Started to get some nibbles from the local high school industrial arts program and the local college instructors that are somehow involved with local economic development regarding my ideas for some local prototyping of transparent entrepreneurialism and engineering combined with some skills seminars and open access to the publicly owned machine tools in the local schools. Pretty traditional standoff actually, before the instructors and schools make any committments about availibility of machine tools they want a large student list and guarantees of benefits they can show school boards. Typical professional cover your ass behavior ..... unfortunately the local unemployed millwrights and machinists are very familiar with this type of behavior from the plants they used to work at which are now shutdown and out of business. They are reluctant to invest their precious time until someone proves they have gotten past the monkey motion phases in which most of these efforts get bogged down in. Further there seem to be large uncertainties in insurance issues and legalities and qualified security monitoring etc. etc.

I shall have to reconsider this a bit. It may be better to work strictly on the private side and lobby the local school board to reduce taxes by shutting down all ineffective activities which are better taught elsewhere or on the job. Perhaps high school should consist of a half day of reading, writing and arithmetic with work study activities in the afternoon where the students can learn real business and industry skills while putting some money away for either college or their initial toolkits.

On a more positive note ..... a friend of mine is setting up an industrial grade wood shop so he can get into cabinet building. I salvaged an old PC power supply from a local civil defense exercise (somebody planted it as a simulated explosive package in a garbage can at the local high school to see how long it would take chaotic but alert defensive citizens to spot it and have it removed) that has some of the capacitors I need to build him a capacitor network for a wood working tool he is refurbishing. Now all I have to do is find an electrical fundamentals book or see if I can derive the proper kirchoff laws from one of the other electronics and engineering handbooks I have lying around. I got rid of many of them on last summers book bombing raids into the heart of local tree age country so I may have to figure out how to use the local shuttle system to go to SWOCC (South Western Oregon Community College) library to look up the proper design methods.

Perhaps I should use mostly wood in my initial ESM prototypes. It is certainly the most prevalent local resource although I have found some supplies of steel in locally polluted ditches and creeks. Myrtlewood nuts would appear to make decent ball bearings for joints that experience only low dynamic or quasi static loads. There are some interesting examples of ball bearing use scattered around various local parks where volunteers have used scrap parts to assemble high quality teeter totters for the kiddies and their accompanying adults. Careful study of how the wobbling binds various types of installations might help me avoid initial problems with pivot joints.

Cool looking articles here on hydraulics and other stuff. I am way behind on my reading. I may take a few days off soon from civil defense preparations and spend them reading the articles that are posted here. I think they will provide a pretty good overview of the state of the art of robotics application as well as some very innovative ideas and technology approaches to robot specific design issues.

Hi All,

I have been a bit busy and have not made any overt progress on my esm line of pack robots. I am very impressed with the level of information that steve and the rest of you guys manage to track down and post. I sure hope that the site owners are considering ways to make money off of this site, so that this valuable online learning experience can be improved and remain available online indefinately. Further, as it continues growing we will need better knowledge base engines and perhaps even some high end engineering analysis tools to continue growing our mind share in which ever market segment the site owners decide to optimize the site for. All this takes money or at least resources and resources must provide a return somehow to all stakeholders or friction develops to the detriment of the robotic organism being grown. No good to have brains if you have insufficient muscle or stored energy reserves to get them where they need to be to accomplish self selected or societally pre coordinated goals. So I think anyway.

I have been learning a lot about mechanics and logistics that will eventually be of use in designing cost effective and useful robots but I fear that I have a ways to go. Fortunately it seems we have many fellow travelors who like the idea of using smart structures to increase humanities potential to implement a true civilization in near space soon.

I take heart from the fact that anything that can be prototyped via manual labor and effective organization can be programmed and automated for routine implementation by creative software developers and engineering teams. It is certainly going to be exciting working in and around the robotics fields of all types for the next few decades.

The advances coming out of the military applications that we are starting to see are going to be very interesting to apply to enhancing civilian productivity as soon as sufficiently trained and responsible citizenry are available to be entrusted with these genies ..... so I think anyway.

I am nearing my allocated time limit for this activity so I shall close by appending the replies I made to a couple of thought provoking articles and questions that were also posted here:

UAVs in the War Against Terrorists

My immediate thought on finding caves was rather star trekian and involved lots of data processing and comparison of thermal sensing data and patterns.

If a more immediate solution is required I would think about designing a robot to crawl in with a seismometer and a satellite transmitter link. An F-15, F16, or F-14 could detonate a rocket at a laser designated site when enough of the robot squads were in place to take readings. Then the siezmotransports crawl on to the next location and wait for the next flyby or buzz bomb to impact.

Clearly there would be substantial attrition of these throwaway robots. Perhaps they could be equipped with some primitive arms operated via teleoperations (we would not want a kid to trigger an attack upon themselves) or commands so that if discovered by hostile terrorist forces they could take pot shots back and keep the terrorists pinned down for a while before attempting a kamikaze run on the nearest terrorist.

It is worth noting that such robots would have a lot of useful components so the design should verifiably destroy most of the most militarily valuable components or the terrorsts would soon be sending these back to civilization's cities, outposts, neighborhoods, and/or parks.

It is also worth noting that judicious stage acting would allow delivery of useful materials and wealth to double agents or freedom fighters in the area under guise of preparation for an overt U.S. military attack. While terrorist leaders waste their resources watching for paratroopers local freedom fighters might be eroding their support base until an almost bloodless coup or a final battle in defense of the free villages computer centers and schools solved the problem of thugs in charge.

Clearly once the thug governments are gone tactics will have to change so we are not arming barbarians with advanced technology allowing them to be more of a nuiscance than would otherwise be the case.

While an intelligent barbarian can probably duplicate anything in the field that civilization's advanced manufacturing processes can put out, it takes a lot of time and effort compared to walking into a military command post and requesting a security sweep of the neighborhood via robotic security forces because a barbarian was spotted crossing the SOSUS borders of the local parks.

UC Davis Develops Highway Robots

I saw a demo in the parking lot of the local Dairy Queen (actually D.Q. out of business locally, it is a local restaurant now) of a small manual line painter that used spay cans to paint the parking lot lines. It was a tiny unit and was powered by a relaxed skilled operator taking their time. It looked like it might take all day to paint the lot (4 hours?) as customers moved in and out but it was being done by a student and a coach or perhaps a contractor and a local city official (my vision is a bit fractal sometimes and closer I look the more overlapping fractal patterns and possibilities seem to emerge .... kind of an uncertainty principle I guess .... freedom loving citizens seem hate to being pinned down or well understood by the local busybodies ..... keeps life interesting I suppose .....)

If a remote controlled tractor and set of utilities trailors were developed it might be possible to automate or comfortably oversee many of the tasks that currently take entire work crews.

Also of interest is the fact that the parking lot was not closed. Apparently there was a high level of confidence that local citizens would avoid the wet lines if possible and that if they got smudged by accident or inattentiveness that this could easily be fixed or was not a problem. I did not look around to see if there were caution signs or other signals out to attract motorist attention prior to getting into the parking lot which was under construction. Perhaps the work crew and bright new pavement and yellow lines were enough for this relaxed yet efficacious private project approach. How the owner overcame fear of liability for others studidity to allow this project on their business grounds I have no idea. Perhaps they carry business liability insurance with an insurance firm they are comfortable will be their obligations ..... how they found such a firm in the U.S. rather staggers my limited imagination. Still, I was always satisfied with Farmer's Truck Insurance Exchange in Corvallis. When one office treated me badly in my perception I moved on to another agent and his service has been exemplary. An employee had an accident in a company vehicle one time and I never heard anything more about it after I referred the child driver's (the victim, my employee ... think .... and I were in agreement that even though she might have been traveling with the prevailing speed of the traffic a bit faster than posted limit, visibility was good and he definately pulled out in front of her) mother to my agent I never heard anything more about it. This despite the fact that the parent stated this was her only transportation to work and support her family and she needed it fixed. I never followed up and made sure she was actually taken care of by Farmer's. I assumed that if she had problems she would call me back as she was aware that it was a company vehicle and that we acknowledged that we were contributory to the accident occuring even if the basic rule in Oregon says the driver must be in control and able to stop their vehicle at all times prior to impacting other motorists or property. Maybe the next time I talk to Todd I will find out if the name and phone number is in the accident report he filed. Way late to fix if my insurance agency is as bad as some I have seen but it would correct a dangerously inaccurate world view of mine regarding Farmer's Insurance Exchange if the single major accident I have ever been involved in resulted in the victim getting shafted like most of the insurance scams/incidents I have witnessed as a curious observer.

Anyway, back to the subject. Such a robotics tool sized appropriately might help keep taxes down here in Oregon by volunteers or training groups to paint roads as per detailed plans using recycled ground glass mixed in white paint by the county on demand or from reasonable storage. Citizens would want to know what high paid county workers do all day if citizen volunteers are out doing much of the work. It would be important to have open houses and an open door policy in conjunction with a friendly well connected neighborly work force such that local citizens, taxpayers, and commercial interests have a high degree of certainly that the community is receiving value added back commiserate with the effort of volunteers put in. There are a lot of organizations around who seem to exist to waste volunteers time and resources to little true effect and as a result Americans have gotten a bit shy of late about participating in volunteer and even professionally paid team efforts.

Another application incredibly useful in Oregon would be blackberry snipping and gourse trimming. In the past and possibly even now the State of Oregon and County Highway departments have expended huge summs of money spraying carcinogens and toxic chemicals on blackberries and gourse in a futile attempt to keep them back away from the roadbeds. This potentially results in poisened tourists and locals (where were your kids really picking those blackberries you put in their cream and berry ice cream or tarts?) as well as polluted ground water and wild life. I wonder if any of that stuff actually affected genetics of surviving species ..... I recommend against Stephen King's environmentally slanted stuff if you have an overactive imagination ....... one book of his I read probably reduced my hiking and outsdooring by 50% for a couple of years after I read it. Have to wonder though if he has some good points considering the sheer stupidly with which U.S. citizens are willing to cheerfully take Dow's word for stuff and then refuse to read the fine print and refuse to fund independent studies or revisit usage regulations more than twice a century.

I wonder if pharmaceutical company owners also own stock in big chemical companies? First we poisen them at a large profit by capturing American Farmers and using USDA to destroy crops protected by insects prior to them reaching market and then we make lots of money selling ineffective drugs that pretend to fix the chemically induced problems while creating side effects sufficient to encourage further drug use. Finally we charge thousands of dollars a day for the privelege of being warehoused in a hospital or retirement home until their money runs out and then we use the laws we purchased to require relatives to pay thousands for unnecessary and unnatural burial services which incidentally we can use to create future super fund sites.

I shall have to check further into this line of thought .... could be millions, thousands even ..... iff the racket were run properly. The thing I got to figure first though is do I want in on the action or should I make a fortune making noise and creating apparent motion that exacerbates the problems that I make a fortune talking about? After all, a few billion is not enough, I might need a few billion more if someone purchases a yaught a few feet larger than my own or lines it with platinum or titanium fixtures to impress the high society hookers and whores with whom they and I wish to associate.

Maybe while I think about this I will be more careful about washing my hands after handling the roadside cans I have been picking up to help finance the "Getting Ready" effort. Might be fun sometime to audit the accounts of the professionals currently spending billions to prepare the war machine that was supposed to be ready at a moment's notice at a price of past trillions and starving freezing amcits in the streets and see what creative methods (of reaching out to love fellow freedom loving peoples who wish to join the Terran Federation while waiting for the United Planets to get their act together) they are using in their black programs.

I trust that fair play and continuous improvement of processes and standards are the order of the day so when we Americans choose to allow them to shine publicly, they are proud of their performance. Confident that they did their best working within the initial conditions they were given and loving various lover's suggestions if they could measure or even suspect the anticipated gains sufficiently to devise safe ways to try it and find out, retaining options where possible to back up and try again.

Anyway. Cool robot ideas. We should consider adding telemetry and mainframe support so that online tasking and status databases are kept up to date and periodic hardcopy dumps are made either incrementally or in their entirety for military use by home defense forces. Perhaps the slightly obsolete material could be given away to the public for training exercises or recycled effectively in some other way ..... redline QCs could be performed by art and drafting classes in the field to verify that the teams actually accomplished the work they thought they did at the location they reported. This would also provided a closed loop system end to end check. If a third verification method could be devised then a high level of certaintly would start to exist that the white safety lines on our highways that augment night driving for older feeble eyes in the rain locally are actually in place and ready to assist winter drivers and tourists. Not to mention avoiding unnecessary off road accidents in the event of an emergency mass evacuation of a terrorist targetted town.

A possibly profitable way to begin implementing this might be to have teams of interested citizens use the manual tools to mark off start and stop points for line tasking for the highway professionals painting lines with the heavy duty equipment. As they get better they could start knocking off the small lines and the details painted on the road (such as arrows, stops, etc.) so that the county crews would not have to start and stop all the time when painting the highway lines between towns. Also line maintenance could almost be done fractally or chaotically by citizens out for long duration hikes if they used proper flagging techniques and used walkies talkies to tell each other to get out of the road because impatient motorists and/or incompetent CDL drivers had blown by the flag points at high speed. A cell phone could also drop a quarter or two on reporting license numbers and status of offending vehicles to the DMV. Vehicles with large patterns of reckless behavior might warrant a visit by the police of appropriate levels to remind the owners and operators that an audit trail of sorts is beginning to materialize and point out that civil courts do not require absolute certainly to levy large economic penalties if a jury becomes convinced that criminal negligence and willful stupidity were involved even if it could not be proven to the satisfaction of a judge and/or jury adhering to the higher standard of beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Hi All,

I also was shocked by the trade tower bombing. I thought our training program was far enough along that we had sufficient manpower to protect ourselves. I also thought that the Moslems had a civilization and that only a tiny fringe was insane or erratic enough to violate their own commandments against killing. Obviously I was incorrect.

Resources

I have made substantial progress on the resources issue here locally. A local group of businessmen is working with me to setup some cottage manufacturing capabilities. We have an approximately 20?30X100?200 sqare feet plus a local buddyy of mine has been colllecting and refurbishing heavy duty work working machine tools.

I have started getting the carport sorted out into a sewing machine area in one end along with my mom's automated sewing machine I should be able to put some high quality emblem patches on the internet marketplace soon.

I have also found several useful ocmponent attached to spent water bottles and have begun purchasing these consumables so that recycling adds to my compopnent's bin.

Kiryu on working Al Exellent information regarding aluminum construction, plus or minus one entry. JB weld for aluminun.

I am now considering two different concepts from the preliminary previously discussed (sorry I think it is not posted yet, I will try to rekey the information I lost and get it into the project page.

Basically the initial concept was looking at a robust microrover with wireless link to the interact and a remote supercomputer if I can get beawolf working on our local net. Speaking of which, I will be traveling for a couple of weeks so entries here will be sporadic. At least when I get back to homebase my brother will have our cisco router and subnet up and running, then I start doing conceptual work in 3DSMax models so I can animate the expected motions of mechanical components.

The two new easier prototypes I am considering to get started effectively consist of:

Collecting Human Factors and Interest Information

A wagon and some talking toys for my neice and nephew. They are approximatley 2nd graders and the research requirements for this prototype assembly will be to determine the range of capabilities on board to retain the child's interest. By going with an unpowered protoype and requiring the child the pull the wagon along if he/she want to we eliminate the potential risk of the child feeling trapped or spied upon by their esm (star mule extraordinary) companion. The final unit must incorporate the features demaned to maintain the child's interest. We should also leave the tow bar/handle/leash function so that if the self motivation energy is running low the esm with its load may be pulled by its human owner or a truck as appropriate to the unit's size and function.

I think that much of this information should be very similar for similar robuts. Since my niece and nephew are in Texas and I am usually in Idaho or Oregon I will probably look around online to see if I can find information that is applicable without doing all my own research.

Developing Some Personnel Skills and Understanding of the ESM Line Functional and Manufacturing Requirements.

Use some tin snips and steel edges and hinges to create tiny robot parts out of recycled aluminums cans and plastic. The unit should be big enough to use an onboard electronics package in common with the entire mid section of the final line. (child buddy to light industrial or packpack). This should allow me to build a unit large enough to use cots (commercial off the shelf) for the electronics components.

sashi ono Sound like a good cheap prospect for some electronics for my prototypes. Might be a bit expensive in the long run for the lighter units in the toy/domestic market.

kerap Hi kerap, I hope things are going well for you. I had a successful meeting with my sponsor and some of his associates (I have been sponsored to study open paradigms as applicable to long term commercialization potential by my brother.) He has no personal interest in robotics at this time but he agreed that participation here might be a way to get in on a leading technology edge if robotics go small and cheaply mass produced soon. If you would like to discuss your resource problems further in private feel free to contact me at mri_icboise@surfbest.net or lazyquasar@yahoo.com I cannot guarantee a response at this time since I do not seem to be recieving any messages at these two addresses other than cc material self addressed for recordkeeping and filing processes. If you put a paragraph or two in your diary here ocassionally I shall eventually catch up with it. I am sorry but if I do not hear from you within a few weeks then I feel the most appropriate thing for me to do is decertify you. I wish you luck in future endeavers, perhaps we shall cross paths again. I hope so, we really need some small cheap robots and low end low cost prototyping by interested people seems to be the best way for the field to advance in ways useful to small open entrepreneurs.

Further information on these concepts is available at:

lazyquasar@yahoo.com open space entrepreneurialism

advogato.com Online community for Open/Free developers.

gnome.org This open source software NPO has a working model set up showing how a large and growing online community sharing common interests can organize and government themselves for the benefit of larger projects.

Hi kiryu aka nathan

I am extremely interested in your robots. I am committed to showing some results before I can get the AIAA and other U.S. PE whores to commit to tutoring all comers who are willling to try and pull their weight while studying mathematics and helping establish a medical industry on this planet. The local bleeders are really getting on my nerves. They memorized lots of organic chemistry stick models and pharmaceuticals and think therefore that the scientific method is useless even with volunteers begging them to (if they cannot save them) get the data and make some progress. I tell you a story about a lover and liver cancer sometime, for now i will stick to robots.

I am casing the local neighborhood with a view to resolving some local wars and establishing a safe zone for a robotics engineering field lab where our Robotics Systems Engineers who have high enough certs that someone will take responsibility for reviewing proposals and resolving the liabilities to the extent possible when a local toy robot malfunctions and scares or injures a local child. I have begun interviews on walks to collect information on the inhouse local grievances with a view toward helping resolve. Then I can go get a grant and put field lab in service.

I will be coaching the open entrepreneurs (if I do not find a site soon I will build one with my brother, I am not really up to the security layering requirements, i ramped up pretty high last time designing technologies applicable to armegeddon weapons, there were some lovely physics. As a result noone in personal trust web really wants me squinting and working, they want me relaxing and playing. I am not certain my layered protections have sufficient diversity yet to keep nuts in ruts from self destructing while taking me out. The fracture lines are deep chasms and the fractal tendrils just now really testing the waters.

For example on the local radio ......... never mind.

My twin brother, a multiple certed allstar apparently weak in digital systems (after 3 years at Micron maintaining and designing chip line manufacturing automation and 3 years as the network administrator Secretary of State of Idaho's business records knowledge base .... big iron yeah right ... it is an illusion he and I are careful to maintain just as he pretends that I am really a technical airhead with handson is required. In reality we are coaching each other because we are reinforcing keyed knowlege with loving care of each other sufficient to allow us to function when the full spectrum analog universe multiplexing in to tell us to go back to sleep.

I have a hypotheis that I was beginning to test last time around before I got bogged down in high tech systems engineering and started optimalzying the deployment schedules of our star ships. Forget entirely that starships are useless without the medical and environmental and closed loop manufacturing and all the rest required to support a civilization in space.

I was creating cancer as far as the universe may view it.

I believe the comet strike on Jupiter at this time was no cooincidence.

Just as the giants who came before us created training systems for themselves and their tribes could see large pieces of reality or "truth" and codified it in the stable religions and even bred for adherence to customs that seemed advantageous to their faction .... thus hardcoding or biasing the DNA (?) the creator of this universe or planet culture knows to sufficient resolution for its purposes when we are ready or spoiled. Comet strike was a sign from the universe that we be healthy community tissue or fabric or we be excised.

I think Tom Sawyer is correct, eventually we will know enough science to find the designer's fingerprints.

First we finish triage, then we learn the mathematics systems of all those that came before and attempt to multiplex them and scientifically test them in safe increments. I am serious that I do not want to see a premature quasar in the local area, I am confident that the creator of this universe has interlocks set to take appropriate action if that happens. I have no idea what that would be. I know that if we are worthy to be called to judgement instead of flushed, that I do not want to have to account for leaving any more sisters, brothers, species, etc behind than I have to.

We are not expected to be perfect, we are expected to be trying our best to improve while loving each other. For those incapable of loving yet, try being as polite as possible and watch one of the excellent multimedia comedies, talk shows, get out and walk around your physical neigborhood, join a social club, DO NOT get isolated with your computer. You must be well grounded and have fractalized trust certs or eventually black despair and mental health problems of all kinds set in. You begin implementing improperly phased negative and positive feedback on all around you and they begin backsliding with you. This quickly destabilizes (inherently dynamically unstable) to violence and evolution.

The good news is we have the intelligence and ability to overcome this and help each other with our problems. We all have troubles and problems, some worse than others but not truly discernable from the outside.

Tell the cancer researchers (anyone who reads this and knows some to ask the physicists and chemist to form an elite grandmaster panel briefly or in safe ....

ASIDE: Heard the mountain west clinical trial advertisment. I am healing myself fine. You guys better be designing decent scientific data collection systems in conjunction with real engineers, medical combat personal (operations, all kind .... look for the combat fatigue it is there, it was obvious in some places ... also that you were monitoring and attempting improvement. We get you some real technology designed to your operational requirements and it will get easier. In the meantime I will watch my brainwaves and love (feul for thinking) supplies and you watch yours.

Feel tired then get out and play with kids, go love a colleague by brightening their day somehow. Plan synergistically when feeling good to have SOPs in place for ready activation when brain starts to wind down and you are losing your talents and memories and ability to think critically. Try to do this in the real world local, the internet is cold medium and virtual love taps are very weak octane compared to our glorius ambient environment. Pet a cat till it perls. Squint your eyes at the stars until they fractalize and you can pretend you are creating a supercomputer in your head.

back .... tell them to consider that a correct particle signal sequence in proper cell structure at the cancer origin might turn off the cancer. The patterns scale up and down and out and in and around.

Only a hypothesis, very expensive in any measure of resources. First we must finish triage and get safety nets in place.

You web rats or hacker elite or whoever is running the show remember that while we are analog and inherently better (wider bandwith and signal can multiplex way up and down and carry virtual channels via mathematical coding) these tools we are building are much faster and propagate the knowledge over all 6 billion analog server nodes and all the rest of the local life forms or "source, force, creation, universe, god, etc." You guys get out an practice in the (warm)^infinity plus medium provided and avoid going crazy, if we can finish these tools we are going to be awesome soon or next cycle or whatever. Judgement day. Afterlife. All the religious mathematical systems have them, that I have seen. The cults die out because the corrupt self serving asshole at the center can not propagate anything but another like themselves and then they in competition.

We learn ethical behavior in all languages and play fair then we all win.

If you hacker elites have not discovered that all genius has its own language then buy some dvds, look around, watch an adequate parent compared to a master teacher working a kindergarten or daycare center. Stop hiding out with your computers and come out and help out. Web, net, and processing center masters are desperately needed but we test you well because communications is critical and dangerious position and we are losing too many of you to get the grannies cataloguing their aches and pains via voice recorders and analyzers into the knowledge bases for processing by medical neophytes and rooftop supercomputers.

If you try and fail, do not worry, minimize the damage to life, yours as well as that around you and love somebody else well enough to get back good attidute. Then try again. More good buddies you have the more likely you get on stable course up the slope. Need good support structure to deal with someone in despair. Ultimately it is their choice but if we can strobe some love energy their way we can get them out of their love think sink. Just not let them drag us in, call emergency number and get some well trained professional rescue teams who have arterial connection to our civilization's resources. One soul at a time. Tough nuts, get lots of help when shining love at them from a safe distance.

Hmm.... robots! Critical path on some tracks that I have identified.

Snyopsis: A prototype opt in community of general population mix. Later we try building specialized communities to isolate some factors carefully for analysis. DO NOT try this without first having supermajority of populations bought in, it will lead to factions and armegeddon unless done correctly. We are social animals, generalists, specialists need generalists to stay well grounded. Specialists with poor mental stability should be asked to consider whether they wish to participate in the fractal distribution networks that the advogato and gnome communities are studying setting up so we can get all our generalists involved and shining by helping out. Likely a lot of new genius types that we have never even considered before will be emerging. As open entrepreneurs are graduated they will be needed to manage getting resources, tools, and services efficiently delivered to where they are required. We be careful not to overload you with too much responsibility too fast. If you think you have what it takes, come collaborate with an open community that is interesting to you while you maintain your day job and meet all personal responsibilities as well as you can. Eventually you will get the knack and begin creating wealth out of nowhere. Like a majic trick, it must be learned and you have to study but your mentor will help you out as they can using their resources to the best of their judgement.

Soon they have more reliable data and safety systems in place to let them experiment a little more quickly and effectively. You can kill a lot people with a million dollars in this transition zone. If you get think lock then we/you are not quite ready yet, go love someone else carefully or be nice to animals, etc.

Best etc. log into a web site that is managing fractal distribution systems so that the kiddies and the offline can get just enough resources to succeed spectacularly.

Background links:

I get them to tommorrow.

I write grant sumary up tommorrow as well. Probably will not get the money yet locally because my nearest kin have downchecked it already. That ok. I am an irrational optimalizer, rationalizing synergizer. Had a good code once but I forgot it lol, forgot the passwords too. lol

You stay in touch Nathan, if you can. I will be hanging out here for a while. We get some design and prototyping done soon. The local neophytes and masters can see collaboration in progress and perhaps we will start seeing some information flow in the journals. We must organize our local community soon as an open not for profit similar to www.gnome.org (that was a hint for the true robot lovers, do not darken my day asking silly questions like what page is my homework on. You manage your play safely and I will manage mine. NO COERCION! Commerce is done with those you do not trust. We will be working with recycled materials, how much can you lose if you address it through fractal escrow and it is pre-empted for elsewhere? If you lose trust in your teammates it will not bode well for your projects. There will be thieves and trolls here because:

1.) It is an open site. 2.) I will plant them myself to identify snakes before they do too much damage on their schedule instead of mine. 3.) Big guys will be testing to see if I can be trusted with as much responsibility as I have chosen to take upon myself. 4.) If this site becomes a potential problem it will be shut down, I have demonstarted to the powers that be that they will not be lazy like me unless they are as good as me or better. 5.) We are getting fun competitions organized to keep interest up and show off our marvelous stuff by delivering results to our buddies in other sectors. Pickup men delivering our raw materials need some some too. We show up with some remotely driven expendable teleoperated shell driven by kiddies at an amusement park with a mission to pickup U.S.G. field rations for delivery to troll stations and troll brigdes already in place in some parks and the truckers will like it. They good guys and all know somebody like me that goes wandering around with camping and hiking gear with his Dad followed by a prototype star mule extraordinay (sme cp mri @ sci.space.policy in collaboration with good buddy sometime last year, all rights released to the universe. I am going to time how it takes some quality animation with a sme make robot buddy to show up from RSE teams to start showing up as animation. 3D models make great conceptualization and design tools

All minors, under age of eighteen. Ask your parents to review the gnome.org site organization and privacy policies with regard to minor and help us design a safe interation and escrow system here at robots.net. You and your parents must be responsible for your behavior and actions while you study and play here because I accept no consequence. I very busy. While you have fun remember to be thinking of ways to love buddies on other side of planet. A lot of misery and think sinks left on this planet and they are each as potentially dangerous as I am. So are you. Be polite and cooperate with legitimate authorities or you will not like being at the end of the line.

Now fun part:

My design team is going to put the brains in realtime gnu/linux supercomputers to help the local big guys (NASA, NSA, etc. accelerate open medical research) by processing data for them at nightime when our solar powered robot buddies bodies are powered down (gone to bed lol) for the evening. We put enough power storage in to maintain internet link so we can join our intrepid wanderers at their campfires or trollhouses if they wish to socialize or play online games and training manuals or do collaborative design with us.

I want mine in animated 3D if possible. Go look at lazyquasar@yahoo.com to see my buddy craigie's first cut at C33. Scale very large. The crew compartment is two large Russian crew capsules. The unit shown is conceived as leaving the center payload, wings, etc in orbit (IIRC) while the nose capsule and the engines fly home. A friend of mine has a different idea at his information site .... he into hydroponics and sound like a troll at sci.space.policy, he argue a lot with Jim Benson, CEO SpaceDev while they sucker me into finding the resources to get critical paths moving as fast as sanely possible so we space robot buddies can have some fun and be productive in more important endeavers.

The software guys will be building tools for us as fast as they can, including 3D animation tools, games, simulations for logistics comparions, etc. Design Review Boards of diverse neutral grandmasters will be picking the best for sponsoring. The rest of us must build and finance our community ourselves as we can. Can be done. Just take a little effort from everyone. Look for little things to do.

Datamining at advogato.org (mirwin, idot) will provide a lot of useful links and big ideas. Think about ways to protype using recycled materials and begin recycling. Look around for a virtual distribution site to find out how to help get materials to your buddies. Watch for microbusiness ideas the open entrepreneurs are putting out for homework and case studies before putting their repuations on the line with a physcial startup being watched like a hawk and shutdown when it gets dangerous.

Play safe, have fun, love your buddies, neighbors, and little animals and insects and you will be a professional rse neophyte a lot sooner than you think ... if the other economic sectors are as good as we are.

I be back soon to try to summarize my team's inital plans, meanwhile you find some teamates and try to think of a robot you could give to somebody for Christmas. If you have gnu/linux try to start using some of the existing tools to produce engineering documentation. Maybe someone can post some samples. Please only open/free material on this site until community/company owner say otherwise. Ok to link to proprietary stuff. OK to copyright your stuff and link to it. It will only slow you down and keep you poor but some thing you have to learn for yourself. Do not take my word for it, who am I? A person just like you with opinions and a little specialized knowledge. You figure out what your wish to do and go for it. Play safe and legal or the big guys will shut you down to a play space that you can manage responsibly. Might be pretty small.

I look forward to reviewing some of the material in your journals.

love mike

p.s. I think wheels instead of tanks so sme (I will call mine rex) can be ready to chase steve's robot in runathon. My twin brother, Ray, gave me an old 386 Compaq to use for mobile chasis. He also just finished refurbishing 20 piles of junk gutted pentiums into 10 almost like new for his local Lions club. Since it will be another month or two before he and/or I are working this was valuable care and feeding of one of his buddies. He not buy me anything but he explain to me how to get ahold of 16 or 32 similar or same make obsolete computers for the AI brain. Find businesses or friends or government departments that are upgrading and collaborate somehow. Do not allow them to exploit you too badly, we setting up good buddy networks.

Join one near you and encourage your friends and lovers to do the same in some small way in area of interest to them and we get the flows moving soon.

I do screensavior processing for :

seti@home ud.com (prequalification of drugs with good potential for influencing cancer)

soon: fightingaids@home ??? not quite right, I google for it when a get a comptuer up

Do a little thing or two when you can. It adds up. Bug hunting with the open/free source software crowd is good. Documention writing. Send them a love letter appreciating what they have given you. If you like the tools considering donating to their responsbile communities to help sponsor further work.

ok, gotta go now, I get more coherent soon. Gotta get a single set of internally consistent requirements that meets all requirements in my head to make sense. I NEED the journal entries, I act something as an interpreter to assimilate diverse information from multiple sources. You think your way, I think mine.

I love to see little perfect modular nuggets. They fit well in PERT charts and trade off evaluations. They can be hard to come by, a lot of information from a lot of talent to merge into prototype good enough to help build the next one. You guys get some skull sweat done and Nathan and I will find knowledgeable mentors to help with rough spots. Meanwhile we have to organize opt in community and possibly define how to interface with the site admin and owner. I have no knowledge of how they plan to run and operate their business here at robots.net.

WhoPhlunPoo on certification wpp I think it would help some people get certified if they told us what they are interested in and posted any link useful online articles or papers they run accross.

At advogato where I am a vocal and very slippery but fairly slick paradigm of advocacy for freeing commerce so we can get some money for goodies, I found that making at least a small entry each day got me noticed. This signt is even better, link to a few sketches scanned in or diagrams on a home page at yahoo is a pretty cool way to exchange information. I think anyway, I am kind of new to the internet scene. Maybe everybody already knew that? Sorry! Some of us older dudes are pretty busy but can answer specific questions pretty quickly even if we do have to look it up after 20 years of project managment. : ) Does everybody here know how to use google? Realise that they can get downloads that read PDF papers put out by professionals at MIT, Nasa, private industry, etc.? I hope that does not sound condescending, it took me 2 years to learn how to use a wordprocessor and a spreadsheet after the six months it took to get the purchasing paperwork signed and processed. Worth it though, my next cubicle buddy at Edwards AFB, Ridley Mission Control Center used to do signal processing to find calibration settings for the analog tape drives a couple of times a year. Our processing data dropouts were far fewer after we had our zenith 100 (8086) online. lol kerap What kind of resources do you need kerap? I used to scrounge pretty good at Edwards AFB maybe if we discuss it back and forth here some of our buddies here will help us out with some ideas. It is amazing to see what 3 or 4 people can come up with in collaboration. We must have a couple hundred people here. Somebody will have an idea we can use if we listen intently. Take care guy.

Cool article. Tanks!

While I was looking this article over I thought initially of the pneumatic tank game my twin brother and I had as a kid. This led immediately to arcade competitions with little software tanks between me, dad, and Ray.

Then I got to wondering if this circuit could be used to control the big transporter crawlers they used on Apollo. Such a device might be useful in lunar mining remotely from earth via teleoperators .... wring word can not remember the preferred form. Of course all the hydraulics, joints, and exterior shell components would have to be ruggedized for the lunar environment but the electronics could live inside an environmental chambe provided for manual operation when desirable or necessary.

With the proper software safety interlocks we could charge Disney to allow customers at Disneyland to operate our lunar mines. Or we could establish our own lunar space camp training facility. A friend of mine might be interested in this. He has been tryig to get land developers interested in a space simulation neigbhood development right pioneering thinking people could live normal lives while participating in training drills and engineering development projects on the weekend or after normal work hours.

I bet a mockup of either (lunar mining crawler or Apollo transporter) could help him get a lot of public attention. Especially if it was scaled to match these guys prototype: VTVL controller prototype testbed.

I better send him an email with a link to here. He will like this site anyway. Coincidentally his name is Rex as well. I do not know if he ever read Lester Del Rey, he is a bit older than I and may have been scrambling to make a living when it came out. Maybe I will send him a copy for Christmas. I will send a copy of this email to myself to remember to put idea in my calender on linux desktop if I can figure it out.

Anyway I have not committed to a project yet, but I have visions of a couple of thin hp boxes on top of four tank tracks controlled by a derivative of this circuit link to a internet radio transmitter. ... Challenging, I would have to dig out some engineering books. I have not done serious electronics analysis since efundies.

Hey! Maybe I get my college roomie to check out this site! He is double EE PE! We see how much he actually learned while working at Oremet Titanium! lol Of course he same of me when we have to figure out the pneumatics. lol We could both journal here to exchange design information. I have to check out the project room or page but at worst we should be able to link to yahoo or space elswhere with our uploaded diagrams and specifications.

BTW I just dropped by to share with you all this OUTSTANDING tool I just found. It is called dia (for Diagram) and is found on the program/application item of the footprint. It looks fairly complete. It should enable some nice looking diagrams of all kinds to present designs to buddies for evaluation and comment. Not to mention help with the analysis. There are so many disciplines involved with space stuff that frequent coordination is required with trusted associates to verify designs are adequate in all aspects. Tradeoffs are often required to get a working system.

Rex, (my buddy not me) I am sure you will have noticed that as we discussed (I think) this could easily begin generating revenue from theme parks connected to a prototyping facility or even an actual mine via the Internet if proper safety interlocks and realtime timing constraint/handshake cutouts are present along with standard manual override linked to industrial emergency all stop.

Oh! Also, I think I found a revenue model that might work in the long term to allow the community to raise money for site operations and maybe even sponsoring selected team projects that will build our community prestige. This could eventually help our members with getting scholarships, help or sponsorship from various nonprofits or government grants, jobs in robots (Robots.net, Journeyer) look good to many companies if our robots look good in press, documentation and analysis is professional grade and useful, and our mutual feedback assessments of each other are obviously authentic, accurate, helpful training feeback in a variety of interesting areas useful to robots.

I will post a link here to the revenue model when I get it polished up.

Hope you guys had a good labor day.

Diary Tidbits at the Water Cooler

Oil cooler, oil .... robots ... oil ... got it.

steve Sounds like a challenging project, very worthy of a master. I wonder if it would make sense to establish a hardware exchange listing or parts bin where we help out fellow robot builder with cheap or free parts? Shipping & Handling might make this ineffective initially for widely dispersed teams or robot buddies for some kinds of parts. However, a lot of specialized parts that can get very expensive can be relatively cheap to ship.

Project leaders and development personal would have to get some parts lists or BOMs (Bill of Materials) put together and get them posted and linked to from the project pages or diary entries to make this effective.

The site might put together a list of commonly useful parts and if we can figure out how to fund it provide an actual physical "parts bin" that would be useful when our community chooses to sponser projects. Perhaps a reasonable markup on donated components sold through a site web store could help finance ongrowing growth and activites sponsored or undertaken by our community.

Let me know what you think, I am interested in learning what works and does not work in building community centered sites for businesses and public service organizations. OOPS! Gotta go check and make sure my home page link and email address are here. My new mail drop is lazyquasar( appropriate symbol )yahoo.com and it seems to be working. Although I have not gotten any spam yet so it may not be reliable yet.

I currently have access to quite a few obsolete motherboards and computer cards as my brother is rebuilding scrap systems for his Lions Club to donate around locally.

Also I know some engineers who might willing to approach employers about postage to get obsolete of past shelf life components to worthy projects in exchange for listing as donors .... PR? Something. For example a friend recently shipped me a micron portable pentium because he dropped it and cracked the screen ..... or his best half would not let him upgrade .... who knows? LOL I know it might be a good brain for a robot with a suitably stripped down and connected software suite. It is spoken for already but accident happen all the time and most professionals I know upgrade every couple of years. With proper software tools would make excellent software development station. I used to program PLC controlled pump stations ladder logic development on 286s. The good old days .... bullshit! Give me a dual Pentium III at 700 Mhz or better ASAP. Still it can be done with less in necessary, we used to.

edleighton I tried to check out mach II but I had trouble loading the site. I am stuck with a 28K modem for a few days so it could have been my problem. I will check back soon. : )

kerap shares a Gleeful Shout of Success. Congratulations! I look forward to a more detailed report after the initial adrenal surge wears off and further is experience is developed. Well done!

I am starting soon, honest.

This looks like it could grow into an exciting online virtual community site and I think I would like to be a part of it for a while. Did anyone catch the reference to Lester Del Rey's friendly robot Rex? If so, be discrete if sensitive about your age. LOL

Status Update on TBD Robotics Projects

Well I better go clear some space in the garage and look around for some scrap that might be useful for a robot. I am thinking about whether I will to start will a mobile unit or go with a stationary manufacturing arm and rig up access to a small machine tool platform. Either a small lathe or a milling machine. The idea would be to be able to have the robot automatically manufacture small plastic, wood or aluminum parts for cottage manufacturing of kits for sale on open engineering sites. Pros and cons both ways.

Oh yeah! Progress of sorts. This is the first online interaction I have had on a linux box. I am converting over to open source software where possible and this should greatly accelerate my learning for robotics since I intend to use realtime versions of linux for my operating systems. Now to find some decent free software CAD and other engineering tools. I will be using open office for my BOMs (Bill of materials, stuff needed to manufacture known configurations) so I am going now to download that and install it. Wish me luck! It is going well today. Who know what else might happen while the universe is smiling on me and my projects? : )

I have long been interested in robots but never really made the opportunity to pursue this interest. Perhaps it is time to change this. I have been investigating ways to tailor the open source software paradigm to engineering projects that might be useful in advancing technologies useful to future space settlements. A robot would certainly provide some hands on excitement and serve as a testbed for some engineering projects when I get an open engineering site up.

I have access to all the software tools I need and some obsolete 486s and even 586s available. I also spotted an open engineering site that may provide some software components that would be useful .... let me go get the link in case anybody is interested ...... opencontrol.org I would think the command processor and related realtime control functions for a spacecraft would be directly to applicable to a robot. Note this stuff is open source so if you have the proper language tools to compile it then it should be pretty inexpensive.

Anyway I have several slimline 486s that might make good chassis. I shall have to look around for servo motors ... my brother has been talking about a robotic lawnmower ... LOL perhaps I can get him interested in some prototyping?