The latest CrabFu robot-made-out-of-servos is...
...the robot fish out of water.
Turn left! Woo! Yeah!
10 July 2008 — danWhat does capitalism mean?
I'll tell you what capitalism means.
It means this.
(Via.)
Y'see, there was this one fireworks store, and then another one opened up across the street.
And then it kind of turned into a theatrical performance.
Here in Australia, the only place where you can still buy proper fireworks - we DREAM of these sorts of things (from the same site as the video) - is in the Australian Capital Territory, a strange little place where the high-level politicians live, and which is also the only place where hard-core porn is still legal.
You may draw from this whatever conclusions you wish.
I bet Threepio never looked like this
5 July 2008 — danA reader who'd noticed my affection for "the hideous, terrifying combination of polycaprolactone and robotics" just pointed me to...
...XRobots' Android 10. Which is, I think, not entirely unlike what you'd see in the workshop of a necromancer. Especially if he'd read a book about tensegrity lately.
Next project: Polycaprolactone Sedlec Ossuary, please!
The Nothing Card
24 June 2008 — dan
The above-pictured object is an HIS iClear Card. And I don't know what it does. It was brought to my attention by a reader who suspects it has no function at all. I think he may be right.
According to the iClear Card's product page on the HIS site, it, and I quote verbatim, "is HIS latest solution to video card noise reduction. It has an excellent implement of state-of-the-art design and technology and give you a better gaming experience by reducing the distortion and noise generated from graphic card. It reduces the noise distortion generated from high-end graphic card (from both Radeon and GeForce) or TV tuner card, which provide up to 10% increase performance on Signal-to-Noise Ratio."
And they go on. Apparently it has "State-of-the-art design". But if you look at its specifications page, the only spec it seems to have is a name.
I suppose the "state of the art" part is because it plugs into a PCIe x1 socket, not boring old PCI. It's a bit hard to see in the picture, but I think it also has contacts for all of the PCIe x1 pins, too. But all it seems to have to connect to any of those pins are six capacitors and a few tiny surface-mount components, all sitting in the corner of an otherwise empty rectangle of fibreglass.
So I suppose it's meant to be a power supply smoother, or something. It's within the bounds of possibility that noisy DC input could have some sort of effect on the performance of a video card, if only making it less overclockable; putting a few more caps across the input rails would help with that. But many modern video cards get most of their power directly from the system PSU; hanging some caps across the PCIe power rails won't make any difference to that.
And I'm entirely at a loss regarding how this has anything to do with "noise reduction". Most PCs these days have a 100 per cent digital data path for the video subsystem, so there's no need for noise reduction at all. Software tells the graphics card what to do, it figures out what colour all of the pixels should be, and then it communicates that information to a monitor via a digital link. "Noise" doesn't enter into it, here; if there's enough noise to actually affect even one pixel of the signal, the result will probably be a completely blank screen or a hideous mess. The effect of noise in digital systems is either zero or catastrophic; there's nothing in between.
Perhaps the iClear Card is s supposed to make analogue "VGA" video less noisy. But I've never seen even VGA video that actually was noisy. I've seen distortion from cheap VGA extension cables and blurriness from the inescapable failure of CRT screens to display square pixels on their non-square phosphor, but not noise.
Alexey Samsonov at Digit-Life spoiled the fun by actually reviewing the iClear, testing it in the one application where it'd have the best chance of doing something - when a low-quality analogue TV tuner card is trying to tune a weak signal, but a video card a couple of slots over is emitting RF noise and making it difficult.
And lo and behold - the iClear actually did something!
For almost the entirety of almost every signal-to-noise-ratio graph in the review, the "without iClear" and "with iClear" lines are right slap bang on top of each other. But here and there, at certain frequencies, the without-iClear line actually does dip below the other one. In a couple of places, by as much as three decibels. And it never goes above the other line, which suggests that the differences aren't just experimental error.
I'd be interested to see what happened if you just plugged a completely blank card into the slot between the video card and the tuner, though. As long as the card has a ground plane and one lousy contact hooking that sheet of featureless copper up to the system ground, I suspect you'd see a similar reduction of noise at certain frequencies. You'd think that if the capacitors were really doing something, there'd be at least a small signal-to-noise improvement across the whole spectrum graph. That's what HIS is claiming, after all, insofar as their claims are comprehensible at all.
Apparently Newegg have been giving iClears away for free with purchase of a video card, which implies that the card has not been a major commercial success.
At least they're not claiming it makes your hi-fi sound better.
[UPDATE: Boing Boing Gadgets presents X-Maple pixel-flutter reduction block for PCIe!]
Wait until you see its big brother
21 June 2008 — danI-Wei Huang of Crabfu has a link from his SteamWorks page to his non-steam-powered remote-controlled contraptions. That link is called "Steamless Crap".
He's now given that section of the site a more dignified name, Crabfu MotionWorks. In which the latest creation is...
...the R/C Tortoise.
(Once again, the cat is unmoved. If something in the Crabfu back yard doesn't blow hot steam and shriek like a banshee, it's not worth worrying about.)
Like its ancestors the Swashbots, the Tortoise is a creature that converts movement of normal R/C servos more or less directly into leg movements. It's operated as an animatronic puppet, with no automation beyond servo mixing on the controller.
But the Tortoise is a quadruped rather than a triped - with legs that look as if they're made from the same low-temperature polycaprolactone thermoplastic as Swashbot 3's disturbingly organic parts - and so it can walk much better.
The Tortoise still turns with a Swashbot-esque wiggle, but when it's going forward or backward it's much more efficient. And it's all based on only three servos - each pair of legs is one arch-shaped piece of plastic. (There are actually four servos in the Tortoise, but one just moves the head.)
The Tortoise's clumsy high-stepping gait makes it look, to me, like a creature that's going to be very very large when it grows up.
(Via.)
Intersection area approaches epsilon
21 June 2008 — danThere is a post entitled Announcement: Alex Sells Out! on The Daily WTF which includes, in deference to the site's purpose, an announcement that ads will be appearing on the site almost four years after ads started appearing on the site.
But it also includes what may be the best Venn diagram ever drawn.
Your weekly dose of swash
9 June 2008 — danWhen I-Wei "Crabfu" Huang created his third Swashbot last month (previously), I never got around to mentioning it here.
Duly rectified:
The grouper mouth and skull-like carapace make it look kind of malevolent... until it starts moving. It still kind of looks as if it's positioning itself to jump onto your face, though.
The "Shapelock" plastic from which Swash3's made is to regular plastic as Wood's Metal is to normal casting alloys. The plastic's chemical name is polycaprolactone, and it's available under other names, too. The bags of it that've been hanging on my wall waiting for a purpose are branded "Polymorph", and I got them from Jaycar here in Australia.
I-Wei's made three videos about building the bots:
(Via.)
When a universal joint is just too PRACTICAL
1 June 2008 — danThis Toolmonger post about a novel right-angle socket adapter led me to the interesting concept of Hobson's Coupling, in which round rods bent to a right angle transfer torque around a ninety degree corner, because they're all free to turn in their mounting holes on each leg of the coupling.
Hobson's Coupling is, as any fool can see, an obvious candidate for adaptation into a steam/air-pressure engine. The result is called an Elbow Engine, and it's a thing to behold:
There are several more on GooTube. If the concept's still not clear to you, this page about making a ten-cylinder version (only seven moving parts!) from scratch may fill you in.