting back into the codebase. I added some new diagnostic commands to the firmware, so I could tell what it was doing. This software hasn’t been touched in a while, so it was a little trippy to step back into it. There’s a bit of really cool math, a touch of crazy motor control code, and a lot of good old state tracking. I’m remembering how much fun it was to collaborate on this code once upon a time, and am really enthused about stepping back into it when I can find or make the time.
Speaking of making time: I’d love to work on this full-time for a few weeks! In order to do that, I need your support. I’ll have a Kickstarter project up in the next day or two. Kickstarter works a lot like a PBS pledge drive: in return for pledges, I will send you some artefact from the project. For example, if you pledge $15, I’ll mail one of the images printed out during testing. At $47, you can get a printout of a vector file you send me. And, at a number I still need to calculate, you’ll get one of the first muralizer kits ever produced.
I’d love to engage the community in the creative process, so I’ll be posting up these progress reports as I go along. You can also email me, or leave comments in the blog. On top of all that, Muralizer has its own twitter handle: @muralizer. You can follow me there and see what’s going on, hour-by-hour, when I’m at work.
