I'm very proud to let my readers know that my little sister Molly won the Statesman Journal Best of the Mid-Valley 2013 award in the Food Cart category for her new business Vivacious Molly's Vibrant Eats! Way to go! Congrats on being such a great chef and whipping the competition in your very first year in business!
Category Archives: Cool Stuff
Fancier Minecraft Pi Game of Life
I spiffed up my last bit of Minecraft Pi Edition code by making the Game of Life fit into a smaller area of the world, making the world grid and live cells easier to see (by making dead cells Obsidian and live cells Diamond Blocks), and even adding a nifty little stepped wall around the playing field. In the two photos, you can see the new Game of Life as seen from the ground inside of the playing field and hovering above it. It runs a fair amount faster now that it's only updating a 64x64 grid. Still not going to break any speed records (even from 1980) but it's a bit more fun to play with now.
Conway's Game of Life in Minecraft Pi Edition
Also known as "The slowest implementation of the Game of Life in 2013". This is what happens when you have insomnia.
What I did was first clear out the entire world, then place a plane of glass across the entire world at y=1. The actual Life cells are Cobblestone blocks on the y=0 plane (the grid is on the Minecraft x-z axis). The Life grid is initialized with a random seed, then set off to work. This code for the Game of Life is about the dumbest and slowest implementation there is. I've done no optimization at this point. It only updates about one generation (over the entire world) every few minutes. But it does seem to work, as you can see above.
Next time I need a break from electronics, I'll refine the code and post it again (or you can follow the Gist). It's way too slow to run the entire world as a Life simulation, so I think I'll just clear out a 64x64 space in the middle of the world and confine the world to that size, which should make things run about an order of magnitude faster, I would hope. I know, this is crap code, but I'm still trying to really get into the Python frame of mind and this was a quick hack any way.
I'll let this thing run for a while and post a screenshot of the evolved world to Twitter and G+ later on. Also, thanks to the shoutout from the new http://mcpipy.wordpress.com/ blog!
Exploring Minecraft Pi Edition
If you are a Raspberry Pi enthusiast, you may have seen that Minecraft Pi Edition was officially released yesterday. I don't have the time to game like I used to, so I haven't really played Minecraft, but this version looked intriguing since it's free and it has an open API. So I downloaded it yesterday during a break when both of the boys were napping and give it a quick run. The performance of the game is surprisingly responsive, which shows that the GPU in the Pi is fairly capable, even if stock Raspian X Windows is slow.
With a bit of digging into the very sparse API docs included with the program, and a little Internet help, I was able to get a bit of code up and running. All it does is create a sphere 10 blocks away from the player's location in the Z direction. Here's the quick and dirty code:
You can see the results in this photo:
Pretty fun stuff, even if it's very basic. I know that the hardcore MC fans have already been scripting some pretty fantastic stuff in the PC version. It should be interesting to see what people do with the Pi version.
3D Printed Enclosures
In my FDIM 2012 and Pacificon 2012 presentations, I mentioned 3D printing as a disruptive technology that could be useful to ham homebrewers in the construction of enclosures for our projects. This link has a good example of what I was envisioning, calling this application the "killer app" of 3D printing.
Mythbusters at The Tech
This year I made a quick trip to Pacificon (hopefully I'll have a full blog post about the trip later) but I managed to squeeze in a little time on Sunday to visit with my Mom and Stepdad, who drove down from the Sacramento area to spend a bit of time together. They took me to The Tech Museum of Innovation in downtown San Jose before dropping me off for my flight home. The museum was cool, but it reminded me of OMSI and seemed to be geared towards kids and the less tech-savvy. However, they had just opened up a special exhibit called Mythbusters: The Explosive Exhibition a day prior to our visit. It wasn't a huge exhibit, but it was obviously well thought-out and a ton of the actual props from the show were brought in for display, which are instantly recognizable to fans of the program. Most of it was interactive, and they even had a live stage show with audience participation. Given that M5 Industries is also in the Bay Area, it seems like a natural choice for The Tech to host this exhibit.
This was by far the best part of the day for me. I snapped some photos with my lousy phone camera, which are presented below. If you're a fan of the show and you are in the area, it's well worth your time to visit, and I think you can get admission separate from the main museum if you would like.
Heading to San Jose to check out the new Mythbusters exhibit at the Tech Museum. twitter.com/KariByron/stat…
— Kari Byron (@KariByron) October 11, 2012
Surreal moment: my clothing on display at the @mythbusters Explosive Exhibition at @thetechmuseum. twitter.com/grantimahara/s…
— Grant Imahara (@grantimahara) October 11, 2012
Resurrect Dead
I imagine that nearly all of my readers are interested in radio in some shape or form, so I thought I would recommend a fun documentary that you can view on Netflix streaming called Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles. If you enjoy the world of crazy conspiracy theories, pirate radio, and solving a mystery, then you'll get a kick out of this one.
The subject is the odd "Toynbee tiles" which have mysteriously appeared on urban streets in many of the larger cities of the East Coast of the US since the early 1980s. The documentary follows a trio of gentlemen who are determined to track down the responsible party for these bizarre messages which have been implanted into the asphalt of many city streets. I don't want to give away much of the story, but there's a significant and critical bit of the story devoted to SWL and pirate radio, so I think a lot of you will get engrossed in the story based on that, not to mention the general oddness of the topic. As I mentioned, it's available for free if you have Netflix streaming, so put it in your Instant Queue for a watch soon.
Please Welcome Elisha Henry Milldrum
Dayton Or Bust
I've got another grab-bag of miscellaneous news for this post, but I'm going to lead off with the big one: I'm going to be a presenter at the world's preeminent QRP convention: Four Days In May 2012. The tentative topic for my presentation will be about the free and open source tools that I use in the development of my products and how you can put them to use in your own homebrewing endeavors. This will be my first time speaking to an audience larger than about 25 people, so I hope that I can provide an entertaining and informative talk at such a prestigious event. I'll be speaking in front of a lot of people who I consider to be much more capable than I and some who I consider my virtual Elmers. It is my sincere desire to not disappoint.
I am very excited for the opportunity to go back to Dayton so soon after my last trip. I really didn't expect to have the chance to go again for quite a few more years, so the ability to get back to the convention after only two years is a great blessing. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Jennifer, who didn't hesitate to encourage me to go, even though she will be dealing with a 2-month-old baby and a near 2-year-old by herself for a few days while I'm away.
In other news, I feel like I've gotten over the steep part of the learning curve with Kicad, having successfully made PCBs for my little Twin-T code practice oscillator. You can see a short video of it in action above. The output level is suitable for modern, sensitive headphones, but if you want room-filling audio such as in my video, you'll need to connect it to an amplified speaker. The PCB is designed to fit in the ubiquitous Altoids tin, with room to spare for a 9 V battery. I expect that this will eventually make it to my stable of products, but it's low priority considering the long delay on the CC-Series and the need to get it ready to sell by May. If you are really interested in the project, write a comment or shoot me an email (milldrum at gmail) and I'll see if I can't work something out to get you hooked up with a kit early.
The OpenBeacon project is cruising right along. Now that I know that I can successfully make a PCB with Kicad, I've taken the plunge and decided to migrate all of my workflow there (I think this will include the next board spin of CC-Series, since there are so many changes to be made there will be no real advantage to staying with TinyCAD/FreePCB). The OpenBeacon PCB design is nearing completion. Once I get a shipment from Mouser in the next few days to verify that my newly-created PCB footprints match the actual physical components, I'll be ready to submit my CAM files to Seeed Studio for prototype boards. With any luck, I'll have them back within about two weeks. (Protip: it's worth taking the time to place your component against a 1:1 printout of your Gerber to make sure it will fit. Don't ask me how I know this.)
Once those CAM files are off to China, it will be full-bore on the CC-Series. With the deadline of mid-May staring me down hard, I figure I will have to get those CAM files out within no more than three weeks. That will put me into mid-March for getting the PCBs back, which will give a pretty slim margin of time to beta test and prepare the kit for final sale. Going to be pulling some long, late-night shifts...that I can already see.
I've also got a few more projects in the pipeline for after FDIM and the deployment of CC-Series and OpenBeacon. The first is a fairly simple and inexpensive VXO DC transceiver that I hope to initially kit for the high bands of 10, 12, and 15 meters. It uses a topology which is somewhat unique. The other is an extrapolation of the receiver circuitry of this rig to use as a dedicated QRSS grabber receiver. But I may be getting a bit ahead of myself. Let's get this CC-Series launched, then see where the winds take us.
Another Harmonic
I can finally let the cat out of the bag. As I alluded to on Google+ a few weeks ago, lots of stuff was happening behind the scenes here. One of the biggest pieces of news I can now share with the world. You can probably tell from the image above: we're having another baby! Noah gets to be a big brother!
We got another small surprise today. The initial due date was estimated to be in the 2nd week of March. Jennifer went in for an ultrasound today so that her OB/GYN could estimate the baby's gestation age better and it turns out that the baby is a bit further along than we thought. The new due date is the 3rd week in February. If this one is anything like Noah, he or she might be late, so there's a chance this could be a leap year baby. Cool!
It's going to be nuts having two little ones close to the same age running around here, but we both wanted Noah to have a sibling close in age. Besides, I'm creeping closer and closer to 40, so I figured we better git 'er done now, so that the teenage kids don't break my hip when we are roughhousing.
I feel a bit crazy trying to launch a new business, develop a brand new radio, be a stay-at-home dad, and welcome a new baby into the world. But what fun is life if you don't try something crazy every once in a while?





















