Useful guide to developing STM32 Cortex-M3 code from Ubuntu Linux. Suggests starting with the Olimex header board for the STM32F103RB, which is the same chip used on the LeafLabs Maple. I like the Maple since it has the convenient USB bootloader and the Arduino-style development tools, but the longer I work at Synapse the more comfortable I get with a lower-level development experience. (I’ve just finished writing a custom serial bootloader for the MSP430…)

Right, so, I’ve been busy. Ava and I had to get a new car after the little red 325 met an unfortunate end on a rain-slicked stretch of I-5. Neither Ava nor the occupants of the other car were injured, but my car came out of the wreck several inches shorter than factory spec, so I decided it was time to scrap it and find something new. Ava and I spent a day shopping and picked out another BMW 325: this one a 1994-model 325i convertible, dark green, with a manual transmission. Sexy.

We promptly took the new car on a 1600-mile road trip, visiting my family in California for Christmas. Getting all of my siblings in one place at one time is an increasingly difficult challenge, as we all grow up and more of us acquire mates and thus extend our families in multiple directions, but it’s a delight when we can pull it off. We stayed in Sacramento long enough to attend Carolyn’s 21st-birthday party, then drove home in one long rainy day.

New Year’s: Ava was tired and opted to stay in, so I went out a-rambling on my own. I met up with Adam over at Ryan’s place, joined Ryan and Maya’s dinner guests for a champagne toast, then picked up Michael, Candace, Michael, and Likhita and went out for a walk. We had the astonishing good luck to be passing by T.T. Minor park, on top of Capitol Hill, when some crazy people started up a renegade fireworks show. They had a whole line of mortars set up, and they just kept feeding in the shells. They launched dozens of them, one after another bam bam bam, and it was glorious – then as quickly as they’d started they bagged up their gear and disappeared. What a way to start the new year!

Later I went by AND for their late-night chill-out party and had a good time chatting and relaxing while Michael H. played the funky mash-up beats. Good times.

I’m still trying to get the new shop space set up. We’ve established an LLC but haven’t signed a lease yet – we’re getting close, but still have some landlord concerns about noise to work out. I feel good about this project; the location is good and there are lots of people interested in being part of it.

With all this going on, I haven’t done much in the way of creative work lately. I haven’t touched the juggling balls project or the walkie-texties in a couple of months, and I have not yet started a new sewing project after finishing my ski jacket.

I’m still pecking away at the rhythm robot, however. I had been planning to create three separate devices – a loop sequencer called “rhythm robot”, a master clock called “steadyrocker”, and a percussion synthesizer named “hammerbox” – but I’m now combining all three functions into a single box. It’s a marketing thing: separately, the devices are unlike anything else on the market, but when you put them together they become an unusual but perfectly recognizable drum machine. Drum machines are a well established product category, so I can describe my system by comparing it to other products, instead of having to explain it from scratch. It is also a product category with a price range high enough that I should be able to break even without having to risk lots of cash on a large production run; this was going to be a challenge if I tried to produce individual devices.

The down side is that the bigger box makes for harder design work. There are more constraints to juggle, more complicated arrays of resources to manage, and fewer checkpoints where I can verify that I’m still on track. I also have a demanding customer who knows exactly what he wants in music gear and has imposed all kinds of challenging design constraints on the project! Oh, well. I’ve designed the algorithms, settled on the parameters and their ranges, assembled a parts list, and worked out a schematic. I’ve gone through three revisions of the UI layout now, and it’s coming together; one or two more and perhaps I can start laying out the circuit board.

Concise electronics for geeks: one long HTML page outlining just about everything a geek hobbyist might want to know about electronics. It starts with basic physics and keeps on chugging, heavily annotated with links to further reading, all the way to an explanation of digital circuits like flip-flops and multiplexers.

Sunset, on the planet Mars.

Home schooling infographic: numbers, results, averages. There’s nothing too surprising here, but it’s always interesting to get an outside view into one of the more unusual features of my childhood.

I have mixed feelings about the whole anti-institution of modern home-schooling. It definitely worked well for me, and I feel fortunate to have had two intelligent, well-educated, well-read parents willing to pour so much time into teaching. I’m reluctant to advocate it for anyone else, though: the features which make home-schooling work are hard to find outside the fundamentalist Christian subculture where it thrives.

One great thing about the high profile of the Wikileaks situation is that it seems to have gotten a lot of people thinking about practical steps we can take to further decentralize the web. Aaron Swartz’s proposal combines certificate authorities, mirrors, URL-hash-lookup services, Tor, and the new simple concept of a reverse URL hash lookup to produce a system which allows people who want to publish controversial data to do so without fear of censorship.

Bruce Sterling has the deepest, most thoughtful commentary I’ve read on the whole Wikileaks situation. This is very much a cryptopunk project, and Sterling understands that background like very few others; he’s also looking at this with a broader perspective, explaining the deeply nerdy worldview that spawned Wikileaks without losing touch with the bigger culture around it.

The three-year lease Adam and I signed on the Rocket Factory space is nearly finished, so we’ve been making plans to vacate. The shop never really worked out the way we hoped it would – it’s too far away, the roof leaks, and it’s impossible to keep the place warm or clean. Nor have we taken on any of the large Burning Man projects we intended the place for, so it’s been sadly underutilized. We gave it a good try, but it’s time to let the place go.

In the last week, however, I’ve stumbled across a new vacant commercial space much closer to home, written up a plan, gotten four of my artsy friends on board, and set myself up to launch a brand new shop / studio / makerspace. It’s a great venue: right near home, in the Burner Triangle neighborhood where most of my friends live, with a garage, good power, heat, and light, running water and its own bathroom and shower – at the same rate per square foot we’ve been paying in Ballard! In four years of looking at shop spaces around Seattle, this is the best place I’ve ever seen. Given the zoning restrictions on Capitol Hill and in the Central District, I would bet that the total number of spaces like this in existence could be counted on one hand. I feel very lucky to have found it and glad that there are other people willing to join me in the venture.

This will be a bigger project than the Rocket Factory was: more space, more people, more uses – but it feels like the right place and the right crew at the right time. It won’t be open to the public, like Metrix or Jigsaw Renaissance, but it is definitely supposed to be a social hub, albeit on a smaller scale. I’ve believed for years that the groovlabs / mezbian burner community could do great things with a shared art space, and this time around maybe I will be able to make it happen. I’m looking forward to seeing what we make of it.

First, we need a name.

How to use an Amazon EC2 instance as a VPN server

The Murata OKI-78SR DC-DC power converters are a pair of drop-in replacements for the classic linear regulators, LM7803 and LM7805. Unit cost is about four bucks, where the LM78xx is more like $0.60, but they claim 95% efficiency and no need for a heat sink. Sounds like a nice tool to have in one’s parts box.

I have never been a fan of Microsoft, but as the company has become less of an all-conquering juggernaut, I’m starting to see something valuable in its approach to computing which is rapidly being lost in the world outside the increasingly insular Redmond walls.

The last ten years have all been about web platforms, server-side applications, cloud computing: a sort of modern return to the mainframe. Microsoft, on the other hand, continues to be all about the personal computer. Of course they are trying to play in the new world too, but Microsoft still fundamentally sees the network as a service for the PC.

Contrast this with Google’s new CR48 laptop, a device so unstylish, so unremarkable, that it is clearly nothing more than a viewer for the network. The computer is not interesting, Google is trying to tell us: all that matters is the data on the network.

They’re right, of course, and this approach has a lot going for it. Why shouldn’t everyone delegate system administration to the professionals? Why shouldn’t everyone keep all their data offsite all the time, where it’s invulnerable to accidents? Why shouldn’t you be able to get to everything from anywhere, no matter who happens to have paid for the piece of hardware you’re using to get it?

Google, as a company, gives me all the warm fuzzies Microsoft never could, but there’s something wrong with the future they seem to be building, and I can’t completely get on board. The problem with the network is that you don’t own it, you can’t control it, and you are therefore at the mercy of whoever does own it and control it. Once your data lives on someone else’s machine, you have to trust that someone to take care of it, and no matter how reputable, that someone will never care about your data as much as you do.

The Google of today appears to be an extraordinarily intelligent, farsighted, responsible corporation, but organizations change over time as people come and go. Will the Google of ten years from now be as trustworthy? I doubt it. Google is vulnerable to pressure from various governments; this will not change unless they recruit an army and set themselves up as an independent state. Google is not accountable to its users, but its shareholders; this will not change unless they commit a spectacularly unprecedented act of corporate suicide and turn themselves into some sort of user-driven non-profit. Organizations change, but data is permanent, and I am not willing to extend my trust to all the possible future Googles as well as the current one.

I am picking on Google in part because they are the biggest, the smartest, and the most ambitious; they are pushing this new frontier farther than anyone else, and their projects make it easiest to guess where we will all be a few years from now. I’m also picking on Google because they are also the most obviously benign of our grand technological overlords. There are other cloud services, other thin-client projects, and the situation there looks more grim. Amazon booted WikiLeaks off of EC2 the moment they started to look a little inconvenient; they’re certainly not going to stand up for anyone else. Apple, lovely as their design work is, has an even more strongly paternalistic little walled garden going with their iPhone and iPad; I’ve been a Mac user since 1985, but I wouldn’t trust Apple with my data.

I understand the economic forces that are pushing the future in this direction; I just don’t like the direction very much. I have smart friends at these big companies who are working hard to create enormously powerful tools that will change the world for the better, and I wish I could be as wholeheartedly enthusiastic about their work as I believe their efforts deserve. The irony is that the move toward a Web-centric world has cost us the decentralized freedom of communication that the Internet originally offered.

Decentralized peer-to-peer services are the way out of this trap, which is part of the reason governments and organizations dependent on governmental coercion find them so unpleasant. Every central server is a vulnerability, because governments or greedy corporations can interpose themselves as gatekeepers; every service that depends on a central server is thus dependent on their blessing, or at least their indifference.

How can we re-engineer the web so that every node in the network can participate in the cloud system? How can we build something like EC2 or Azure that cannot possibly be shut down by anyone, no matter how large their army or how deep their pocketbook? It’s a hard project, and the economic model is a far bigger challenge than the technical one, but freeing our communication infrastructure from the threat of corporate or governmental interference is the most important project of the 21st century.

Kevin M. and I joined Barry B. for a quick little ski-trip getaway this weekend. We met up after work Friday and drove up to a cabin near Mt. Baker, so we were in line waiting when the lifts started up. The epic drifts of fresh powder we had heard about did not materialize, but it was good snow and the place never got crowded, so we had a great time. We spent most of the day bombing down a single run, over and over, stretching out and encouraging the muscle memory to come back. I missed last season, so I definitely felt rusty, but I had my carving down again after a couple hours, and was working on balance by the time my quads started to give up.

We all got tired around the same time and left an hour and a half before the lifts closed. There’s something to be said for pushing yourself, but there comes a point of exhaustion where your body just doesn’t respond properly anymore, and there’s not much fun to be had after that.

I wore my new ski jacket, of course, and the experiment was a definite success. I stayed warm and comfortable all day, had no trouble moving around, and got a number of enthusiastic comments from the resort staff. The material worked, the style worked, the design mostly worked, and I will definitely wear it again. That said, of course I learned a few things that will help me do a better job next time:
– there is nowhere to hang the lift-ticket tag. needs some kind of loop stitched in along the bottom hem.
– the collar is too snug – it works fine when the jacket is all I’m wearing, but it doesn’t close when there’s a layer of fleece underneath.
– the front flap tends to blow open in cross-breezes: needs more weight or some kind of closure to keep it positioned. Next time I might use a longer zipper and add some side vents, instead of using the front for range-of-motion.
– the hardshell material keeps the wind and water out but doesn’t really keep heat in; the jacket is not much use without a fleece layer underneath. Next time, why not incorporate a microfleece lining?

I’m having a good time with MJ. There’s no real agenda for this weekend – I’m just here to have fun in New York and spend some time catching up with my sister. Yesterday I went up to the fashion district and bought pieces of various fabrics at Mood: nothing too exotic this time, but some interesting, quality material I couldn’t find at home.

After dinner we went rambling around the lower east side and found a place called the Living Room, with a series of bands playing one-hour sets. The group playing when we walked in were a bunch of hilariously earnest music nerds – the front man played a banjo and some circuit-bent kid’s toy – so we didn’t expect much, but the next band was really surprisingly good. Called Feldberg, they are touring here from Iceland, and we’re going to go catch them again tonight in Brooklyn and bring some of MJ’s friends with us.

Today we visited the farmer’s market at Grand Army Plaza and bought some cheese and apple cider. Then we wandered around prospect park and poked our heads in various shops, stopped in at Press 195 for lunch, rode the subway, and wound up spending a couple hours in the Brooklyn Bead Box making stuff. I had just been looking for a couple split rings to repair a cuff link, but MJ got sucked into a Christmas-ornament project, and then I started making a braided wire-and-bead bracelet, and we had a great time hanging out chatting with the staff and working on our creations.

We’re off to dinner soon, then music and dancing and probably a fair amount of whiskey along the way. Should be a good night out!

The code is done and the assembly line is humming. With one exception, everything works the way it is supposed to. I’m not supposed to describe what it is I’ve been building or explain what the project will accomplish, but a descendant of this device will ship as a commercial product someday, and perhaps then I’ll be able to point it out. For now, I’m just glad crunch time is over, and impressed that crunch time at Synapse has been such a reasonable experience. Long days are never exactly fun, but there’s a big difference between pushing hard for a few days, as this week, and having to grind on for weeks or months.

uIP: a TCP/IP stack for various 8-bit microcontroller architectures. Wow.

Work. Lots of it.

Shipping soon? I hope so.

Going to NYC to visit M.J. tomorrow evening. Yay.

Hoping to swing by Mood while I’m in the neighborhood.

Cost/benefit analysis of the TSA’s new pornoscanners:

Given the current deployment levels of AIT scanners, these scanners will over a long time horizon only save approximately 2.4 lives a year, while inducing 3.4 incidents of fatal cancer per year over the same period. Even more troubling is the increase in fatalities as people choose to drive when faced with the possible option of an intrusive enhanced pat-down, which can result in a median of 189 additional roadway fatalities a year. All together this means that while the AIT program reduces the incidence of a low likelihood, high risk and high profile terrorist attack, it induces a median of 190.7 deaths across other parts of American society.

I will be flying next week, and I have no intention of going through the pornoscanners. If the TSA is going to force me to submit to an invasive personal examination, I have no reason to make it easier for them, and certainly no reason to accept the health risk associated with X-rays, no matter how minor it is.

Beyond that, I’m tired of the farce air travel has become. What is the point of the fourth amendment if “terrorism” can justify arbitrarily invasive search and surveillance? I am vastly more likely to be harassed and deprived of time or property by agents of the TSA than by any “terrorist” attacker. The fact that the X-ray pornoscanners are, by themselves, more likely to kill you than a terrorist attack is hilarious, but it is true of the entire apparatus: it’s a bogus cure which is worse than the dramatic but extremely rare disease it claims to cure.

In the end, though, we won’t get free of this nonsense anytime soon no matter how ridiculous, invasive, and pointless it all is. The bureaucracy exists, and like any bureaucracy it is primarily in the business of keeping itself in business. The only solution is to avoid the whole mess whenever you can, and gum it up via passive resistance whenever you can’t.

From now on, I’m flying in a kilt.

Ever needed to write platform-dependent behavior in your C/C++ code? Pre-defined C/C++ Compiler Macros is an apparently comprehensive list of platform, compiler, library, and architecture identifiers.

The Freakduino-Chibi is an oddly-named Arduino-compatible board with a built in 2.4GHz radio, plus a software stack implementing the 802.15.4 (Zigbee) protocol. The designer had remote sensing applications in mind, but it looks like a pretty reasonable foundation for the walkie-textie project – lots cheaper than the combination of an Arduino Fio and an Xbee module.

There’s nothing going on with the juggling balls at the moment, but I’ve been banging away at Radian with some success. I’ve rewritten the IO system, which now supports both input and output, as well as providing access to the command-line arguments. It’s now at least theoretically possible to write Radian programs that do something useful. It won’t be long now before you’ll be able to read, write, create, delete, and otherwise manipulate files. Shortly after that I will need to spend some time planning the feature set and development timetable for the first release, since it will no longer be obvious what work needs to be done next. This is a pretty exciting phase of the project!

The ski jacket is still on track to be ready for the beginning of ski season. I’ve stitched and taped both sleeves, though now I’m out of seam tape so I won’t be able to get much further until I can drop by Seattle Fabrics for more. Two and a half yards of the three-layer goretex material turned out to be just barely enough; if I did it again I’d probably get an extra quarter yard just to make layout less of a challenge. Working with goretex is an interesting challenge: you can’t poke pins through it because that damages the waterproof membrane. I laid out the pattern using scotch tape, and have been holding the pieces together for stitching with fine silk pins, put through about an eighth of an inch of fabric in the seam allowance. It doesn’t matter if there are holes in the seam allowance, since I’m going to cut most of it off and seal it with seam tape anyway. At least the fabric doesn’t fray, since the top and bottom layers are bonded to the goretex membrane.

I prepared a talk for Chillstudy yesterday, titled More Than You Ever Wanted To Know About LEDs. The link points to a PDF copy of my slide set. I’m not sure how useful it will be without my accompanying chatter, but at least it should serve as an entertaining demonstration of my facility with Google Image Search. The talk went smoothly, despite all my stressing out about it; the turnout was small, but the people there seemed to be interested in what I had to say.

I’m thinking of putting aside the DJ-hardware project for a while. I’ve had nothing but trouble with the rhythm robot PCBs, and it’s become discouraging. I think I need to let this specific batch of hardware sit until I have had some time to think about what to do next. This would leave me with only three active projects: Radian, the intelligent juggling balls, and the ski jacket.

My ideas about an IO system for Radian are coming into focus. I have decided on an internal architecture; I am still thinking about finding more user-friendly ways of presenting it, but I don’t actually have to solve that problem in order to start building the foundation. I think I’m going to end up implementing something like a

The ski jacket is coming along well – I’ve finished enough of the cotton twill prototype to be confident that the pattern will fit comfortably and offer the range of motion I need. I intend to finish the prototype as a garment of its own, but for the time being I’m going to put it aside and start cutting out the gore-tex.

So I implemented the parallelization system for Radian, and it works.

Yep. Now, uh, on to the next thing, right?

It feels like it ought to feel like a bigger deal than it feels like. Accomplishing a big goal often seems to work that way.

When did the verb “ask” become a noun, as in “their minimum ask was $50k”, and what was wrong with “request”?

Two useful calculators for working with Rc filters:

• Simple R-c Filter Cutoff Calculator: type in any two of the resistor value, the capacitor value, and the cutoff frequency, and it will calculate the third value, for either high-pass or low-pass
• RC Low-pass Filter Design Tool: much more sophisticated, for low-pass filters only; plots frequency charts and transient curves

Electric motorcycles are popping up all over the place. The one that caught my eye today is the Enertia Plus from Portland-based Brammo: 80-mile range, top speed in the low sixties, and the usual torque-like-crazy electric performance. Not only that, it looks terrific and list price – brand new! – is only $9k.

My project this afternoon is a quick little record bag for my DJ costume. Record bag, that is, as in a shoulder-bag that holds actual vinyl records. I already have the big raver pants, and I got this puffy, fur-trimmed hoodie and a baseball hat this afternoon; add a pair of headphones and I’m all set.

But wait, the informed reader may ask: you say you are dressing up as a DJ for Halloween, but aren’t you actually a DJ in real life? And aren’t you, in fact, going to be performing as a DJ on Halloween itself? Wearing your… DJ…. costume?

Ah, yes: but it’s still a costume, because I am dressing up as a completely different kind of DJ. It will be obvious that my DJ outfit is a costume as soon as you hear the music, because I will look like someone who would be playing a completely different kind of music! Obviously.

Also, I will be a zombie.

Maybe it’s the return of grey, rainy weather; my enthusiasm for Radian is back in force and I am making what feels like rapid progress. I built one major component of the automatic parallelization system in one quick burst, and it worked practically the first time I ran it – I guess that thinking about it for so long meant I had a solid design in mind by the time I finally got down to writing the code. Why did I wait so long? Oh well – there’s plenty more to do, and I’m digging through it with gusto.

Tonight I’m doing a little debugging work on the new rhythm robot board. The microcontroller will not respond to my programming attempts – it appears to be dead. I’ve tested all the connections and they seem to be correct. Is it possible that I simply overheated the chip while soldering it in? Another instance of what appears to be exactly the same circuit works just fine in a breadboard. What’s more, I assembled just the microcontroller portion of a second board, and ran into exactly the same problem. It seems strange that I would have fried two chips in a row in exactly the same way, when I had no such problems building the bloom light boards, but the chips worked fine when I tested them in a breadboard beforehand. Oh, well, I’ll work it out eventually. In the meantime it’s tempting to just let the whole thing sit and work on something else, but I really do want to get this gadget running.

This completely awesome home-built searchlight incorporates an arc lamp, powered by a welder, using a trash can as the reflector. I want to take one of these to Burning Man.

a few samples from anti-jokes:

Your momma’s so fat that she should probably be worried about the increased risk of cardiovascular disease.

Why was six afraid of seven?
It wasn’t. Numbers are not sentient and thus incapable of feeling fear.

So a Hispanic, African-American, Jewish, and Asian man were walking down the street.
They were involved in a parade that celebrated racial equality.

A duck walks into a bar, the bartender says, “What’ll it be?” The duck doesn’t say anything because it’s a duck.