Canoe and Kayak Interfacing

Been getting busy lately, which I suspect is a good thing... although the number of interesting projects is a reminder about how annoying it is to be finite. I remember when I wasn't (or at least didn't realize that I was); ever since those halcyon days, there has been an alarming increase in the number of things that never get done.

Speaking of which, I've spoken recently of the change in the topology of my technomadic toolset, and a couple more pieces have just fallen into place. As you may recall from a few days ago, the notion is simply that the "User Interface" should remain attached to the user... and each machine or environment similarly owns a "Substrate Interface." The UI is a sleek pocket-sized computer: the Tapwave Zodiac 2, with the SanDisk Wi-Fi SDIO card to provide connectivity. The SI is an ultra low power fanless PC like the SolarPC Mini-ITX system that's sitting here running Linux and Squeak in a CF card... basically, any little box of silicon that has Wi-Fi on one side and a USB host port on the other.

The software is where it really gets fun. I've just rediscovered the joys of VNOS, which is particularly adept at stitching together a wide range of resources using a visual programming environment that actually makes it fun to parse incoming strings from serial ports and build control panels. "Writing code" in this world is a matter of dragging lines between widgets, some of which can be user defined with Perl, FORTH, or regular expressions to handle oddball problems (in other words, it's easy to use, but not constraining). Loosely coupled to this is a web server (Apache), with standard PHP and CGI tools to interface with SQL telemetry and configuration databases, stored variables, and whatever code is dealing with a pile of utterly non-homogenous I/O.

The rest is essentially website design... when the human is within range of a substrate, tools suddenly exist to control things, examine sensors, browse historical data, invoke utility scripts, open multimedia streams, or whatever. The first installation will be in my office, of course, and the "affordances" (to steal a term from the usability folks) will involve music, audio crossbar channels, video cameras, environmental sensors, and anything else lying around the lab that would be fun to dust off and put to work. Once this is online, doing similar things for the boatlets should be not much more daunting than the packaging projects associated with stuffing hardware into a micro-trimaran.

In other news...

Random Notes

The homebrew blackberry wine is done! It was 4 months from a tub of must to the corking of 22 recycled Three Buck Chuck bottles, and, um, yes, looking at those numbers, apparently a little got lost along the way in, um, testing, yes, that's it, testing. (Yummy.)

The office project is moving along, now that some of the other non-maskable interrupts have been serviced. I'm choosing flooring, a friend's oops-paint is ready to go, and all the drop-ceiling and insulation parts are laying around the lab depreciating (or whatever it is that things do when we're not watching). I'm getting very itchy to move my theatre of operations out of the house and back to a place where 3000 square feet of geek toys are within reach instead of at the end of a long cold dark walk through the forest.

Also, it's starting to look as if I may be starting a new book project in January... stay tuned.

Items sold since last entry:

Technomadic Designs Paddle Bags to Seattle, WA & Green Valley, AZ
Swept CD by Julia Fordham - $7.50 to Miami, FL

New goodies from me on eBay:

Chateau stainless steel disc padlock, C-870
Trimble TANS GPS Manual & 2 old GPS World issues

New goodies from Jeannie on eBay:

Rare purple Outdoor Research Seattle Sombrero hat, size M, new