The Swirling Brain is currently certified at Master level.

Name: Jim Brown
Member since: 2001-03-01 04:33:02
Last Login: 2010-02-08 23:16:54

Notes: Hi. I'm The Swirling Brain. I tinker with robots, work on rolling ball sculptures, and I love to program. I come here to robotics.net since an old DPRG friend of mine runs his site. I've always enjoyed his company.

Projects

Lead Developer on Peripheral Chip
Lead Developer on 5x7 LED Matrix Driver
Lead Developer on CF Walker

Articles Posted by The Swirling Brain

Robot Rewind - Weird Robot Articles of the Past Year or So 1 Feb 2009 at 06:09 UTC
Citroen's C4 Dancing Robot ad is "Staying Alive!" 19 Oct 2008 at 20:23 UTC
Robo-Q Tomy's Tiny Toy Walking Robots 12 Oct 2008 at 03:34 UTC
$100K Loebner Prize Turing Test This Sunday 11 Oct 2008 at 03:40 UTC
Freaky Looking Robot Girl Repliee R-1 10 Oct 2008 at 02:50 UTC
Terminator Salvation 17 Jul 2008 at 12:20 UTC
Humans Are Smarter than Robots! 15 Jul 2008 at 17:11 UTC
Top Ten Weird yet Cool Robot Stories in the Past Year 9 Jul 2008 at 00:48 UTC
Robotic Jurassic Park - Restless Planet 26 Dec 2007 at 16:46 UTC
T4! Christian Bale will be John Conner 2 Dec 2007 at 12:14 UTC

Complete list of articles by The Swirling Brain

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8 Dec 2009 »

I made some more rolling ball sculptures and things on shapeways. Click here to check them out.

18 Oct 2009 »

I got an android mytouch phone. (Mine is black not white). Of course this is the first day I've had it, but so far I love it! This all started because I lost my other phone and so my employer told me to get another phone. Nice thing is they reimburse it so it's free to me. It came with a 4gb sd card too! It looks like Android phones are programmed with Java. I know java and I'm happy about that but of course they'll have their own weirdness so i'll have to figure that out. I really like the idea of being able to write apps for my phone! I'm not sure what I want to make but it just seems cool that I can. I've spent most of the day downloading free apps. Wow, I'm impressed what's free for this phone. So I guess for the next few days or weeks I have a big time waster figuring out the phone. Wee!

10 Oct 2009 »

I've been playing even more with Shapeways.com. I made a Christmas Ornament Rolling Ball Sculpture. I want to 3D print so much more but I just don't have the money to do so. I found an open source 3D printer that looks a little promising and I want one of these: Maker Bot. Watch the video of it in action on their website. I can't really afford one but I think it would be cool if some robot groups like DPRG bought one for their group and then let me greedily use it now and then. :-)

Watch the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikVwr1E6hoo

15 Sep 2009 (updated 15 Sep 2009 at 02:09 UTC) »

Lately I've been trying to make robot parts and have them 3D printed in plastic at Shapeways.com. I have made a few rolling ball sculptures with them.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGdUFg_X8mE

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfqH_60ZgFY

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfXCBFxDx6w

I want to make some robot parts. I tried making part of a robot servo leg using a pixel method with a program I wrote.

However, because of the pixels (voxels?) there's too many polygons for shapeways to accept. There's only 4300 faces but I think they turn them into multiple triangles and then it gets nasty like a million of them. As you can see from the image, my program has some strange problem or Turbocad 14 has a weird problem where it removes a small face on the left hand side. I'm not sure if it's real or just a bug with Turbocad 14. I tried downloading MeshLab and Blender but they both have their troubles. MeshLab crashes all the time. When I could get it to work. I could get it to close holes and reduce or decimate the number of polygons but Shapeways would never accept MeshLab's output. Similarly, Blender could reduce polygons but there again I had trouble loading the file into Shapeways. I'm sure it's something I'm doing. Shapeways has to have a totally watertight model for it to be accepted and when I reduce polygons somewhere something gets messed up. I also made a few Christian rings and a few other RBSs but I haven't tried to print anything else except for the three RBSs shown so far.

(Testing putting a line on a curved faced ring)

(Testing putting text on a model & curved face)

(This rbs has a start bucket and an end bucket)

6 Jul 2009 »

Kotulas has a $13 robot desk lamp that seems amusing!

I saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen this weekend. It was entertaining but too long and drawn out for its own good. They could have chopped out about half of the movie and no one would notice. It was a lot of robots hitting each other and blowing up stuff. I went to the restroom during the movie and when I came back they were still hitting each other and blowing up stuff. There was a lot of "corn" too that really put the movie down to elementary grade roll your eyes level. I wish they could have left that out too. I'd say it was entertaining if you could over look the 12 year old cheezy stuff like the robot humping Megan Fox's leg. The movie was really geared for 12 year old boys at best. I'd give it a 2-1/2 stars out of 5.

Our oldest daughter Bethany was in Children's Hospital for about two weeks. Her lung function had dropped to 50% because of her CF condition. It's up to about 70% now and they let her out. While she was in the hospital they isolated her from other patients because they thought she might have a resistant bacteria. So they let her have a laptop in her room. After they released the isolation, she still go to keep the laptop. That means she was on the internet and facebook every waking hour. She was a little rude about it too. People would come visit and she couldn't acknowledge them because she was too busy IMing some friends on facebook. She had so many people coming to visit she had to dole out time slots of when they could come and how long they could stay and such. My family had to work around her schedule. If I were in the hospital I figure I'd have like one or two visitors and that's all. I'm glad she was spoiled but that was a funny strange unexpected situtation that I didn't know she would have to deal with. One creepy boy that came to visit wouldn't leave. Bethany did about everything to get rid of him, even typing on her cellphone for the nurse to read to please get rid of him but even she couldn't get rid of him. Finally my wife took him out of the room and walked him all the way down to the train station to see him off! Anyway we had a lot of nice sweet friends that cared about Bethany. I'm afraid Bethany's lungs have deteriorated more than expected if all she can get to is around 70% lung function. That doesn't sound good to me but I don't want to let on to her.

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