"If It Looks Stupid But It Works, It Ain't Stupid"Me: "Hold My Beer"

"If it looks stupid but it works, it ain't stupid" Me: "Hold my beer"

Have you seen a girl boy

I saw a... WONDERFULL poem that really hit me, but I needed to fix it a bit first, before I send it to my boys .Original from here:

You were dumb, and that is GREAT

The reason you remember yourself as being dumb, and making bad decisions... is because you, now, are smarter than that person was. You have developed your skills, your empathy, your critical thinking. You have grown. You have become a better person. And that is GREAT. That is NOT a sad fact. So keep growing. And hopefully, when future you looks back on you, now, they have gotten better yet again.

The Universal Serial Bus is often not universal...

So there is this problem you often run into when doing development. You come up with a solution. You research the solution, and find only tiny amounts of people talking about it, and/or they seem to say many different things and disagree. Most of the time, that is for 2 reasons 1: it is a very novel solution, so no one have tried it much, and everyone who have, has made very custom versions of it. 2: There are variables that makes it impossible to do it in one single way. I needed a rechargeable battery system to power my robot. These can get... VERY complicated, and pre-made solutions can quickly be expensive and you might end up with batteries catching fire, or destroying the batteries so they can never be used again. You need protections on them, but which kind depends on a bunch of things. I know electronics, but I am mainly a software guy, and I know when I do not know enough about electronics to do it myself. This being such a case. So, I came up with the idea to use powerbanks. One for each steppermotor, and one for the microcontroller(so the noise fromt he motors could not cause issues).If I use ones that can output enough amperage, they should just work and they are cheap. They are meant to be used by normal costumers, so have all the protection needed, and are quite idiot-proof(Which is a very handy thing when you are an idiot, like me) so should be easy to use. But I could not find much info about doing this... and I did not realize I was looking at reason 2. Basically, BECAUSE powerbanks are idiotproof, they do not want to discharge themselves unless there is a real device at the end of the USB cable. So if they cannot detect one, they turn off after about a second. How do they determine if there is a real device? Depends on the power bank.... No really, there is NO standard way to do it, as far as I can tell. And it does not depend on the power bank MODEL. I have 2 identical power banks, bought at the same time, and they do NOT behave the same. Which means that when I connected the powerbanks to supply my system, they (SOMETIMES) did not supply anything. Some check how much current is being drawn, which can be faked with a resistor wasting some power. 500mA was being quoted a lot, but that is more of a "That is probably enough to get it going". Others check for impedance(Basically, also resistance, but from frequency dependent sources). Those can be "faked" by having a coil or a device that acts like one to the faking resistor. I wanted a tiny 5 volt fan to cool the stepper motor drivers anyway, so I had one power bank also power that. That ensured that it actually stayed on (But if I used the other, (identical!) power bank it just turned off anyway). The other one could be connected up directly. If I used the powerbanks lower amperage socket. If I used the high amperage one, it just turned off. So now it works... I have 2 powerbanks for the motors, each with painters tape marking which powerbank and socket to use for what. Took me a week longer than I had hoped to figure all this out and do all the experiments. Sometimes, things that should be simple are just headaches.

So... fun fact, there is a orwellian reference in the CANopen protocol.

We, as humans, made thousands and thousands of robots constantly keep track of how far we are from 1984... just because...

Frustrations

Following other developers, learners and makers are great. It facilitates learning and gives inspiration

But one thing that is often missing from people telling about how it is going, is the failures, frustrations and problems any developer will run into.

For this reason, two of my favorite maker youtube channels are Extractions&Ire (Chemistry) and Code Bullet (machine learning). Because these madlads are brave enough to not just show their process and result, but also their failures, mistakes and errors. And how they overcome them. Not always by learning (Sometimes making a dumb mistake is not really something you can learn from...)

It's good, because it's real.

Code tutorials and guides can give the impression that the normal process of development is "Open IDE, code, fix tiny typo error, compile, success". They don't do it out of malice, but out of a want to be concise. Which is fair.

So I also want to share when things do not go so well. I have programmed Atmel's AVR Chips for quite a while now. But I have done it mostly in microchip studio(former Atmel studio) and a bit in the arduino IDE. A job I am currently applying for, uses visual studio code. Which is fair enough. So to prepare for this specific job, and to acquire this quite good-to-have skill, I want to set that up for myself First things first, since I have not done this before, I cannot know if my code would have a weird error so I want to know everything else is working first. So I write a tiny program which simply have the microcontroller increase a number every 2 seconds and write it to my PC over UART. Takes 2 minutes.... I grab one of my Arduino Nano boards and a USB cable for it. And then... I cannot flash it... Its communication protocol have troubles.

I have seen this before. It is to do with the cables not being correct. If they are USB 2.0, very little magnetic noise can cause trouble. (And you cannot tell if a cable runs USB 2.0 or 3.0 by looking at it... because the universal serial bus is not universal... Insert grump rant here) I then spend an hour finding and trying different USB A to USB B-mini cables. Give up, notes down to buy (and MARK) some USB 3.0 versions for the future. I then grab a Arduino Uni instead, as they use USB B, which is much more resistant to noise... And then spend half an hour trying to find a the cable, as I do not have a lot of them, since... nearly nothing uses them. Finally find it, and yes, the program can now be flashed. So I packed all the cables I tested back in their places, after marking them so I will(hoefully) not have to do this again. Had to take several breaks feeling depressed and grumpy, and all in all, this adventure took 4-5 hours. And now I can START on this... And this is how work sometimes is. And that is ok. It is still... VERY frustrating ...