Alt-BEAM Archive
Message #07358
To: beam@sgiblab.sgi.com
From: "Timothy Flytcher" flytch@hotmail.com
Date: Wed, 03 Nov 1999 19:44:12 PST
Subject: [alt-beam] Re: FLED Cover-up ( FYI)
How about house paint??? don't laugh... I found that exterior house paint to
be a nice free paint that stands up to UV... well like exterior house paint
:)... hears what I did... I got some baby food jars and went to my nabers
and asked for a "sample" of the beautiful color they have on there house...
I now have a life time supply (at least for my small projects) of paint...
one of them even gave me three gallons!
>While working on a FLED triggered carbot , I found I had no more
>heat-shrink tubing in my misc. supply box . Since it was halloween & my
>girlfriend dressed up as a witch complete with black fingernails , I
>wondered if her fingernail polish would work instead . I am happy to report
>it works great & at .29 cents , a bottle should last a long time . I have
>since tried several other colors , although some require 2 or 3 coats , all
>have shielded the FLED from light sources . So go cheap & and add some
>color to your fleds .
>
>Ed Jones
>sargon@gte.net
>
______________________________________________________
7359 Wed, 03 Nov 1999 21:43:46 -0700 [alt-beam] Re: Tildens Window Cleaning Robots beam@sgiblab.sgi.com Dave Hrynkiw At 05:47 PM 11/3/99 , Elmo wrote:
>I was reading an old issue of New Scientist (July 1988) which had an
>article on Beam called "Brainless Wonders". In it Mark mentions that he
>has some robots that "Clean his windows". Has anyone ever seen or heard
>anything about these robots? I am curious as to how they work and more
>importantly, How he gets the to traverse or stick to the glass?
It's a window-hanging that spins its way up and down the window surface. It
has brushes on the tips that hold it away from the surface, and these wipe
the surface as it spins up and down the window pane.
-Dave
---------------------------------------------------------------
"Um, no - that's H,R,Y,N,K,I,W. No, not K,I,U,U, K,I,_W_. Yes,
that's right. Yes, I know it looks like "HOCKYRINK." Yup, only
2 vowels. Pronounciation? _SMITH_".
http://www.solarbotics.com
7360 Thu, 04 Nov 1999 16:01:15 +1100 [alt-beam] Re: directional can of worms beam@corp.sgi.com Jacob Booth At 12:39 PM 11/4/99 +1000, you wrote:
>
>
>Wowza!
>
>I really like your sound BEAM thought experiments Jacob! What was the
>output
>from the Polaroid range finder unit?
too much thinking and not enough building though :(
The output... in Db for example? (I don't know off the top of my head) but
if you mean the tone or whatever, it was more of a beefy click. (Closest
I'll ever get to hearing 40khz I guess).
>I played a bit with ultrasonic intrusion alarms but they use doppler shift
>to detect motion and are pretty useless for this application.
>A surplus motion detector may be a cheap source of ultrasonic transducers
>though. I suggest a combination sound click and IR flash could be used to
>get direction and range by measuring the delay between those two signals
>(speed of light vs speed of sound). heheh!
>
Some automobile 'radar' reversing alarms also have 40 kHz audio transducer
pairs in them. These too can sometimes be found cheaply. I have a pair of
transducers I bought for us$4 as a matched pair. Made my Murata. Peak
response 40 KHz. No other info!
Well the circuit was pretty clever in the Polaroid unit..It took care of
things such as settle time (as the transducer tx'ed and rx'ed), listened
for multiple echoes (could range several objects) and other such things.
Before anyone says it, no, it was analog, not micro controlled. It did have
some custom IC's (which I have a whole bunch of) but was definitely analog.
Somewhere I have the spec sheets etc, with all the waveforms and diagrams.
Maybe I'd better dig them out and try to make something simpler for my own
use...
Cheers
Jacob
------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacob Booth BIS, MCP Web http://www.its.mary.acu.edu.au/
IT Services Email j.booth@mary.acu.edu.au
Phone (02) 97392235 Fax (02) 97392924
Australian Catholic University - MSM Campus Strathfield NSW
7361 Wed, 03 Nov 1999 22:19:07 -0700 [alt-beam] Re: Tildens Window Cleaning Robots beam@sgiblab.sgi.com "John A. deVries II" At 06:12 PM 11/3/99 -0800, J. Parks wrote:
>I've seen the window cleaning robot. If I remember correctly, it hangs
>from a suction cup. It travels across the window by swinging itself from
>side to side; at the same time it moves up and down by dispensing and
>retracting its string, which is tied to the cup. The result is an
>automated, "bachelor-quality" window cleaning.
This is, of course, all past tense. The robot has been broken for some
time (i.e. years) It is/was a clever idea, though & like many of Mark's
other creations quite artistic. As Jacob writes, however, the quality of
'cleaning' wouldn't be very high because there isn't very much pressure
against the glass and because no solvents are used.
I have always been confused about one claim that Tilden makes about the
machine. He says that it is (and this is a paraphrase) always "trying to
get to the sun on the other side of the glass". Since there isn't anything
other than how the device is suspended (i.e. the point of suspension being
closer to the glass than the rest of the robot so that it "leans") I don't
see how it could "try" to go anywhere perpendicular to the window.
Z
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