Drawin' Stuff

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I'm taking a "Learn How to Draw" class at the high school. The instructor is the art teacher at the school, and we're working in her room. The steps we're taking to learn to draw are the same steps the high-schoolers take. I started a few weeks ago, and already I'm getting better. Here are a few of my projects:


On the small piece of paper is a copy of a drawing of Igor Stravinsky, done by Pablo Picasso. We were told to "enlarge" it onto the big piece of paper. But - we had to draw it upside down. Here is my version, right side up. I did pretty well, until I got to the hands, and then all heck broke loose.


Our first exercises in the class were to draw our own hands. This, according to the teacher, is a very hard thing to do. She claims that if you can draw an outline of your own hand, you can pretty much draw anything. (We'll see!) The top drawing of the three hand poses was our final project for the first class, and before that I had drawn three hand poses on another piece of paper as practice. Since the hands are recognizable as such, I consider that a victory.

Below the hands, you can see part of a larger project where we have 16 rectangles in which we are supposed to draw items starting with the letter A, B, C, and so on. On the shelves in the room was a broken violin, and I picked it up and put it back a few times before I got up the nerve to try to draw it as my "I" picture (I is for Instrument.) It didn't look very good to me, but then I stood up from the table and saw it from a distance, and it started to look better.


I have several more classes to go, and I'm looking forward to them.


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Gratuitous cat picture

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Enough Blood to Fill a Ten-Gallon Hat

K on the first day of school with some of his friends (who shall remain anonymous). Notice anything new or different about him?

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There Will Be Ten Gallons of Blood
Today, at a blood drive sponsored by my employer, I donated my 80th pint of blood. A little math shows that equals ten gallons. No wonder the vein in my left arm complains so much when they stick the needle into it.

They didn't have a little "10" pin to give me, though. I might have to go looking on eBay for one, because what's the point of giving ten gallons of blood, one pint at a time, over 20 years or so, if you don't get a pin? There isn't any other good reason that I can think of.

Miscellaneous Related Sentences
K is off to a good start with soccer: he's scored one goal each in his first two games.

M spent three days and two nights with his fellow seventh-graders at Howell Nature Center. I stayed overnight one night with a roomful of boys (including M) as a chaperone, and my conclusion from that is: one night is enough.

The elevator project is pretty close to being done. I have the four buttons ready to go, all I have to do is finish the code to handle them and operate the motor properly. It won't be hard, I just have to sit down and do it.

The two new cats have settled into their new home and are perfecting their daily routine of sleep, eat, ignore the humans, sleep, eat, ignore the humans, and so on. Meanwhile, I go to work to earn money for their food and clean their litter boxes.

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I hope everyone is enjoying the cooler weather after the hot summer. I know I am. I went out running this morning at 5:30 and the cool air felt great. I was a bit of a slug all summer because I didn't want to run in the heat, so now I have to make up for lost time.

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The Elevator is Uplifting

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Elevator "Up" Date


The elevator mechanicals - RIP old drawer hardware...

I've been working on the mechanical part of the elevator project lately, and I thought I had an easy idea - use some of the drawer runners, the ones that have the little wheels that the rails ride on.

I figured I'd just use one rail for a guide, and two of the little wheels to attach to the elevator car.

That didn't work because of the way the rails are constructed - they are only shaped to cradle the wheel on one side, and are flat on the other. That means putting the wheels into the rail vertically would cause the car to flop out of the flat, open side.

I put up two rails next to each other, with the curved (closed) sides on the outside, and that was enough to keep the wheels from flopping out. I superglued some of the drawer rail parts together well enough so they would slide without much friction. I then glued some other wood pieces to it to create a test platform. It's pretty ugly to look at from the back, but it works, and it is enough of what I would call a "Proof of Concept" to be happy with it.

The next challenge was to get the motor working with the rest of the circuit. For all of my testing of the ultrasonic sensor (the one that tells the program how far the nearest object is) I used a tiny toy motor. It doesn't take much power to run that tiny motor, but the bigger motor I am using to raise and lower the elevator car drains a lot more of the power from the rest of the circuit. As I was setting everything up, I noticed that the ultrasonic sensor was not working at all if I hooked up the bigger motor. I went back to my book, "Arduino Cookbook" and checked the wiring diagram again. I knew I needed a second power source for the motor, and I had one setup for that, but I discovered that I hadn't hooked it up correctly. The diagram got me straightened out.

I set the program to raise the elevator car until it was about 3.5 inches from the sensor and hooked up the really fancy pulley system to give the elevator its final test.

The Moment of Truth



A Few Pictures

The setup at the bottom of the rails is the sensor and the power supply for the motor. The sensor is the two small metal cylinders - one sends out a signal, and the other receives it as it bounces back. The time between the "sent" and "received" times can be converted to a distance by the program.

The red light is part of the power supply for the motor, and the black cord coming out of it is plugged into a power strip that's not pictured.


At the top of the elevator rail is the Arduino Uno board (the blue one) and a breadboard that contains a chip called an H-Bridge. It's the H-Bridge's job to control the motor based on the Arduino's commands, turning it on and off, and setting its speed and direction.
You can see the string wound onto a threaded rod, attached to the motor. This raises and lowers the elevator.


M helped me measure the distance between the sensor and the bottom of the elevator car. About 3.5" which is what I was hoping for.

I still have some work to do - it's not an elevator if you can't get the car back to the first floor! Next up, I'll add some buttons to the circuit to allow a user to control its up and down motion. That will require some changes to the program to handle the button presses, and to know where the car is. I don't want the car to keep going up if it's already at the top, and there's no need to let it back down if it's already at the bottom.

I'm also going to create a better rail system than what I have. It works, but is not a very elegant solution, and everyone knows that if there's one word that describes me, it's "elegant." (Maybe not.)

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An updated shot of some of the components - the ultrasonic sensor is now soldered to a small circuit board instead of plugged into a breadboard. The wiring is more complete and it's been tested. Some of my later posts in this blog have a link to YouTube videos of it in action.

August Aupdate

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Tigers, the Detroit Baseball Ones and the Other Kind

A few things have been going on with us lately - we went to the Detroit Zoo last week, and to a Tigers game last night. The Tigers and the tigers were travel-worthy as they hit home runs and yawned/slept, respectively.


K and M at the Tigers game


K and M relax at the zoo with a snack.


Links

It would be fun to drive to the store in the snow using this.

Hand-made bikes in England. I could watch films like this all day.

A video point of view of one person who worked on the "Curiosity". I dare you not to tear up a little.

Got an old piano you don't want? Turn it into useful furniture or a mailbox.

How do they get the javelins and discuses (disci?) all the way back to the Olympians? Here's how.

Rayguns!

I'm still a little unsure how this works, but it appears to work, and it's a great invention.

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New Kittens

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Two new kittens are living in our house now. My accountant says they can't be claimed as dependents, but if a cat doesn't qualify as dependent, I don't know what does.


Left to right: Rigby


Clockwise from bottom: Mesko



Here's a brick we bought for the Humane Society's sidewalk to memorialize our three previous adopted cats, who are all now playing with balls of yarn and/or acting indifferent in Cat Heaven.

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Frankfort 2012

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We're back from Frankfort, and as usual, we had good weather and lots of fun.


M at the miniature golf course.


K, the Putt Master


The view from our east window. The plaque is titled "Marquette's Death". It presumably lets the reader know how Marquette died. I'm not sure, though; we've stayed across the street from it for six straight summers, and I don't think I've ever read it.


A view from the Sleeping Bear Dunes climb.


The boys at sunset on the beach on our last night.

Book Report

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A few books I've read recently

I just finished Chike and the River by Chinua Achebe. This book, by the well-known Nigerian author, is about a boy who won't stop until he finds a way to cross the river into Midwestern Nigeria. When he gets there, he is lost, but helps bring some robbers to justice. I first found out about Achebe in college, where we were assigned to read A Man of the People.

I'm enjoying some of crime novels written by Donald Westlake. His main character is John Dortmunder, a career criminal, whose circle of friends consists largely of other career criminals. The books are part crime, part comedy, and are good, easy summer reading. I've read Road to Ruin, Get Real, and Thieves' Dozen, the last of which is a collection of short stories. My favorite of the short stories was about Dortmunder's crew's long-term attempt to tunnel into a bank vault from the basement of a neighboring building. When they finally break through to the vault, they are met by a crowd of people welcoming them and thanking them for coming. Confused, the gang of robbers discovers that the bank is currently being robbed, and the people in the vault are being held hostage there. The vault-dwellers believe the crew is there to save them.

Leviathan, by Paul Auster, is one of the best books I've read in a long time. It's about an author who befriends another author, and their friendship through the years. The book begins as the author's friend has been found dead by the road. He had created a bomb, and the bomb had gone off unintentionally.

Infernal Angels, by one of my favorites Loren Estleman, is the latest in the Amos Walker mystery series. Never a dull moment in an Estleman book, and the setting is Detroit for this book, as it is for many of his books. The old Tiger Stadium is the location of the final big scene, where the kidnapped friend is rescued, and some of the bad guys get their just desserts.

I've read a few Ernest Hemingway books, the latest of which was A Farewell to Arms. A subtle book which probably would have been easier to relate to if I had grown up during that time.

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Family Updates
There are lots of things going on here lately. I'm practicing the piano pretty regularly (and let me tell you, the kids are getting really tired of hearing me play the same thing over and over).

Yesterday, while J was out of town visiting a friend and attending a baby shower for our niece Ann, the boys and I went to Greenfield Village to see the old-time baseball game. A family friend is a player for the Chelsea Monitors, and let us know that he would be playing. Games between different teams happen every Saturday and Sunday, and it was a lot of fun to see the players in their uniforms and learn about the rules as they were in the 1860's. Rules changed a lot during the mid- to late-1800s, and even the two teams playing yesterday do not follow the same rules when playing in their own leagues. (When teams that follow different rules play each other, they use the rules of the home team.)

Top of the Park is over, but we got out there a couple of times. Not as much as we have in past years due to the weather and some other activities, but enough to enjoy it and appreciate the opportunities we have in Ann Arbor to see free, live music and sample food from different local restaurants.

The boys have been alternating between swimming, taking tennis lessons, playing in summer band, going for bike rides, and so on. They're keeping on top of their piano skills by playing their new piano and taking a few lessons here and there.

On the Fourth of July, Benjamin Franklin's ghost visited our area in the form of a big thunder storm, and two large branches of my neighbor's tree came down in his front yard. Fortunately, the house wasn't hit at all. When they returned from their vacation, I went over and helped him cut up the branches and take them to the curb for pickup. This is the same neighbor that helped me stake up my fallen tree last winter in the freezing rain, so I owed him one.

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Keep cool and have a great week!

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