Arm news

Oh, the robot arm is mostly built, by the way. Whether it will work or not remains to be seen.

Game avoidance

I'm on holiday, which used to mean I had long, lazy days entirely at my disposal, unfettered by the need to offer entertainment, sustenance and attention to my delightful children.  Not any more. When I am off school, so are my kids. Work just becomes a different type of work, albeit one with people you love.

This week, however, I enjoy the benefits of working at a school whose half-term holidays are out of sync with my kids' school. I can drop them off and then spend six hours doing whatever the hell I want. I could go for a walk, read a book, watch a film, or play one of my many games that are piled up in a sort of entertainment "in-tray". X-Com is my current nemesis and I have to say it is kicking my ass at every encounter.

But this morning was different. I got an email asking me to look at something for work: a new feature for the music database website. It's not something I have to do, as I stopped officially supporting that thing ages ago, but still I find myself drawn back to it, like how George Lucas won't stop meddling with Star Wars until he has annoyed everyone in the universe.  (Don't go away thinking I am equating my music database to Star Wars. I'm not. My music database is way less entertaining than Episodes 4, 5 and 6, and only slightly more interesting than Episodes 1, 2 and 3)
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The thing is, the work was interesting, and involved learning how to do something I didn't know before. I decided to use it to teach myself a bit of Ajax, which is a programming technique rather than a cleaning product, and to play around with my new local PHP testing server. Tinkering is fun and, in many ways, it IS a game. You have a goal (get the thing working), obstacles to overcome (things don't work so you have to find out where they are going wrong) and rewards (the satisfied feeling that you are making progress, both in the project and in your own knowledge). I certainly find it less frustrating than X-Com, because I'm pretty sure my Music Database is not out to get me, whereas those aliens definitely are. The green-blooded bastards.

Nocturnal Noughts And Crosses

Last night I woke up at 3am with my brain buzzing. Maybe it was because I had gone to bed early, but I could not stop thinking about a cool new project.

"What if," I imagined, "I got a robot arm and taught it how to play noughts and crosses? That would be good on Open Morning at school, and maybe the A level kids would get a kick out of tinkering with it."

I picture a large sheet of paper with a grid on it, a pupil drawing noughts with a thick marker pen, and a computer watching it with a camera before making its own move.

So, as I couldn't sleep I started googling and found one of these cheap robot arms from Maplin. It seems that some people have worked out how to program them in Python, and it doesn't look too tricky. In theory, making an arm draw a cross on a page should be manageable, and if it has trouble handling a pen then it could at least pick up and move a cross-shaped object on a table.

The trickier bit would be making the computer aware of what was happening. I think it's possible to get Python to read an image from a webcam, and it should be possible to write a piece of code to look for a circle drawn on the page.

So that should keep me occupied for a while. I bought the arm today. I'll report back when I have some news.