31 days left! Tomorrow is October. Over the next week, I
plan to hang the ghost, break out some of the basic decorations,
and get cracking on my new skeleton. I can't believe I haven't
really started on this year's projects yet. This is really
late. I probably won't have much new this year, as a result. :(
I finally had some time to clean the mold release off of some of the
resin parts (the ones with more immediate need), and started priming
a few of them, as well as the steel foot shells.
Some good progress to report!
Frame has been "glued and screwed", and the steel rods have been
installed. Rear access door frame is installed, but not adjusted yet.
Rockler bearing (lazy susan) is installed. The inner dome has had it's
lower rings attached, and so now it is mountable on the bearing. The
outer dome's panels have been removed in preparation for sanding,
filing, and painting. And the legs have some basic construction started.
185 days to go, we're just about at the half-way mark between Halloweens.
I'm knee-deep in other projects, such as the droid,
among other things, but I'm getting excited about Halloween again. I'm
tempted to try to build some new props this year and change up the
lighting a little bit. Still plenty of time to plan!
Yesterday, for April Fools, Google announced Project Virgle,
which was supposedly a joint venture between Virgin Galactic and Google (hence "virgle")
to colonize mars. They invited everyone to submit youtube videos as applications
to be among the first colonists.
This was my entry, with the
caption "I am death. Every space adventure needs a good dose of death."
Progress is slow of course, but I'm getting minor things done. Many
of the plastic parts have been run through the dishwasher to get the
laser-cutting residue off, and I have parts and instruction sheets
spread out all over a small project table!
I was hoping to have the head pretty well put together by now, but I'm still
waiting on the dome kit. However, the local R2 builders group met on saturday,
and helped me get started on the frame. I spent some time tonight working on
screwing everything together. I still need to work on the threaded support rods
though. For the picture I just laid the rockler bearing and gear on top to
see where they will sit.
I've added some new books into my bookstore
that are based on Markov Chains,
a statistical model for predicting state changes based on the last few states, or tokens.
The wikipedia article makes it look atrociously complex, but for the purposes of randomly
generating text that looks a lot like the original sources it scans, the program is quite
simple. To generate some new text on the spot, for your amusement, I've made an
online version.
I've opened up a storefront through lulu.com,
which is the cafepress of the book publishing world. To get started, I've
already authored two books in under 24 hours! Check it out here:
One is a book entirely consisting of "This page intentionally left blank" notices.
The other is completely computer generated using a script I wrote a long time
ago (view a random output sample here).
It generated the book in probably less than a second. It took a lot longer
to format the pages and create the cover design, as simplistic as it is. :)
More parts are here, and more are coming! My batteries, lazy-susan, resin parts for
the head details, as well as the lenses for the holo-eyes have all arrived.
Now I'm also planning on getting the frame and leg kits that are
"council approved" and built to club specs. Also on the way are the battery
charger, and front and side vents.
The first of the parts have made it here, though nothing spectacular
yet. I've received the compression rings to hold the lenses inside the
holo-eyes, and the PSI light LED flashers.
I've also located batteries, an external charger, and a power
distribution board, which are now all on order.
I think I'll name the droid R2-E0. The "E0" meaning it's Ed's
first droid. I'm a programmer/engineer. We count from zero.
I'm considering computer control and have been looking at
Mini-ITX boards, as well as various relay controllers.
The Phidgets devices look cool,
but I'm always nervous about closed architectures and complex APIs
when all I want is a simple serial interface that I can work with
from Perl in Linux. The devices over at
ControlAnything.com look more appealing in that regard, even though
they're more expensive. They're also more extensible.
Well, I finally decided to get started! My goal is to build
an R2-like droid, emulating the friendly little Astromechs featured
in the Star Wars films. After discovering that there are clubs devoted
to this thing, I decided I finally had a starting point.
My goal is to build the droid to have lights and sound, and hopefully
eventually also radio-controlled (R/C) motors. I'm also thinking about
an on-board computer to automate sound effects and possibly some of the
lights and movement as well. I'm not aiming for 100% authenticity, necessarily,
but I'd like it to be accurate where possible.
The computer-generated picture on the right is one of my concepts for colors and
style. This may change, of course. The image was created in Star Wars
Galaxies, and then edited to put the steel-blue on the dome details instead
of the white. Below are some more ideas which didn't require editing after
taking screenshots.
The working name for this droid, also subject to change, is R2-M0 ("Artoo Em Zero").
This is an inside joke, paying homage to one of the jokes in the Pink Five
fan films, in which during the Episode-V scene that had Luke shouting out "artoo!" to find R2-D2,
Pink Five's lead character is responding "am not!"... so the droid is
"are too, em naught!"
UPDATE- Crap! I googled around, and even though I came up with the
"artoo em naught" name myself, it's been done before! Grrr. Another idea I
had though was to call it R2-ET, just using my initials.
Also...
Parts ordered! It's a little dicey around the holidays of course, so not
all of these have been confirmed. But I have one of Daren Murrer's
laser-cut 300mm domes on order, from the r2-builders club. Also, some
resin details, such as the logic port, holo-eye, and other housings for
the head on order as well. Plus, the aluminum lazy-susan for the head
rotation, holo-eye lenses and retaining rings, and PSI light LEDs. My
goal is to hit the ground running and have a beautiful head in need of
a body. I'll need to locate suitable paints and adhesives, and I can
get started!
As of a few days ago, I've started up a site that was suggested on one of
the forums. SwordWiki.org is a wiki for
sword information. It's slowly getting fleshed out... Hope it succeeds!
20 days to go! That's just under 3 weeks left. I've run so short on
time, but realistically, even if I don't complete anything else, I
have two new props this year (Mr Crispy and the ghost), so I'm
reasonably satisfied.
Spencer's has $20 sets of talking skulls. They have pretty
crappy built-in audio, but for $20 it's worth the attempt
to hack them to take other input. Add these to the nicer
pair of skulls I got last year, and I'm having visions of
barber-shop quartets and other such ideas that I won't have
time for. :)
Gah! No Spirit Halloween store at the mall this year! Wonder why.
Actually, I can guess. They used to have a spot in the middle of
the mall and the place would be picked clean a week before Halloween.
These last two years they've had a spot around a corner at an end
of the mall, with little foot traffic. The store was still well stocked
when it closed last year.
After discovering that DOS-BOX
will run my old freeware/shareware games and programs in Windows, with the
audio working (this is huge, by the way), I decided it was time to make an
all-in-one package. It's less than 4.5 MB in size, as of this
writing, including 22 games and screensavers/demos.
Also, to celebrate, I just released a "new" one that I wrote a number of
years ago but never released. It's the "LCARS" screensaver program I've had
collecting dust here. It's included in the archive package, but also can
be downloaded separately.
Now it's been 5 days. The eyes are barely on. It's so dim, you have to cup
your hands over it to see it at all even in a dimly lit room.
Still enough voltage
to start them up again if I disconnect and reconnect the battery, though.
So the battery is probably not able to supply enough current (milliamps)
at this point, rather than voltage.
It looks to me like the batteries will give about a day of
full brightness, another of reduced brightness, and a third of
fairly dim light, and a few more that are glowing but nearly useless.
Maybe I'll try a pair of AA batteries next
time and test that. But now I have some good metrics on the 9v
battery method.
I don't run the eyes continuously anyway, just during the evenings,
so a battery will easily last more than a week during my typical
usage.
Can you see the glow? Even with the lights out, it's almost non-existent.
Two red LEDs connected in series with a 270 Ohm resistor to a 9v battery.
By my estimates, assuming roughly 2 volts and 20 millamps each,
and assuming the battery can supply 500 mAh at 9v, the eyes can
probably run for days before needing to change the battery,
but I think a test will be in order.
Some old relics from my Haunted House back in the 80's. Mummy
wrappings, inflatable skeleton, blown plastic skull, and the
crappy rules sign for the front door...
... And also some corpsing progress. So far he's coming out as
a good little crispy critter. I originally planned for the black
to be an undercoat, but I'm liking the crispy burnt look. Might
keep it. We'll see.
90 days to go. Officially three months? Seems like a long time,
but I know if I let things go til October, I don't get it all done.
Got my hands on fxHome's EffectsLab software. Great little east to use
program for special effects in videos. Might have to try it this year.
Gaining some experience with it ahead of time by doing lightsaber videos.
The skeleton is getting a healthy dose of Great Stuff.
Gravestone is my first attempt at using my new foam tools. Letters
were mostly freehand, and added some distressing details around the edges.
I may leave this one as is and go ahead and paint it.
Just migrated my account with linode.com to their
new east-coast datacenter location, and they also recently doubled
the resources for all of their plans. Woohoo! Linode rocks!
I just visited Phantasmechanics
website for the first time in a while, with the intention to grab a
FCG kit. I've been planning since the middle of last year to work on
it this spring. Just my luck, the timing is such that I've waiting
too long... they've stopped selling kits. Since I don't have the
desire to build it from scratch, this likely means I won't have a
flying crank ghost this year. DOH!
