FYI, the Halloween page is officially done. I have updated the About Us section. Also I have my Apache server redirecting all Tiger CAM visitors to the Halloween page from now until after Halloween is over. This is my first time playing with mod_rewrite in a .htaccess file. 
Seems to work like a charm. If the page looks funky to you, do a Ctrl + F5 to refresh your browser’s cache.
Visit the Halloween page at http://halloween.gliebetronics.com
The past few days I have been working on things for Halloween. Mainly the snapshot cam system. I tell you that thing is out to kill me. It’s cursed! Posessed! Infected with a virus maybe? Every time I fix some little glitch, something else more important breaks! It’s been driving me MAD! I could have redesigned and rebuilt it all from scratch by now! Today I was ready to do my final test at night to be sure the light settings were correct. But earlier the dual head video card in the CheezePix computer decided today was the day to DIE. It now had bad memory and it crashes the computer or displays random green vertical lines on both screens. GRRRRRRR!!!!.
I tried using 2 PCI/AGP cards but CheezePix requires that the monitors be a streached desktop across two screens. Not 2 seperate desktops, also known as spanned horizontally. There is a difference. The ONLY way to make it work is to have a dual head video card and I am all out of those. 
So I drove down to PCClub and bought the cheapest nVidia card of this type. After I got home I realized it had a DVI-D connector and not a DVI-I connector. DVI-D is digital OLNY, so you can’t use a DVI to VGA dongle. I took it back right away and exchanged it for an even cheaper ATI card. This one works! It cost me $40. What bad timing.
Once the CheezePix system was back up I replaced the camera’s wall-wart powersupply with a AT powersupply. That seemed to have removed most of the interference in the composite video image.
At this moment Hagitha, Snapshot Cam, and Shaun are all tested and working. FINALLY! Something about this year is really difficult. I hope everything works well on the day of halloween.
Update:
I have encoded a short 6MB video clip of local news coverage about the closure of MicroSkills. (The video is an Xvid AVI)
http://blogserver.gliebetronics.com:800/microskills/microskills.avi
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I got notice of this two days ago but I wanted to be sure it was for real before posting about it. I was up at my friends Condo on Friday and I checked my e-mail. I got this…
From: Info@microskills.com
Subject: Microskills
We regret to inform you that MicroSkills has ceased operations effective October 20, 2006.
Please do not respond to this e-mail. Effective Monday, October 23, you may contact Richard Kipperman, at rmk@corpmgt.com.
You may also be contacted directly by the Bureau for Private Postsecondary Vocational Education (BPPVE). Their website is www.bppve.ca.gov.
I’ve looked at the e-mail headder info and it did come from the MicroSkills Exchange server, aparently right before they took it all totally offline. Today it seems they have a basic web page up with the same message if you go to http://microskills.com. I don’t know what happened. This was very sudden and unexpected. They have been showing a lot of TV ad’s lately so everything seemed ok. I liked MicroSkills. The students and instructors were great. I really enjoyed my time there.
One thing I want to make clear is I personally have not been ripped off in any way. I have long since paid my money to them and I have completed all the classes and passed all my certification exams that were in my contract. In fact as far as I know I was the only student EVER to have actually completed their ITP’s 1 through 4. I even got my free copy of Server 2003 Enterprise. (Thanks Tommy!) I was already finished with MicroSkills before they closed. However their job placement guy was still helping me with finding a job. In fact right now we were in the process of trying to arrange an interview for me at a company. I will have to contact that company myself and see what I can do now.
I am saddeden that they have closed because it was a great school and I’m sure there were a lot of active students there that are now screwed. If I ever find out more about why this has happened I will post it here.
Goodbye MicroSkills, we will miss you all.
For info about other technical vocational colleges in San Diego, visit http://www.sandiegocomputertrainingschools.com. I have sent a couple e-mails to the guy that runs that site a couple times in the past. It’s a good site for seeing what’s going on with these schools.
No, I’m knott..err..not spelling things wrong. My friends and I had planned a trip to go up to Knott’s Berry Farm to experience the night time event of Halloween Haunt. In mostly October Knott’s is open from 10:00AM to 5:00PM for normal daytime stuff. Then they close and setup for Halloween Haunt then reopen at 7:00PM to 1 or 2AM. Our group of people dwindled from 11 people to 7 people. 4 of us had purchased non-refundable tickets online ahead of time. The other 3 people did not and were going to but them at the ticket booth.
Well we all piled in a van and drove all the way to Knott’s only to see a BIG sign that said “Tonight’s event is SOLD OUT.” GRRRRRRRR!!!!! We found free parking outside the park and walked over to the park. After talking to the guest relations people they agreed to exchange our 4 Internet tickets that were specifically tied to each person by name and only good for that specific night for what I called Sympathy tickets. They are Daytime only admission tickets good for any time in the next year.
After getting that all sorted out we all went over to Claim Jumpers across the street and had a really great dinner. I had a burger called the Widow Maker. Mmm avocado. We had a great time. After dinner we drove allllllllllll the way back to the condo here in SD. Somehow we got on the subject of how those little green glow sticks work; Scott, John, and I then proceeded to dissect one in the bathroom and tested various household products in order to determine what exactly makes it glow. Peroxide worked the best. Turns out the glow stick contains a much more concentrated peroxide which reacts with a particular acid and die to glow.
So, I started the day expecting to go on the Xcelerator and ended up in the bathroom doing chemistry experiments. O_o
I can’t say that I’m not disappointed that we were unable to go to Knott’s, but the evening was still fun and we had a lot of laughs. I am looking forward to using the Day passes real soon. We have to go up there!
Yesterday and today I worked on Hagitha. She’s being bad. I have been having a lot of troubles with the Snapshot Cam system.
Warning: Technobabble
While I was messing with it, the relay for the sprayer solinoid fused and got stuck on. I replaced the reed in that relay and found the old one to be blackened from too much arcing. The Soliniod coil was acting like a really big inductor coil. This means that the moment power is switched off to the solinoid, it kicks back a massive burst of current in the reverse direction in the ammount of hundreds of volts. I put a Neon bulb across the coil and it flashes. That’s acusing arcing across the relay reeds. So I added a little diode across the coil to kill the evil induction pulse. That worked for a while when the diode failed closed and caused a short, fusing yet another relay reed. OY!!! I replaced the reed and swapped out the diode for a beefier diode. Then shortly after the xbox controller developed a cold soldier joint somewhere and that caused the very same relay and soliniod to pulse on and off rapidly. So then I had to take apart the controller and fix that.
I’ve had lots of other problems with this particular system on the computer end. Mostly having to do with timing and trigger sensitivity being way too high. For a while it was so sensitive that EMI from turning on and off a flouresent light in the room would trigger a picture to be taken! Now I have worked out all the bugs and it seems to be behaving much better. Lets hope it all works on halloween
End Technobabble
In other news, tomorrow I am going up to knott’s Scarry Farm with a group of friends. We’re going to the 7:00PM to 2:00AM park opening for all the scarry stuff.
I have finished my hallowen page more or less. Check it out by clicking the link below.
Also be sure to visit the page on Halloween to see live video of the trick or treaters and the Snapshot cam pics.
Shaun of the Dead, one of our Halloween attractions, now has a brain. He now runs at 4MHz and has 2KB of memory. LOL. In the past years Shaun has run on basic relays and stuff. It was pretty cludgy and now I rebuilt him from scratch. I replaced most of the wood that holds it all togeather. I moved the piston to the center and fabricated a new U bracket to connect the piston to the swing arm that can take the intense forces. Mark and Jesse say they would like to be able to manually control when Shaun pops up while retaining the automated IR sensor feature as well.
I took it a step further and I added not only a remote trigger with a manual override, but a “Service Mode” switch and features to let Shaun fall back down even if people are still blocking the IR sensor. The Service switch switches between Normal Operation and Service Mode. When in Service Mode Shaun will still function normally except the piston and sound effects are disabled. Instead you hear simple tones played out of a PC speaker to indicate when Shaun would be going up or going down. Too many times in the past have we been nearly slapped silly or thrown on our asses by Shaun poping up and going AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! unexpectedly while adjusting him or his IR sensor.
Here’s some pics of the NEW Shaun. I designed the schematic for the PCB yesterday and I fabricated it, programmed it, and installed it all today. I think it came out rather nice.
I have been working on all the halloween stuff for the past few weeks. Got it all down and started setting it up. Today Mark and Jesse were over and we worked on the compressed air connections and brainstormed a few ideas on how to improve things. Yesterday Jesse was here too and we worked out a better solution for Hagitha’s arm piston problems. Basically pistons don’t function correctly without sufficient resistance. We created some elastic straps that pull down on the arms.
I’m going to be adding a feature to the automated Shaun of the Dead so that we can control him manually from a distance or let the IR sensor trip him automatically like before. Shaun also needs a rebuild in some areas. He’s kind of got this annoying tendancy to snap heads off of critical screws that keep him from killing innocent bystanders. hehe heh. :-/
The snapshot cam system is nearly done. It’s had quite a few quirky glitches to work out. You’d think that taking a picture would be a simple process but it’s not. There’s a lot of timing to do with the flash and refreshing the images and overlay stuff and camera settings, and bla bla bla.
If you’re reading all of this and you have no idea what I’m blabing about, go to our halloween web page on halloween night to see what’s going on. I’ll post the link here closer to Halloween.
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