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Gross!

Here’s my new setup!

To get a feeling for how epicly epic this set up is, download the screen-shot, which is over 5 megabytes.

And here’s the obligatory shot of inside the computer case.

I’ve been at it for a couple days, and I’m still migrating data onto the server.

p.s. I’m running the Windows 7 release candidate, and have 12GB of RAM. I would have opened more programs, but I ran out of them.

TURN THE FIREWALL ON. It’s in the Security pane. Turn it on, and leave it that way. That it ships turned off is just arrogant and stupid.

If you don’t know, firewalls are one of the most basic forms of security, and for it to be OFF by default is just ridiculous!  I even had to confirm with the author of this list, and do research to confirm that this is the case, because it is simply crazy for the firewall to be off by default.  (Note: the firewall is on my default in both Windows XP and Vista.) This really annoys me. If the firewall was off by default on Windows and on by default in OS X people on the Internet would throw shit.  This is clearly a double-standard in how people judge Windows and OS X.

Clearly opinion: Being an avid Windows user myself, it has been a very enlightening learning experience working with this Mac.  My conclusions so far have been that things that are important to me are simply easier in Windows and/or that Windows has more complete implementations of features.  But more on that in later posts.

I got a new graphics card in the mail today.  It’s a Sapphire HD 3850, which is a (you guessed it) ATI Radeon HD 3850 manufactured by Sapphire.  The cool thing about this card, other than it uses PCI-express 2.0, is that the thing is fanless.  Yesterday I had a fanless MSI card with an ATI Redeon HD 2600XT chip in it, so I was ready for an upgrade.

Here’s what came in the box.  The card (which looks kick-ass) and an S-video to component, S-video to composite, and DVI to HDMI adapters.

Since the 3850 takes an extra power source, there is also an included adapter to draw that power from an ubiquitous power connector type.

Here is a size comparison between the 2600 (bottom) and the 3850:

And here’s the card from the end.  Notice that the top of the picture is actually the top of the card, even though the GPU is on the bottom.  Heat pipes bring the heat to the top.

Finally, here it is in my system, a Core 2 Quad q6600 (2.4GHz) rig with a 300GB raptor system drive, and 6GB RAM that runs Windows Vista Ultimate x64.

Now for the performance…

Here is the Windows Experiance Index of my computer with the HD 2600XT:

And here it is after:
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It appears now that the new bottleneck in my system is the speed of the RAM.  I can’t do anything about that without upgrading the motherboard, but that is for another day.

About upgrading the motherboard.  This card supports PCI-e 2.0, but my motherboard only supports 1.0.  Luckily PCI-2 2.0 is both backwards and forwards compatible, but even so, I won’t get the double bandwidth that 2.0 enables, even if I have a 2.0 card.  So when that motherboard upgrade happens, I’m curious to see how much better the graphics card performs.

As for practical gaming, I found that I could increase the settings on Unreal Tournament 3 to 1920×1200 resolution (the native resolution of my 24" monitor), with the screen percentage up to 90, the texture detail in the middle with 2, and the world detail a little higher at 4.  All the while the game runs smooth.  It is a bit disappointing that I can’t turn the settings up all the way without affecting the frame rate, but with such a big monitor I can’t complain.

The card runs in the upper 40 degrees Celsius at idle, mid 50′s with regular windowing in Vista, and intermittently breaks 70 with intense gaming.

Here you can see the inside of my compy while I am installing one of the modules.  That hulking metal thing is the heat sync for the Intel Core 2 Quad processor.

Here shows how to snap the RAM in place.  the little clips snap in when you push on the RAM.
 

Since I’m in here, I may as well show off my dual 1TB hard drives.   I am such a dork!

Here’s where I boot up into the BIOS to confirm that all of the RAM modules have been recognized.
 

Sweet Jesus!  6142MB of Extended Memory sounds like 6GB of RAM to me.  Happy days!

Here I see that Windows has only detected 4GB of the RAM.  No biggie, I knew that 32-bit Windows wouldn’t be able to use all of it anyway.

Here I see that of the 4GB that Windows detects, it is only actually using 3,069MB, basically 3GB.  Again, I was expecting this, and will be taking advantage of the 64-bit disk that came along with the 32-bit disk in the retail box ‘o Windows Vista Ultimate.

In a later post I may discuss why so much RAM is actually useful.

My goal was to have a generic robot with a camera on it that all of the club members could write code for.  First the task was to make the robot bounce around in an arena marked off with red tape, then the goal was to make the robot follow a line (curvy, with sharp edges, with dead ends, whatever), then it was to make the robot solve a maze.  It was a lot of fun, and a great learning experience.

One look at the robot shows that I definitely care about software way more than hardware.

 

It may not look like much, but surely you know that personality is more important than appearance, and besides this little guy has spunk.  If I were to continue this project, though, the next step would be to make him less fat.

Here’s the maze.  In theory the robot can solve any maze of this style.  (Yes, the end of the maze is a mouse pad. )

Here is the robot solving the maze.  Keep in mind that the robot can be placed in any part of the maze with the end anywhere else in the maze.Â

I found by experimentation that the longest time it can take the robot to solve this maze, given any start and any end, is 1 minute and 54 seconds.

If there’s one bit of advice that I think new Botball members need to know, it’s to be patient.  The first version of my maze-solving code was really just code that made the robot follow lines.  A later version would only solve a maze if it never encountered a dead end, and there’s always the version of the code that makes the robot flail about sporadically.  So be patient, and don’t try to tackle the whole project at once.  Get little pieces to work, and use that to build off of.  I in no way assert to be the authority on robotics, but I have learned a thing or two.

Oh, also precise names.  Don’t go calling methods “dog” or “cat”.

Download the code here.

Here I made a video explaining in general terms how the robot stays on track when following a wall:

So you may want the code to mess around with, and if you do then you’re in luck!  Not only is there a link to download the code at the bottom of this post, but I also recorded two videos of me explaining it, or attempting to anyway.   Warning: It may be a little boring!

In this video I explain the defines, whose values you can change to make the robot behave differently:

In this video I explain how the rest of the code works:

(Note:  I found an error in the deadEndInSight method.  I fixed it incorrectly on video, but it should be right in the download below.)