Demoing WordPress for a student.
Three years in, and I now have license to set up a lab.
At Allegheny, I have found there there is a great deal of opportunity for cross-disciplinary collaboration. I have colleagues I can have fun with in Art, Environmental Science, Biology, Physics, Psychology… perhaps even History, but I’m really only including them in the list in case one of them wanders by and feels left out. 
Being able to make things move or collect data over time is a powerful thing, and I’m planning on making sure we can do more of that in my lab.
Of course, I would like to maximize the ability to fabricate while minimizing cost.
2D Lo-Fidelity Prototyping and Building
To start, I’d like to be able to do two things. I want to be able to cut new aircraft repeatably, and I’d like to have a low cost, workable material for exploring small scale robotics construction. My inclination, at this point, is to purchase a CNC foam cutter.
The Phlatprinter 3 would allow us to cut multiple copies of the Flying Gator easily, which would be excellent. Given my conversations with colleagues in Environmental Science, I think it would be useful to be able to build larger aircraft as well — for example, something that could be deployed for aerial photography in a coastal setting with gusting winds. This implies a much larger aircraft, and frankly, I don’t want to be cutting out wing spars for the rest of my life.
The Phlatprinter would also make it easy to cut robotics platforms out of foam (allowing students to design and build their own small robotics platforms), as well as provide (perhaps?) a robust enough skeleton for doing plushie robotics.
Twitchie Scorpion from MAKE magazine on Vimeo.
A Phlatprinter would run me roughly $1200 plus shipping.
2D Routing
A router would allow manufacture using beefier materials, but they’re big, and they’re more expensive. The blacktoe comes in either 2′ x 4′ or 4′ x 8′ sizes, for $2300 or $2900.
Given the prices, it is obvious that a 4′ x 8′ table is the way to go… but, I have precious little floor space. And, in truth, I need to think more about what role a router would play. It may be that a 12″ x 36″ table would be more than adequate for what I want to do (which mostly would be enclosures and small components for sensors and robotics platforms).
A router has many applications for small scale robotics as well as more artistic endeavors. The buildyourcnc website has some pretty pictures of the kinds of work people have done using these tools. I’d love to have access to these, as well as be able to make them available to students here at Allegheny.
PCB Milling
The MTM Snap was just announced, and obviously, that’s the machine I need.
While I could outsource PCB manufacture, the reality is that I typically need small, single-sided boards, and in quantities of 1-10. I could outsource (and perhaps I should), but I prefer not to outsource board production when I haven’t even had a chance to build and test. At roughly $700, I’m talking about 14 PCB runs at $50/each. If, for example, we were to decide that Environmental Sensing and Robotics might make an interesting course (or, perhaps, something more artistic, like Animatronics 101), then allowing students to cut and assemble a small board from scratch using tools like this would be an incredible experience unlike any they could find at any other small liberal arts college. (I may be wrong on that count, and if I am, someone tell me.)
Basically, I think I need a PCB mill. I could be wrong.
Misc Equipment
I’m hoping I can save in this space, and get high utility, low cost tools that allow my students to do basic electronics work without breaking the bank.
Power supplies, scopes, multimeters… these are all tools that you need to get on with building things and making sure you’re doing the right thing. I’m going to do some digging to see what we have on campus that I might use before I go shopping.
What Else?
What else do I need for a small scale electronics and robotics lab? Components, I suppose. Pieces-parts. Sensors. Motors. Stuff to build with. That may have to come with time. For the moment, I’m wondering what large pieces should be brought into play, and when. Is a dedicated machine for CNC foam work worthwhile? Can I use it in the ways that I think I want to use it? Would a single router be better? What tools would be valuable that I don’t have here already? (I have a Makerbot, but haven’t been able to set it up…) What, in short, would be the ideal set of tools for a small lab capable of supporting the exploration of environmental sensing and robotics?
A few weeks back, I wrote about my attempt to translate a low-fidelity circuit board design into something that could be run through a laser cutter. Today, Ponoko delivered the results:
You can click through to a large, high resolution image. In a word, it came out beautifully.
I do work surrounding the use of parallel languages in embedded applications. This summer, along with two students, we began work on a novel control system for an unmanned aircraft (a UAV), and managed to achieve autonomous level flight. Last term, Rich Bowden (Environmental Science) asked me if we could do a sensing project in Environmental Research Methods. During the break, I developed a board, built some prototypes, and wrote the control control code. I’m now developing the documentation (video coming soon!) for students, so they can assemble circuits and deploy their sensors to collect data. It’s exactly the kind of cross-disciplinary opportunity that we want to create. (Next time, we’ll get CS students involved early, and they can help develop the control code, and possibly even the board design.)
Sadly, we won’t be using these laser cut boards for this project; instead, the students will be poking holes in manila folders, and it should go well enough. Why not? First, the lead time was several weeks – it takes too long to send out for the boards to use in any “impromptu” manner in a classroom or research setting. Second, Ponoko charged me $21 for that board.
How is this a $21 piece of cardboard? The laser time cost $2/minute, and this design took just over 5 minutes to engrave and cut. The shipping was a flat rate of around $8. And, the cardboard… $0.41. It was worth it for a prototype, because I know that a laser cutter will meet real needs, and have high utility in multiple educational and outreach contexts.
I have students prototyping sensors as part of their senior projects, building robots as independent studies, core research that involves prototyping and construction, and I’d love to be doing more tangible, computational work across disciplines (eg. with colleagues in Art, Environmental Science, and so on). I’d go broke trying to do this via a service like Ponoko, and the turn-around (for prototyping and exploration) would kill me. Waiting three weeks for a design to come back means that, if you’re lucky, you can do two design iterations (maybe three) in a semester.
Hence, we’re going to try and get a laser cutter. $20,000 is my round-numbers target for a laser with a 2′ by 4′ bed. At the rates Ponoko is charging, it will pay for itself after 10,000 minutes of usage. We have excellent connections into the community (schools, etc.), and I think it will be easy to run this printer for all kinds of awesome projects that let teachers and students at the College and from area schools come together to explore the intersection of computer science and manufacturing.
As a member of the faculty, it is often hard to justify spending time learning new technologies. This, to me, is a rather ugly Catch-22: to learn a new technology, I must justify it either with a publication or a clear, immediate application to my classrooms. If you’re driving towards a clear, concrete deliverable, it really isn’t exploratory learning… it’s work, under pressure, with a deadline. That’s why I’m excited about a project I’m undertaking this semester with one of our seniors.
The student was looking for a 2-credit independent study (this is roughly a 1/2 course load). We brainstormed a great deal, and in the end, the student thought they’d like to dig into some more Scheme programming, so we decided a compiler might be a good way to focus our efforts. However, I didn’t expect that it would end up being a project with so much potential.
At Indiana, I saw how we can write compilers front-to-back in the nanopass style. However, several grad students in the languages group insisted the right way to write a compiler was back-to-front. What does this mean?
First, you take your assembly language, and generate an executable.
In our case, we will be working with LLVM Compiler Infrastructure project. Specifically, we’ll begin by writing programs in LLVM assembly, and using the LLVM toolchain to turn that into a native executable.
Although our input language is not C, we might imagine starting with a simple program in our language LNOT (L0) that is nothing more than the number 8. A single expression. When compiled and executed, it should return the number 8. Expressed in C, this would look something like:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | int main(int argc, char **argv) { int retval; /* Assign the result of our entire program to retval */ /* In this case, the entire program is the constant 8. */ retval = 8; printf("%d\n", retval); } |
The disassembled LLVM looks something like:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | define i32 @main(i32 %argc, i8** nocapture %argv) nounwind { entry: %0 = tail call i32 (i8*, ...)* @printf(i8* noalias getelementptr inbounds ([4 x i8]* @.str, i64 0, i64 0), i32 8) nounwind ; [#uses=0] ret i32 undef } declare i32 @printf(i8* nocapture, ...) nounwind |
As we are writing the compiler “back-to-front,” we now need to take one step backwards towards our input language. Because we are working in Scheme, we’ll represent our language in S-expressions (to minimize parsing effort). The first pass (or, the last pass, in front-to-back thinking) will be one that transforms an S-expression based syntax for LLVM assembly into actual LLVM assembly. Therefore, the input language to the penultimate pass might look something like:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 | (define (main i32) (args [i32 argc] [(i8** nocapture) argv]) (entry (tail-call (printf (i32 (i8* ...)) ...)) (ret (i32 undef)))) (declare (printf (i32 (i8* ...) ...))) |
This elides many things, but my point is that we might take the ASM of LLVM and “lift” it into a syntax that can be easily pattern-matched in Scheme and manipulated. As we work from the back-end of the compiler to the front, our next step might be something trivial: for example, we might get rid of the entry form, because (with a very simple input language), we know we will only ever have one function, and therefore we can generate this automatically. Or, we might be more aggressive, and acknowledge that we don’t need to generate any of the wrapper code… so, we should only need to develop a language for statements that will proceed and/or live on the right-hand side of the retval assignment statement.
For me, it is exciting on a number of levels. I get to learn with a student, which happens less often than one would like. I don’t know LLVM, and am glad to be spending time getting to know it. Also, I haven’t ever written a compiler back-to-front, and evaluating this (both technically and pedagogically) has value — I’ll probably be teaching our compilers course next spring. And, I get to do some hacking, which I simply don’t get much time to do.
When we have a repository up, I’ll post a link to it, although it won’t be an “open” project, per se. We’re not doing this to engage in a new compiler authoring project so much as learn, but if you want to, you can watch us as we work.
I want computing to be tangible and accessible. By “tangible,” I mean I want students to be able to see, as much as possible, how a computational artifact comes together and/or interacts with the world. By “accessible,” I mean I want students who don’t consider themselves “computer people” to have opportunities for positive and meaningful interactions with programming and/or other computational technologies.
Just before break, a colleague asked me if we how hard it would be to develop a sensor that students studying Environmental Science could use to monitor light and temperature levels around a building, both on a fixed schedule and when motion was detected. (The answer: it takes 120+ hours of research, design, development, and testing.) Last year, first-year students build a cardboard computer — an Arduino glued to cardboard instead of soldered to a PCB. Building on that idea, I developed a sensor that would achieve the stated goals while also allowing for all of the major components (processor, sensors) without difficulty. The original board design looked like this:
The board design was done in OmniGraffle. The gray areas are velcro (for attaching the board to the enclosure), the gold areas are copper tape (making it easy to bring several ground wires together, for example), and the rest are wires that students would solder between various connectors. They would print the board, glue it to a manila folder, cut it out, punch holes, and start gluing headers to the board; I expect the total assembly time to be between 3 to 4 hours.
Now, the substrate leaves something to be desired: it is floppy and a bit annoying to work with. Further, it is tedious to punch holes through the board for every header connection. And while I like the fact that there is a certain amount of craft involved, I’d like to cut some of it down. So, I went looking to Ponoko, to see if I could laser cut the board.
I hadn’t used Inkscape before, but it wasn’t too difficult to get the hang of. The color blue indicates a cut through the material, gray indicates raster surface engraving, and green indicates vector engraving. (Letters are vector engraved.) Now, here’s the kicker. The material (cardboard) cost $0.41 for a 7″ x 7″ piece. This is fine. The laser work costs $2/minute, and my design will apparently take a little over five minutes to engrave and cut, meaning the laser work costs around $11. Handling is about $5, and shipping around $4, meaning the total cost for a Ponoko laser-cut board is $18 in cheap cardboard. Yes, that is more expensive than designing a PCB and having it produced and shipped in quantities of 10.
All of that said, I wanted to see it would come out, so I went ahead and ordered one. The reason? I want a laser cutter. A laser cutter is an incredible tool for crossing disciplinary boundaries. I can have students engraving parametric equations from their multivariate calc class onto balsa surfaces, capturing (cheaply, but robustly) the most beautiful 2D and 3D equations they can design. Or, we can explore paper cutting, or using more robust (cardstock), have students in Theatre doing scene design just like the pros. There are no end to the applications in Art. It would be a powerful tool for grounding outreach into the community (making laser cutting available to area middle- and high-school teachers and students), as well as a centerpiece for a new hacker/makespace. And, for me, I can be working with students on small-scale robotics using some of the tools that make bespoke and custom robotic work possible.
If I had my own laser cutter, this would have cost $0.41. And, in the end, getting a prototype in-hand is worth $18. But the real power from tools like this comes from having them readily available to make new collaborations and innovations possible.
What: Parallel Programming on the Arduino
When: Friday, December 10, 19:00 – 21:00 GMT-5
Where: Hack Pittsburgh
On December 10, I’ll be heading down to Pittsburgh for my first ever visit to Hack Pittsburgh! Now, you could claim that my lack of visits is because I’m a bad maker, or you could just accept that faculty are busy people, and having a toddler multiplies that effect.
But the making must happen! In this particular case, the making will be more along the lines of programming. I’ll introduce the basics of the programming language occam, a parallel programming language that has been around for roughly 30 years. Along with colleagues at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), University of Dundee (Scotland), and University of Kent (England), we’ve made it possible to write occam programs for the Arduino, and have gone a step further in developing Plumbing, a library that simplifies many common tasks on the Arduino. We also have the start of a book on the subject which (hopefully) will get refreshed over Turkey Break.
If you’re looking to attend, you should do the following:
- Bring an Arduino.
I have a few I can lend, but you should bring your own. - Download and install our software.
We have a free and open source environment for you to use when writing occam programs for the Arduino. It runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. - Grab the book.
We have a CC-licensed book you should grab. You don’t have to print it (save the trees!), but you might want to have it on hand. So you know: I expect to update this over Turkey Break, so watch the Twitter feed (or the c.cc blog) for notice when that happens! - Subscribe to our Twitter feed.
We’re @concurrencycc on Twitter.
I’ll assume you don’t have any particular programming experience, unless the crowd who shows up happens to be a bunch of expert embedded systems developers, in which case we’ll adapt. If you have any questions, or anything you’d like to try and do in particular, drop an email to matt @ concurrency.cc, or (better yet!) join our users mailing list and drop your ideas there.
I’m also hoping to bring some students down as well, so it should be a good time.
Welcome graduates of POSSE SA!
Actually, South Africa is a big place; perhaps there will be more POSSEs there, in which case, we’ll have to call you Classic POSSE SA, or something like that. Mind you, you’ll always be special. But really, I digress. Already.
Take 2.
As you look to involve your students in the world of open source (and, indeed, as you explore it further yourself), use the tools you’ve been introduced to so we can stay in touch. Not so much because those who came before think we have all the answers, but because we’re hoping you can contribute to and improve the explorations we’re making already. And, for that matter, TOS can, we hope, serve as a space where we can support each-other as we try and engage in explorations that encourage our students to reach beyond their comfort zones as they begin exploring the world of decentralized collaboration under the aegis of free and open communities of practice.
So again, welcome!
This past year, I’ve been serving on a task force at my institution. Our charge is to investigate the intersection of technology and learning on campus, make recommendations regarding where we might focus our energy in the next five years, and (perhaps most importantly) recommend political structures that might then provide guidance and insight on an ongoing basis.
This post at CunchGear struck a chord. The author’s recommendations for new college students are (simplifying):
- Don’t buy a new laptop. Buy a used one.
- Install free software on it.
- If you want to play fancy games, use someone else’s fancy game machine.
Scott Merrill, the author, even addresses two major constituencies: engineering/computing-type students and liberal arts (literature, history, etc.) students:
- [ COMPUTING ]
No matter what you buy, you’ll probably have better facilities on campus. And networks are everywhere: remote into powerful machines. - [ LIBERAL ARTS ]
You’re just typing papers and checking Facebook. You don’t need an expensive computer.
And do you know what? I think he’s right.
Sadly, institutions are slow to change. I would love to push for the following:
- Install a free operating system on all public machines.
- Offer a netbook/laptop programme that provides low-cost, robust laptops running open software. System76, for example, provides netbooks and laptops ready-to-go with Ubuntu. I’d love to have an EduBook to trial – my suspicion is that this little laptop would cut it for many students.
- Establish a grassroots initiative to provide training and support for students. On my campus, we’re starting a learning/living community initiative, and I could see that new community structure playing a role in this way.
I might be able to go further in my recommendations, but that’s what comes to mind at the moment.
This re-statement/reflection on Scott’s piece was inspired by a post over at TeleRead. Chris at TeleRead closes with the following statement:
Perhaps the emphasis on college students having the latest and greatest technology should be reconsidered, at least from the perspective of giving them them the best ability to focus on the important thing—their education.
Now, making a bit of a 180º turn from what I was just saying, I’ll claim that this is a naive, sweeping statement that fails to take into account any of the realities or pressures I think many faculty feel in higher ed: students expect new media. Their world is made up of interaction and video, and we’re still giving them chalkboards. So when the sweeping claim is made that they should focus “on their education” (at the same time as you’re calling for new modes of interaction, collaboration, and problem solving), please consider what tools we’re currently working with, where the technology is headed, and how we might be leveraging that technology to improve our students’ learning experience. No one I know is considering technology for technology’s sake… but we’re pretty sure that there’s some really amazing learning we could be supporting… if we could just get the tools in the students’ hands.
The fact is, some of these devices do enable real-time, community-driven collaboration (many-to-many interactions) that simply were not possible a few years ago. Yes, I could photocopy a student’s paper and hand it out to everyone… but doing that with 20, 3-page papers means 60 x 60 pages (roughly 3600 pages). Using tools like iAnnotate allow students to comment on and mark up each-other’s papers instantly and digitally. And, perhaps more importantly, tools like that allow me to handle my digital workflow more easily. (I do not, at this time, own an iPad, but I’m reasonably confident that a lightweight tool designed for media creation, annotation, and consumption would be a boon on a day-to-day basis. Netbooks simply don’t cut it (for many reasons), and my 13″ MacBook is too big and has too short a battery to be practical.)
In my mind, we’re in a Catch-22 situation in higher ed: we can require our students buy tools that let them engage in distributed, real-time media creation and collaboration surrounding digital artifacts… but that implies that our pedagogic approach is going to change to support their purchase of those tools. Down that road lies a commitment to change when many think that we’re doing fine as it is. Or, we could adapt our pedagogy (which is fine as it is), but our students won’t have the tools to engage the way we want them to. How do you drive change in a system that is (at best) mildly elastic, but ultimately static and resistant to change?
I’m teaching a first-year seminar this year titled Creativity and Leadership. I’ll put the question to them. Perhaps they’ll come up with something.
During the summer of 2009, I had the good fortune of taking part in the Red Hat POSSE programme, meeting a bunch of excellent open source peeps, and getting a sense for how I might introduce more of my students to the world of open source contribution. This last spring, my colleague and I introduced 40 first-year students to the Fedora project. This semester, I’d like to introduce y’all to a few more.
This semester I will be leading eight intrepid students in an exploration of interface design and development at Allegheny College. Your open source project (or a small part of a larger project) could benefit greatly from these students, if you’re interested.
HOW YOU CAN HELP
I want developers/managers from “projects” that have a GUI. I say “projects” because you might be the lead on, say, a network settings dialog box that is part of Fedora. You need to be of the mindset that your GUI could always be better, but you never seem to have the time to sit down and do heuristic evaluations, sit users and do interaction testing, and so on. If we work with you, you also have to commit to being timely in responding to the students—most likely on your developer mailing lists—because we can’t wait for two weeks to go by in a 14-week semester while we’re waiting to hear back from you. (I’m not talking about 5-minute response times, but if you can’t reply to email from people trying to make your project better within 24-48 hours, please don’t respond.)
Basically, we ask that your community be reasonably responsive, and we’ll be doing all the work.
WHAT WE WILL DO FOR YOU
Small teams of students will, throughout the semester, engage one or more of these projects as budding interface designers. They have no prior experience in this regard, but will be engaging material on lo-fi prototyping, usability, the psychology of interface design, and so on. We will be discussing this material (which we will try and do in as open a manner as possible) and directly applying what we learn to the interfaces that are part of your project.
The students will work within your community, using your tools (mailing lists, wikis, etc.). I do not expect them to implement their designs, although some of them may be capable of doing so, and they might even do it. This, however, will not be a requirement of the course. (Not everyone in the course is capable.) If their work is good, and you like what you see, we only ask that you give their efforts serious consideration for implementation… we’re working with you because we don’t want to be doing interface design and testing in the abstract, but instead we want to add value to real projects through our efforts.
SOUND GOOD TO YOU?
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If it does, please drop me an email (mjadud at allegheny dot edu). If you’d like to talk to me on the phone, I’m happy to chat—92JADUDM92 is my Google Voice number, which… well, it’s new to me, so we’ll see what happens. I don’t (yet) have the course website up, but it will probably live here when it goes live… |