Month: October 2019

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I seemed to do a little bit of a lot of stuff related to working on with a Raspberry Pi. Let’s get started!

Stated project goal: Develop a tool so I can code with my laptop, but execute on Blinkie.

I went into the workshop relatively early today (Sunday) with my stated objective. In light of my fragile case being fragile, I elected to just take my SD card “solid state drive” in to see how my setup reacts to different hardware running things would act. There were some interesting results. The following sub-projects happened concurrently.

The first project was setting up the new Raspberry Pi 3 B+ the workshop has to mirror my setup. It came with a metal case —titanium if I remember correctly— and I got to assemble the ting. There’s just something about a proper case that just feels right. As soon as I slid the board in, so satisfying with it fitting perfectly.

The case doubles as a heat sink, complete with thermal paste. While I want to do that eventually, I decided to wait a while until I’m ready to seal the case for good. I have two ports I intend to use within the foreseeable future: the camera port and the GPIO port. Both have slots in the case to accommodate the relevant cables.

The GPIO port was the first to go on. Since I really didn’t want to mess anything up, I didn’t use enough force to seat the ribbon cable connector correctly, and couldn’t close the case. I tried looking for a way to test for an electrical connection, but ended up probing the female connector with another part and verifying it could take the whole length of the pins. I pushed a bit harder and managed to get it in there.

The camera port was more straightforward. Same as before, I just lifted the little plastic piece, inserted the comparatively narrow ribbon cable, and pushed down to have the port bite down. On the other end, I sat a Pi camera for testing purposes.

In the best case scenario, the cables would barely poke out of the case with maybe an inch or two to spare, and I could just connect to external ports like they were on the board itself. No such luck here. In testing, the camera failed to take a picture because it wasn’t detected.

My second project was backing up my SD card. I found a utility to make an image of my card. It wasn’t the best coded piece of software; it refused to make a new file to save to, but I renamed a new .txt file and got it to work. It took half an hour, during which I worked on the other projects. I did not have a spare SD card to test the image on, but there was a warning about similarly sized cards being slightly different sizes when they’re from different companies, and not to try applying a larger image onto a smaller card.

My third project was testing how the workshop’s Pi handled running my SD. I expected the MAC address to be different, but otherwise nothing else. I was close: PuTTY warned me about a different host key, and had me log in with the password the first time, but otherwise didn’t have any other software problems. I had to let it to connect to my phone, but that gave me an idea for my next mini-project.

My fourth pseudo-project was just some general knowledge base maintenance. I had a few questions, and not all were answered. I connected both Blinkie and my laptop to my phone, where I would expect them to work similarly to a local area network. I used traceroute from Blinkie to my laptop, but ended up with over 30 hops. Yikes! Honestly, I have no clue what’s going on with this one just yet. I still need to look up the difference between a hotspot and a more conventional router. For all I know, it could just be no discovery turned on or that it acts more like a gateway to a larger router. Possibly both.

Final Question: What do you do while code is compiling or otherwise waiting on a computer to finish?

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow 8472, and I am never using Stage/Part sections again. Let’s get started!

Last week, I tried super gluing Blinky Pie’s base back together with unpromising observations. After two successful runs gluing segments of an interrupted print to its own raft that I somehow still had around, I went on to the main event, but it failed hard with the broken tab springing away from its base.

I hardly touched my project all week.

Sunday came and I forced myself to work on it. I was expecting to clean it off with some acetone and start over again, this time with the baking soda method that gives the super glue something to latch onto.

I pulled my project out and took inventory. I was surprised to find that not only had the broken piece returned to its proper seat, but it was holding up to a semi-reasonable amount of pressure. No way am I stress testing it, but I’m hopeful this case will continue to serve me for a long time to come as will be.

I set the base aside, then had help from my father tending to the top half. I took the camera out last week, so it wasn’t attached to any electronics or anything. As it stands as of writing, the glue is not quite to the 24 hour mark needed for full strength.

Next week, I expect to do a little sanding and painting on Blinkie’s dome head, but only if there’s glue oozing out the back.

I’ve also had a vague thought that I’ll need to get into soldering some day. It’s no time soon, but I really hope it’s not too much of a challenge.

Final Question: If you were a real-life spacecraft, what would you be, and why?