Curated river of news
Latest posts from blogs I follow
Today I printed out and glued together the first iteration of the ping-pong ball hopper that takes up most of the space of the robot. The assembled hopper Full of ping-pong balls, I can get 12-14 in without packing them ...
I needed to re-design the motor mounts on the robot base, they didn’t hold the motors securely enough and tended to shift around. The new mounts are better fitting and include a small wedge that fits between one of the ...
I printed out the front half of my Raspberry Pi camera module mount. It serves two purposes, providing a way of mounting the camera on my robot, and giving me a place to attach the wide-angle lens I’d bought earlier. ...
Testing the robot power requirements Before I pick a battery I need to know what power requirements my robot is going to have so I took it into the hackspace to test. I hooked it up to one of the ...
The Raspberry Pi camera doesn’t have a field of view that is wide enough for my robot, I’d have to mount it really far from my robot to see enough context to make it drivable so I’ve bought some wide ...
The robot base design from my previous post printed OK. Here it is printing: Robot base 3D printing The finished print. The two small separate objects are the motor covers: Completed robot base print The assembled robot, including Raspberry Pi ...
I’ve re-designed a prototype robot mount in OpenSCAD as Sketchup wasn’t up to the job. It took a while, you have to program the model in a text editor so there’s lots of trial and error. Will have to wait ...
It works, but it needs more refinement. Testing the new motor mount
Printing a motor / caterpillar track mount detail The 3d printer at work
Designing a track mount for my pololu caterpillar tracks. Sketchup is trying very hard to prevent me. Pololu track mount design in progress
I soldered together my MotorPiTX motor controller today and fitted it to the robot: The robot with MotorPiTX board It’s a hell of a lot neater than my original effort, and only trails one wire. It goes forwards and backwards ...
One of my new motors. It's about 10mm in diameter I’ve started work on a top-secret project. I can’t really hide the fact that it’s going to be a robot, but I’m not going to say what it is, at ...
Java annotations are syntactic meta-information that can be added to your source code. You can annotate classes, methods, variables, parameters, and even packages. The primary advantage of annotations over Javadoc tags is that they can be reflective. This means the ...
A Piglow glowing A few days ago I got a Piglow. It’s a fairly useless but fun addon board for the Raspberry Pi that has 18 individual user controllable LEDs arranged in Arms/Legs/Tentacles (whatever you want to call them). There ...
A completely incomplete guide to packaging a Python module and sharing it with the world on PyPI.
Google killed its Reader and my beloved Reeder for Mac and iPad officially won’t get updated in time. I think to have found an adequate setup to replace both.
Even though Java 7 introduced a low-level API to watch for file system changes (see the article here), you also have the option of using the Commons IO library from the Apache Foundation, specifically the org.apache.commons.io.monitor package. The first step ...
A list of best practices for writing bash scripts: Use a portable shebang In computing, a shebang is the character sequence consisting of the characters number sign and exclamation mark (#!) at the beginning of a script. (source wikipedia) Use: ...
Contents Introduction The Binary Heap Why use a Heap? The code Defining the data Implementation Testing Introduction In Computer Science, a Priority Queue is an abstract data type similar to a standard Queue, but with a critical distinction: every element ...
Contents Introduction The Algorithm Implementations Scala Python Haskell Introduction One of the earlier challenges from Programming Praxis was the RPN Calculator. The goal is to create a module that evaluates Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) expressions. RPN is a mathematical notation ...
Introduction If you’ve ever tried to write your own calculator, you’ve probably needed a way to convert mathematical expressions written in the usual infix notation into Reverse Polish Notation (RPN). This post walks through that conversion using the classic shunting-yard ...
Update (2026): This was the first 'real article' I ever wrote. It actually dates back to before 2010, though I didn't publish it until later. I’ve made a few tweaks here and there, but the original 'old code' remains. Please ...
My first blog post, in which I am writing Hello World!. #include int main() { long long h = 0x0A646C726F57206FLL; long long e = 0x6C6C6548; printf("%.4s%s", (char*)&e, (char*)&h); return 0; }
A lot of the SVG filter primitive content out there is some really rad, deep-dive type content (I’ll link some of these at the end!), so I reckoned it might be nice to do a quick write-up on some effects ...
I have this weird relationship with Incredible Amounts Of Grief where, like, I’ve literally been there — I know there’s nothing to say, and nothing will heal but time. When The Bad Thing™ happened, I felt angry so often with ...
There are zero audio files in PyTheory. No samples. No recordings. Not one byte of pre-recorded sound anywhere in the repository. https://soundcloud.com/kennethreitz/ragamidnight You can see the code that generated this song. Every sound you hear — every plucked sitar string, ...
I love my OP-XY. It's one of the most elegant pieces of hardware I've ever used — Teenage Engineering at their best. Opinionated, beautiful, immediately playable. You turn it on and you're making music in seconds. But here's the thing: ...
I'm working on an album. Each track is a Python script. You run it, it renders a WAV file. That's the whole workflow. The project is called Interpretations, and it's built on PyTheory — the same synthesis engine I've been ...
A friend of mine, Alex, asked me a question the other day that should have been simple: "Do you think Claude has elements of consciousness?" I've written tens of thousands of words exploring this territory. I should have a clean ...
Photography is time travel. I don't mean that metaphorically, or at least not entirely. When I look at an image I made on a street in Stockholm in 2013, I am there. Not remembering being there — being there. The ...
Here's a question I've been sitting with: what does success look like when you live with Bipolar I and Schizoaffective Disorder? For most of my adult life, the answer was simple. Success meant knowing when to go to the hospital. ...
About a decade ago, I drank ayahuasca in a ceremony. I'd been on a trajectory toward it for a while — years of psychedelics taken with what I told myself were spiritual intentions, a growing involvement with the local hippie ...
