When: During the normal March PARTS meeting (3/3/2012)
Meeting starts at 10:30am; we’ll probably start building at 11 or 11:30am after a short presentation and show-n-tell

Who: You!  But, we’re limited to only 12 boards + a couple extra.  First come first serve.

Cost: $7

Bring:

• A small desk lamp is very helpful
• Magnification is very helpful (the smallest parts are 0603)
• We could use a couple more soldering iron stations, power cords, and power strips
• An Ardunio, if you have one, for testing out your sensor.  We’ll have an Arduino or two set up for testing as well.
• A 4-pin 0.1″ jumper cable to connect the female 4-pin 0.1″ spaced square-pin header on the OptiMouse board to your Arduino

Details:
Schematic, layout and BOM here:
ADNX_26XX_Breakout_A_2_boardBuild (PDF)

Eagle files:
ADNS_26XX_Breakout_A_2 (zip)

See you there!

Monty

There were only 14 people present, though many regular members were there. I added Fred to the list, even though he was not present.  I could not easily find an online tool that would determine the center of a set of zipcodes, so I wrote my own using a combination of a geonames.org api and a google maps api and Python.  I basically find the latitude and longitude of each address or centroid of each zipcode; average them all, ignoring spherical distortion since this is a pretty small patch of the Earth; then convert that back into an address.

(Turns out the google maps api does not give the official census bureau zipcode centroid, so I use geonames’ api when all I have is a zipcode.  If I had a full address, I used the google maps api.)

Anyway, the center is surprisingly central east-west but further south than I expected. It’s within 2 miles of PCC Sylvania and also 2 miles north of the I-5 and Hwy217 interchange.

Also interesting is that even though google map’s idea of the center of each zipcode is different from the official center in most cases, the errors all seem to average out, so the address I get just using google’s api is within 0.1 miles of the more accurate one.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100

#
# center_of_zipcodes.py
#
# find address corresponding to center of a set of zipcodes using google maps api
# written by Pete Skeggs, 4/5/2011, for PARTS
# updated 4/13/2011 to use geonames.org API to get true census bureau centroids when just given a zipcode; also, use an address when known and look that up with the google maps api
#
import httplib
import json
import urllib
 
# define functions
 
def ztoll(z):
   conn = httplib.HTTPConnection("api.geonames.org")
   # note: you need to replace 'demo' below with a valid username; I decided not
   # to share mine
   url = "/postalCodeLookupJSON?postalcode=%s&country=US&username=demo" % z
   conn.request("GET", url)
   r = conn.getresponse()
   o = json.load(r)
   c = {'lat' : 0, 'lng' : 0}
   # format returned:
   #{"postalcodes":[{"adminName2":"Multnomah","adminCode2":"051","postalcode":"97210","adminCode1":"OR","countryCode":"US",
   # "lng":-122.703348,"placeName":"Portland","lat":45.530318,"adminName1":"Oregon"}]}
   c['lat'] = o[u'postalcodes'][0][u'lat']
   c['lng'] = o[u'postalcodes'][0][u'lng']
   c['addr'] = z
   return c
 
def addrtoll(addr):
   conn = httplib.HTTPConnection("maps.googleapis.com")
   url = "/maps/api/geocode/json?address=%s&sensor=false" % urllib.quote_plus(addr)
   conn.request("GET", url)
   r = conn.getresponse()
   o = json.load(r)
   c = {'lat' : 0, 'lng' : 0}
   # format returned:
   # { "status": "OK", "results": [{"types":["postal_code"],"formatted_address":"Portland, OR 97210, USA",
   # "address_components":[{"long_name":"97210","short_name":"97210","types":["postal_code"]},
   # {"long_name":"Portland","short_name":"Portland","types":["locality","political"]},
   # {"long_name":"Oregon","short_name":"OR","types":["administrative_area_level_1","political"]},
   # {"long_name":"UnitedStates","short_name":"US","types":["country","political"]}],
   #"geometry":{"location":{"lat":45.5552753,"lng":-122.7384041},"location_type":"APPROXIMATE",
   #"viewport":{"southwest":{"lat":45.5158719,"lng":-122.7897450},"northeast":{"lat":45.5858230,"lng":-122.6920030}},
   #"bounds":{"southwest":{"lat":45.5158719,"lng":-122.7897450},"northeast":{"lat":45.5858230,"lng":-122.6920030}}}}]}
   c['lat'] = o[u'results'][0][u'geometry'][u'location'][u'lat']
   c['lng'] = o[u'results'][0][u'geometry'][u'location'][u'lng']
   c['addr'] = o[u'results'][0][u'formatted_address']
   return c
 
def lltoz(lat, lng):
   conn = httplib.HTTPConnection("maps.googleapis.com")
   url = "/maps/api/geocode/json?latlng=%f,%f&sensor=false" % (lat, lng)
   conn.request("GET", url)
   r = conn.getresponse()
   o = json.load(r)
   addr = o[u'results'][0][u'formatted_address']
   return addr
 
# define variables
 
# list of zipcodes for PARTS members at April 2011 meeting
addresses = [
"97007",
"97210",
"97223",
"97034",
"97202",
"97232",
"97224",
"97071",
"97219",
"97086",
"97224",
"97211",
"97006",
"97224",
"97225",
"97229"]
lat = 0
lng = 0
count = 0
 
# main code
 
for a in addresses:
   if len(a) == 5:
      c = ztoll(a)
   else:
      c = addrtoll(a)
   print "%d. %s: %f, %f" % (count+1, c['addr'], c['lat'], c['lng'])
   lat = lat + c['lat']
   lng = lng + c['lng']
   count = count + 1
 
lat = lat / count
lng = lng / count
print "average of %d zipcodes: lat %f, lng %f" % (count, lat, lng)
print "address at center: %s" % lltoz(lat, lng)

This yields the following output (using a valid geonames.org username — you need to register for one of your own):

~$ python center_of_zipcodes.py
1. 97007: 45.450489, -122.865171
2. 97210: 45.530318, -122.703348
3. 97223: 45.447390, -122.795294
4. 97034: 45.409263, -122.684721
5. 97202: 45.484007, -122.636534
6. 97232: 45.528712, -122.636310
7. 97224: 45.409448, -122.801400
8. 97071: 45.144617, -122.858342
9. 97219: 45.457956, -122.707380
10. 97086: 45.444600, -122.537200
11. 97224: 45.409448, -122.801400
12. 97211: 45.565259, -122.644815
13. 97006: 45.520130, -122.860376
14. 97224: 45.409448, -122.801400
15. 97225: 45.498473, -122.778659
16. 97229: 45.548317, -122.827561
average of 16 zipcodes: lat 45.453617, lng -122.746244
address at center: 6655 SW Kingsview Ct, Tigard, OR 97223, USA
~$

Scott’s bringing the hot-plate reflow system and I’m bringing the parts.  You bring whatever parts you might have already gotten from me, some magnifying device if needed, a soldering iron (if you have one) and some cash if you haven’t paid for parts yet.

We’ll be at the bRainSilo:
bRainSilo.  7pm.

http://brainsilo.org/wiki/Location

See you there!

Monty

Cat uploaded a video she took of my dual brushbot avoiding / attacking objects, during the November 15 group project meeting.  See the PARTS flickr pool.

Here are links to most of them:

http://engineeringtv.com/blogs/etv/archive/2008/05/15/galileo-wheel.aspx
http://www.chilloutzone.to/video/regenwurm-roboter.html
http://io9.com/5637131/robot-opera-is-less-madame-butterfly-more-oops-i-dropped-a-butterfly-screw
http://www-robotics.cs.umass.edu/Robots/UBot-5
http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/geek-builds-functional-wall-e-robot-using-lego
http://io9.com/5474788/the-diy-high+speed-camera-that-is-about-to-change-your-life
http://www.dinofab.com/videos.html
http://www.mikrokopter.com/ucwiki/en/MikroKopter?action=show&redirect=FrontPage
http://www.k2.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/movies/index-e.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WCx8_voRzY

-Pete

A small group of us have been regularly getting together every other Monday night at the bRainSilo to work on swarm bots.  We’d love to have more people come join us — especially if you built one of the BrushBotComm boards a while back!  We’re at the point where we have bidirectional IR comm code working and want to try it out w/ larger swarms.

This get together is not just about swarm bots though — rather than toiling away alone in the basement on that killer new robot, why not bring it down and work on it in the company of other robot enthusiasts?

7pm, bRainSilo: http://brainsilo.org/wiki/Location

Hope to see you there!

Monty

Scott Dixon will fill in details of how to use it.  Enjoy!

Have a great Labor Day!

Monty

See you there,

Monty

And if you DO have brushbots, bring them down and let’s get them talking!

7pm, bRainSilo:
http://brainsilo.org/wiki/Location

Hope to see you there!

Monty