Category: Matt’s Musings

So I see that it's been quite a while since I posted.

In that time, I got divorced, got remarried, and earned a master's degree.

I'd like to get back into electronics, and I'd like to keep sharing my experiences here.

The truth, though, is that life is busy. I have a job. I have three kids. And a wife. And oh, my wife is in school, so a lot of the housework is going to fall to my shoulders.

So... I guess we'll just have to see. Hope to see y'all soon with something interesting.

This morning, I was invited to be a part of an interview panel for some candidates for openings we have in my workplace. There were five of us conducting an interview for technical positions. I've done this enough and seen enough facepalms in these interviews that I want to pass on some basic advice. Continue reading Thoughts on Technical Interviews

A couple of months ago, while doing research for the Sparkfun AVC, I posed to the DIYRovers Google Group a question about the Kalman filter. I had discovered through reading that the Kalman filter is a popular algorithm in robotics and the more I read the more it seemed that the Kalman filter is the answer to just about any robotics problem out there. Unfortunately, I was unable to find any good learning resources for this algorithm that didn't require an undergraduate degree in mathematics.

One of the members of the group suggested that a good resource for learning the Kalman filter is the Udacity course "Artificial Intelligence for Robotics."

Udacity, for those who don't know, is a MOOC: A Massively Open Online Courseware site. Udacity hosts online classes that anyone can take free of charge. Udacity is a for-profit educational organization founded by Sebastian Thrun, David Stavens, and Mike Sokolsky. It is the outgrowth of free computer science classes offered in 2011 through Stanford University, where Sebastian is a professor. I'll talk about the for-profit part in a few paragraphs.

So, at the encouragement of another AVC'er, I started taking the course. Continue reading Udacity Course Review: Artificial Intelligence for Robotics

I just feel so.... dirty running Python on Windows. Like I'm going against God's Natural Law or something.

OK, I feel better now that I have that off my chest. Back to work.

The amount of spam comments that even an obscure blog like this one receives is unbelievable. I've changed to the "Resisty" CAPTCHA by Adafruit to see if it makes a difference in the volume of spam I get. The akismet anti-spam service is a godsend!

If you've ever hosted a geek-oriented blog, you're familiar with this problem. You have some code that you want to share with your audience. You copy the nicely formatted code from your source file, you paste it into your blog, and when you preview your post, your code looks like mud. HTML in general, and the WordPress post editor in particular, don't play nice with leading spaces in text. Text that was nicely formatted before it was pasted into a blog post ends up having all the lines mashed up against the left margin in an barely readable mess.

I searched for a solution to this problem and found that there really is no good solution. So I decided to invent my own. It's a hack, but it's a solution. Here's what I do to paste code into a WordPress blog entry, and have CodeColorer display it as I intended:

1. Install the CodeColorer plug-in on your WordPress site
2. Edit the source code for the plug-in to change a special character (I use ) into the escaped HTML string  
3. When you want to put code into a post, copy it from your source file into a text editor. Replace leading spaces with your special character. Copy the resulting text and paste it into your WordPress post
4. WordPress won't strip out the leading spaces in your code because, well, they're not spaces any more
5. When your audience views your post, CodeColorer will take all your special characters and send them to the web browser as non-breaking spaces
6. The web browser will display the leading spaces as you intended

Now, I admitted up front that this is a hack of a solution. But... and this is the key point... it works!

It's hard to argue with success. Here's how to do it. Continue reading WordPress, CodeColorer, and Leading Whitespace

As I've mentioned here before, I'm the father of two young boys. Today, they're 3 and 4 years old, so not quite old enough to participate in making/hacking.

But that's going to change in a hurry. In fact, just yesterday my older son asked me to help him build some birdhouses. Now, I don't know why my son wants to build birdhouses (I'm assuming he saw it in one of the children's shows he watches), but you'd better believe that my son and I are going to build birdhouses together. And soon.

My dad always had a garage full of tools. He didn't often do much with them, but they were there. And he taught me how to use them. I worked mainly with wood, but as far back as I can remember, I was always confident that if I wanted something that could be made of wood, dad and I could make it.

I've done some reading recently that makes me think that this is not typical in today's era. I read in Make magazine today that a college professor teaching a freshman level engineering class this year asked how many of his students had ever used a drill press. Nobody raised their hands.

Nobody.

That absolutely shocks me! I can't imagine not knowing how to use a drill press. And I can't imagine raising my sons to not know how to use a drill press.

Though dad had plenty of woodworking tools, that was about the only medium that I felt comfortable working with. My father-in-law is planning on building himself a "Bucket T" car. As a teenager, if you'd talked to me about building a car, I would have thought that you needed a car factory to build a car. You know, only Ford or Chrysler or GM can do that kind of thing.

One of the burning desires I have is that I want my kids to grow up believing that they can make anything. I don't want their imaginations or ambitions to be crippled by thinking that something can't be done. And that is a large part of why I'm finally going to build the workshop I promised myself this time last year. (It's not the only reason, but it's an important one.)

Then I'm going to have to stock it with tools. I have some basic woodworking tools. I have a stick welder. I'll need to add a lathe/mill and learn to use them so that I can teach my kids. I'll have to pick up fiberglass skills somewhere. I'm going to have to build that CNC router I keep dreaming about. And of course add a 3D printer and a laser cutter.

When my son is 14 and comes to me with a great idea of building a go-cart with a lawn mower engine, my son and I are going to be able to head out to the garage and build one. He's not going to be left with a dream and no opportunity to realize it. We may fail in building the go-cart, but we'll have fun trying, and we'll learn something in the process.

He's going to go to high school one day (or maybe even junior high) and show off the Stirling engine that he built on dad's lathe. When the physics teacher assigns a group project to his class to build some contraption, his project group is going to meet at our house, because his dad has the workshop and the tools needed to build the best contraption in the physics class competition.

That's what I want to provide to my children. And that's why I need a garage workshop.

I have received comments that www.thehackerworkshop.com is not rendering correctly for some users running Internet Explorer.

If you're seeing rendering issues, please send a screenshot of the problem to matthew@thehackerworkshop.com. I would like to see what the issue looks like so I can try to solve it.

Thanks!