Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   headless-computer-based trauma
Sunday, August 18 2019
Last night I'd awaken in the middle of the night and, being unable to get back to sleep, decided to relocate to the greenhouse. I was naked at the time and remained that way, though I grabbed what I thought was a pair of my shorts off the floor. This morning when I wanted to return to the house, I realized that the pair of "shorts" was actually one of Gretchen's skorts. Not knowing how early our houseguest Barbara would be getting up, I couldn't go into the house naked. But I didn't want to put on that skort either, because being seen in that would just be weird. I briefly considered putting a ladder against the north end of the house and entering through the second floor laboratory deck, but that was too much trouble. So I squeezed myself into that little skort (the elastic part between the legs felt unexpectedly good under my balls) and went into the house. Fortunately, nobody was up yet.
Later this morning when Gretchen drove off to her job at the bookstore in Woodstock, Barbara convoyed with her and the two would be having a final brunch at the Garden Café before Barbara continued on to her other East Coast destinations.

I dedicated my Sunday to work with my many small headless computers, the ones I use for remote surveillance, the gathering of solar energy, and (eventually) audio harassment. It seemed, at least for a time, that everything was breaking all at once. The surveillance bot on the woodshed was working okay, but the serial data from the solar controller in the basement had stopped, telling me that I'd managed to kill yet another Max232 RS-232 interface chip. This time, though, I actually had some diagnostic information. The dead chip was hot to the touch, something it really shouldn't've been. Somewhere online I found a post saying that Max232 chips should have internal 400 kilohm resistors connecting their inputs (pins 10 and 11) to five volts, which will keep them from oscillating erratically (and energetically) should they be disconnected (either physically or electrically). I measured one of my Max232 chips and there was clearly no such internal resistor. So adding such resistors to the solar controller board seemed like a prudent thing to do. That was one of several things I did with a soldering iron this afternoon.
At some point I went to check in on my Speakerbot (aka "Disturbatron"), which has been running reliably for something like six weeks. But, to my dismay, I found that it wasn't working at all. I soon discovered that one of the connections to the lead-acid battery had come loose, making the solar charge controller act erratically, turning on and off repeatedly. But even when I hooked the solar controller up to a reliable five volt supply, the Speakerbot refused to appear on the local WiFi network. The heart of the Speakerbot is a Pyle megaphone, with the electronics sealed up in the otherwise-unused battery compartment, and now I had to slice open the caulk to get in and see what was wrong with the Raspberry Pi Zero at its heart.
I found that the Raspberry Pi was not able to boot, and this led me to think that the numerous power cyclings it had been through had destroyed it. But more testing revealed that the problem was actually the microSD card that booted it. That card was now completely unreadable in every device I tried to read it from. Fortunately, I'd made an image of the Speakerbot's card, and though that image wasn't completely up-to-date, it meant I wouldn't have to do to much to get the Speakerbot running again.
My one other headless-computer-based trauma concerned a device I hadn't even built yet: the Waterbot, a Raspberry Pi surveillance bot that I want to build on a toy boat. I'd bought a nice little 3 amp-hour 12 volt rechargeable lithium battery to power this device, but every time I tried to power the main propulsion motor with that battery, it went into what must be some sort of safe mode every time, suggesting that the motor required too much current. Either I had to change the battery or I had to change the motor, and changing the motor was going to require things like custom-milling tiny mechanical parts. I thought about using a small lead-acid battery, but it was far too heavy for the boat that had to carry it. But then I realized that a smaller NiCad battery for my trusty old impact driver (rated 12 volts at 2 amp-hours) might be perfect. It had no problem driving the boat's motor, and it wasn't hard to make a custom socket out of a piece of wood to reliably get power out of it. I actually made pretty good progress on the hardware requirements of the Waterbot, soldering together a small board containing an H-bridge and an efficient 12-volt-to-5-volt power converter. At this point, most of the rest of the hardware work is to simply bolt things down onto the boat's deck and connect up the various boards with jumper wires. Once all that is put together, the rest of the work is writing software. If I actually get that working, I will be providing a link to a GitHub repository.
While I was doing this work, I was listening to a YouTube video featuring famed atheist Matt Dillahunty debating some poor hapless Christian preacher. As I worked, I wasn't feeling 100%, perhaps partly due to a mild hangover. But the weather had also taken a turn for the oppressively hot and humid, and I was never really comfortable unless a fan was blowing directly on me.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?190818

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