Root Access

Ok I'll be more specific

It's like "I want to build a car with a bolt. Is it strong enough?"

2 mins ago, by Bob

If you just want something to wave its hand, the majority of your job is making a frame/bodyshell for it.

it also depends on how much overhead the code has

Adding the motor would be almost the last step. And even then it's probably going to be a basic servo.

1:05 PM

higher level runtimes and languages and middleware layers decrease the amount of bang for your CPU/RAM buck

A robot with basic movements, like moving with wheels and so on

if it's just a robot waving its hand, you can probably do that with raspberry pi even if you wrote it in Java or something

since that's a really, really simple action

You need something to control, before you care too much about what's going to control it.

Building a control system without a subject/target would be rather pointless.

@Bob what do you mean?

@JuanRocamonde: Lets say you had a motor. You'd need something that would supply power to the motor. With something that big, you probably need say, a H bridge and relays. Your raspi would end up controlling the relays

1:06 PM

I just wanna play around with it

anything dynamic where you're reading sensor data or driving fine-grained values at a high rate of change is going to require more power, but probably nothing an rPi2 couldn't handle

@allquixotic You could probably do that with a fully analog circuit.

@JuanRocamonde Get a Lego Mindstorms kit.

@allquixotic so I will need a separate power input for the motors and another for the RPI?

@allquixotic so I will need a separate power input for the motors and another for the RPI?

I'm not talking about power in terms of energy; I'm talking power in terms of computation power

1:08 PM

@JuanRocamonde: If you need to ask that...

after that question...

You need to do your homework

You don't seem to intend to put much effort into the rather complicated job of building the hardware from scratch.

@JuanRocamonde Get a Lego Mindstorms kit.

perfectly valid suggestion. and not insultin by any means

Feeding say, the power for a wheelchair motor... would end up with a nice charred raspi.

1:08 PM

@JourneymanGeek it just depends of the weight of the pieces

...do we have an echo in here? :P

...

yes

(yes)

I just reposted the suggestion to use Lego Mindstorms kit.

1:09 PM

Ok thank you all for your attention

@JuanRocamonde Again: think about the hardware first.

yeah. I think mindstorms or some smaller kit would be a good place to start.

Ok! :P

In fact I feel tempted to buy one for myself

Not even - think about what you want it to do. When you build from scratch, you need a purpose.

1:10 PM

can anyone tell is that bad?

If you just want to play around as an absolute beginner - stick with kits.

@Bob it is just to play around with it

In my free time

@Bob sounds like my decision to !!hv earlier was spot on

Nothing but experimenting

what is !!hv?

1:10 PM

@JuanRocamonde If you just want to play around and start with absolutely no plan or idea, you'll get absolutely nowhere.

so I ask

Get a kit. Follow guides.

@Bob yes making a robot :-)

Set a goal

Starting from scratch needs a plan.

@JuanRocamonde That's far too vague.

1:11 PM

!!tell 20833465 no

ChatBot John Cavil

"I want a robot that looks like X and can do Y" would be better, but still vague.

In fact, forget the word "robot".

😂😂😂😂😂

You just want a machine that does something.

The typical robot as pointed in the kit someone up there was suggesting

1:12 PM

you have to make a specification, at least in your head, or ideally on paper, for what you are trying to achieve, in detail, in terms of functionality.... even if you are just experimenting

@smc I have a Mindstorms kit. It's nice for beginners - you can experiment a lot, and it's pretty easy to build the sample designs and modify them.

google.es/…

And the control brick is pretty versatile if you chuck custom firmware on it.

Actually, we even ended up using it in a Uni-level introductory engineering course.

if you don't want to design the specifications yourself then get a kit and follow guides; it won't be creatively your idea but you'll acquire knowledge of the technology and how to do it

@JuanRocamonde There's no such thing as a typical robot.

1:13 PM

which might end up eventually giving you ideas for how to make one from scratch

It's like saying "the typical animal" - it's such a wide range it's not even funny!

yup.

@Bob, I am full-time employed microelectronic engineer. I do engineering for life... I still want to buy that Mindstorm kit... Is that wrong?

You have androids, that look and behave kinda like humans. You have automated arms, from prosthetics to manufacturing. You have automated vacuum cleaners. Automated warplanes. And far more.

It's such a massive range.

robot dogs snort

1:14 PM

at its core, a robot is basically some kind of physical contraption that moves and does so through some kind of logic or programming, which doesn't even specifically have to be digital (but in these days often is)

@smc: heh. Naw.

@Bob I mean a humanoid robot

@smc The great thing about lego is how easy it is to take the same pieces and move them around for something new.

Clear now?

@JuanRocamonde: let me put this to you. darpa is working on a half sized humanoid robot, and its not quite there yet

1:15 PM

humanoid adds a ton of complexity -- a ridiculous amount, really -- if you want it to behave in any way that is even vaguely resembling human behavior

Walking on two legs is hard

Humanoid not too humanoid

*sigh*

HV indeed. going to work.

Not walking, id replace them with whells

wheels

the rest would be the same

Then its not human

Seriously

@allquixotic: I agree :/

1:16 PM

Ok I do not know how to describe

@JuanRocamonde: That needs to be your starting point

What? the fact of describing?

Yes!

Then designing

then working out the motory bits

Ok, I'll clear my doubts and indecision out and ask for more help when I'm done

Thank you all for your support

1:49 PM

looks like the new surface and surface pro 3 are out?

Or am I just behind the times ;p

microsoftstore.com/store/msuk/en_GB/pdp/Surface-3/…

@JourneymanGeek Uh. Last was Surface 2 and Surface Pro 3

Thoguht they weren't planning to do a Surface 3

o.o

Oh, they did?

oh new theverge.com/2015/3/31/8317597/…

and new gen atom proc?

Except the Surface 3 is an x86 (Atom), not ARM

1:56 PM

yup

Sathya

2:51 PM

hello, April Fools

;p

Welp. There it goes.

Someone went and restarted it.

I give up.

lol

Protip for anyone trying (based off what PCCG seems to be doing): get Qs high, then As high, don't worry about empty, always act on warnings

can anyone explain what !!hv is?

3:00 PM

!!tell 20836946 hv

ChatBot John Cavil

@smc: its a chat bot trigger

!!;p

ChatBot John Cavil

@JourneymanGeek That didn't make much sense. Maybe you meant: ;p

does it come up with a random picture every time?

ekaj

Since school wants to screw me one last time before I graduate, does anyone know where I can find a decent database management class online?

3:05 PM

naw

they're pictures/commands people added to the bot

is allquixotic managing that bot?

@smc yep

lol, stackegg is multiplayer

@allquixotic it's fun-ish until someone comes along and wipes out hours of progress by restarting it -_-

Oliver Salzburg

@allquixotic It's also chaotic

Might be a social experiment

@Bob it takes a voting majority to restart

3:14 PM

@allquixotic When it's just you and one other person, and they win the 50% toss twice...

I'm playing it on StackOverflow with 69 other people

no restarts happening with that many

@allquixotic I kinda wanted to have SU win at least one game

but it looks like that isn't happening

I still did not figure out how to play it

Q: What is the optimal strategy for the launched site in Stack Egg?

we'll finish this at the bottom of the leaderboard :P

20 mins ago, by Bob

Protip for anyone trying (based off what PCCG seems to be doing): get Qs high, then As high, don't worry about empty, always act on warnings

@allquixotic Apparently Cherry Trail is only ~5% faster than Bay Trail... better graphics though.

6

The Stack Overflow instance in particular seems pretty poor. How should it be done to achieve the best performance? How is there such a difference between different sites?

stack-egg

LOL

Oliver Salzburg

Two times already today, I got weird interference noises in my speakers and my currently viewed document scrolled up

3:23 PM

@OliverSalzburg Pretty sure you live near/are the target of some government psychological experiment to see how much frustration a person can take before defenestration of either the person or their equipment occurs.

Oliver Salzburg

I think it's because I'm resting my phone on my computer today

The first time it happened I thought it was a coincidence

@Bob yeah, probably going to get a full scale laptop at some point instead of piddling around with low-end boxen

@allquixotic Low end?! Don't you have a SP(1)?

I want an ASUS rig with a GTX 980M for over $3k that's on my employee pricing site, but don't have the money for it obviously :P

probably waiting for Skylake and whatever latest Radeon/Nvidia and then buy that

lol

3:27 PM

o.o

And here I am buying one with an 860M -_-

Then again, I need to worry about my desktop GPU before my laptop one!

isn't sure what he needs to upgrade ;p

@allquixotic I thought you preferred AMD GPUs?

I'm still pining after the Holy Grail, aka not having a desktop but running a high-end laptop

@allquixotic: !!!

one that's hopefully portable in a wheely suitcase ;p

gotta wait for the right moment to strike at that, though

3:30 PM

(eh, considered that, but my laptops barely gets any use, especially since I use a workstation at work)

@allquixotic: My dream laptop for that's the blade

and its not huge

Skylake; the successor to Maxwell (or the successor to the Radeon R9-290X, haven't decided); 32 GB or more of DDR4; SLI or Crossfire in a laptop; 2 x 2 TB SSDs...

lol

in that case it'll be a clevo ;p

@allquixotic If you don't mind 17", your main issue is probably the storage.

ok. all of you quickly get involved in the stack egg. we cannot afford to have 0 score. SU myst win the internet at least once before the end of the day

Well, that and not being able to run Star Citizen :P

3:32 PM

Prolly worth waiting for pascal if you're going nvidia.

@Bob yup, but I don't need 8 TB, and can settle with 4 with RAID-0

@smc I already gave up after the last reset.

@Bob 2 x 980M in SLI will run star citizen fine, imho

and whatever craziness dx 12/vulkan is bringing

@allquixotic What about say 2 TB in SSD space with LAN/NAS storage at home?

3:32 PM

why do resets happen?

@smc Because some dumbass clicks reset twice in a row.

@Bob maybe, except my "LAN" is the smartphone-of-the-month :P

lol

is it someone consciously sabotagin the game?

maybe.

3:33 PM

we just need more people to keep a reset from occurring

@smc Not sure if it's intentional sabotage, or someone who thinks "YOU STARTED WITHOUT ME I MUST RESTART IT"

@allquixotic: heh. I got an email from my ISP about the Samsung S6

Actually, it's not very clear in the beginning that it's multiplayer.

yep

1.2K for a off contract phone 0_0

3:34 PM

took me a while to figure it out

@JourneymanGeek $1200 USD? oh, right, Singapore

I'll stick to my mid/low end stuff ;p

SGD

I'm not interested in the S6 anyway

@JourneymanGeek The trick is not getting the S6.

It sucks anyway.

that's still more than I'm willing to pay for a phone ;p

3:35 PM

it's basically a Moto phone with delayed Android updates now

yeah, the S6 is an epic fail

everything that made the "S" good is gone

Samsung had a good thing going... annnnd ruined it.

@Bob: Prolly the next phone will be a one plus, if its available here, or some moto.

@JourneymanGeek One Plus has some pretty serious QC issues :\

if they make the Note 5 so that the battery can't be replaced and remove MicroSD, I'm going to somehow get myself into Samsung HQ and flip over every table I see

then meet the CEO and blast at him, "What were you THINKING???????????????????"

Moto is now associated with Lenovo and therefore anathema.

3:36 PM

Or whatever my next phone company has reasonably, since I may jump ship if myrepublic starts doing phones

@Bob: Xiaomi's hw is alright, price is good, but they skin their android apple style.

damn, stackoverflow is winning the internet

@JourneymanGeek Hm. CM?

they have Qs and As up to 4 hearts

Donno, new phone is a year or two away. The moto G is awesome.

Xiaomi also has Chinese backdoors in the firmware :P

3:37 PM

@Bob: maybe, but I try not to reflash until my next phone ;p

@allquixotic As opposed to the US backdoors in other phones? :P

@Bob Unproven ;)

;p

One day US and Chinese backdoors will clash and brick every phone.

Or create Skynet. One of those.

Well, I plan purchases ahead

3:42 PM

@JourneymanGeek Ok finally starting to use the full Pistons :P

Still considering the 3.0 ones... someone slap me

The chocolate smell is a bit strong though.

lol

@JourneymanGeek Did you get the brown ones?

I didn't really notice the smell on my silver ones

nope

And I only got one pair ;p

@JourneymanGeek There's no smell on those :P

The brown ones have a chocolate smell in the cable.

chocolate's not for dogs anyway ;p

3:44 PM

It's interesting, and kinda nice, but now feels gimicky :P

I would have waited if I'd known the 3.0s were coming out

@JourneymanGeek Probably same here :P

But it wasn't widely announced until ~~last~~ this week.

Ah well.

;p

(but the pistons are good)

True. And 3.0 might be worse.

@JourneymanGeek Which size cone are you using? :P

4:18 PM

The one the headphones came with

tried the triflanges but didn't like em

didn't try the other 2

@JourneymanGeek ...they had tri?

HackToHell

4:46 PM

Blah I have a Windows 8.1 Pro N license key and I have Windows 8.1 WMC Installed

4:56 PM

OMG

StackOverflow is close to winning the internet

5:10 PM

so close

@allquixotic halp on SU egg? :D

need to keep answers/downvotes at max, but someone keeps voting upvotes

urk

nooooo another person joined voting upvote

come on so close and we're gonna fail again -_-

...oh come on not again

...I give up

...just checked in, whoever was voting against me has managed to lose all three traffic hearts we had

urk

oh more users now

yay, probably even fewer can figure out the requirement!

@Bob :(

@allquixotic help us! :P

too tired atm, lol

people keep trying to raise the users count... except it's completely useless :(

hehe

jokerdino

5:23 PM

what is going on?

Q: What is the optimal strategy for the launched site in Stack Egg?

@jokerdino april fools thingo

2 hours ago, by Bob

6

The Stack Overflow instance in particular seems pretty poor. How should it be done to achieve the best performance? How is there such a difference between different sites?

stack-egg

jokerdino

Oh. It's already April.

wow, 73 users playing on SO

some numbskull keeps trying to raise users even when it's not lowest

probably thinks upvoting feels good

this isn't real SE, it's a game and it can be gamed now help us game it please :P

it took SO 468 days to win the internet

5:29 PM

we're on 380 and I swear someone is sabotaging us by voting the least useful

great, users somehow got to 4

this reminds me of twitch plays pokemon

5:48 PM

what linux distro would you guys recomend for use on a low resources vmware player VM?

@KD8NXH How low, and what will it be used for?

I had Lubuntu working with 256 MB of RAM to use as a terminal & SSH client

Debian's default desktop environment didn't like the RAM limit. Works with 512 MB though.

about 500 mb ram

I use Fedora 21 on a VM with 4 GB :P

@allquixotic One week till new laptop with 16 GB RAM :D

@Bob nice!

5:52 PM

Then I can expand these VMs a little

I'm pretty sure I'd rather have a 17" with all the bells and whistles (and GPUs, and SSDs) than to have a Surface Pro 4 and a desktop

=> logicalblueone.com.au/store/… => + 16 GB RAM + 750 GB HDD + spare battery + Win8.1Pro

literally taking my desktop with me when I go places... well, somewhat cumbersome, but nothing that a suitcase on wheels can't solve

= ~$2000

@Bob I would like to do some linux distro development with linux from scratch

5:53 PM

@allquixotic Yea, 17" is too big. Even 15" is a bit bigger than I'd like.

Though I'm not too sure about that res on 13"... text is gonna be tiny :D

@KD8NXH As in, you want to create a distro?

In that case... why are you asking for a distro recommendation? Doesn't that kinda defeat the purpose of "from scratch"?

yes, more or less.

@allquixotic Always Intel wifi cards when I can :P

They're consistent, and the drivers don't suck.

no it does not when i need a vm based platform to built the lfs on @Bob

@KD8NXH Wouldn't more resources help, then?

my laptop only has 3 gb ram

5:56 PM

ouch

yea, that's not an environment I'd run VMs in o.o

yep

considered dual-booting?

did that a few times and didnt like it

@Bob about how much ram does lubuntu use normaly

@KD8NXH I squeezed it into 256 MB.

I don't think it booted the graphical environment in 128.

You can get Debian into 128 if you do a text-only minimal install.

If you want a graphical environment, you'll have a hard time getting it lower than 256.

TinyCoreLinux might work but it's more limited than standard distros

what about kubuntu?

or xubuntu?

6:02 PM

KDE is heavy.

Xubuntu might work but it won't be much lighter than Lubuntu, if any

That Brazilian Guy

@KD8NXH Lubuntu 14.10 w/ Firefox running uses ~ 240 MB

@ThatBrazilian WOW thats great

That Brazilian Guy

I was just talking it to a coworker 5 min ago ;P

what about linux mint?

That Brazilian Guy

I have no experience with it

6:13 PM

debian?

@Bob what about opensuse?

6:33 PM

@KD8NXH openSUSE is actually fairly heavy

@DragonLord what do you mean by fairly?

Has relatively high memory and disk requirements even for a minimal installation.

leds then 500 mb ram? @DragonLord

6:52 PM

@allquixotic If you're planning to get a 17" laptop... are you going to lug it around? :P

Also, those seem a little big to actually use on your lap (or in bed)... they're more something you set up on a proper desk

rlemon

7:29 PM

@Bob I "lug" around my 17"

fits in my lap fine.

haven't tried it in bed.

ioSamurai

anyone seen anything like this before superuser.com/questions/896359/…

@Bob ya

Michael Frank

7:50 PM

@Bob Got that Win key I was looking for. Took about 20 minutes for the guy to respond to my PM with payment instructions. $35AUD for a Win 7 Ultimate key.

KronoS

8:11 PM

we suck at the stackegg game

@ioSamurai these thing shouldnt/usually dont start flashing even unless the flash was designed for the hole it is going into :-) nowdays any flashing should be careful enough to verify prior that it would fail before beginning to destruct :-)

Then your flashing tool here looks all GUI in the OS style, and IF there are a lot of problems flashing it is often the "windows" in system methods that are more likely to have problems. and the cruddy boot to a bootable USB type stuff dos like methods are usually recommended. . . with much of this stuff cross brands even.

The question itself needs the hardware/motherboard that your doing listed in the question, if you do solve it, it would really help others searching for the same thing. The software used for the flash should also exist in (at least) the answer too.

@KronoS I got this under control.

It certannly would not have to be a malware or virus issue to have BullPuckey like this happen :-)

9:23 PM

"I believe that the problem is that the power connector was connected to the X-Dock backwards" (#8: forums.hexus.net/chassis-mods/… ) Poster #8 claims the plug is reversible. Check the pinouts on the dock power plug? — Yorik 24 mins ago

Ouch!

10:20 PM

superuser.com/questions/896423/… what a mess, direct to chat i might start a "help session" to attempt to provde clues which can assist the person into fixing thier own computer. But answer is out, and comments would be extended, and could very well be wrong some of the time.

I percieve that something like this well documented situation, well written question (minus the unnessisary bolding) becomes a candidate for tossing. with no respect for the user or the time spent writing it.

It is a progressivly added errors by the user , one minor problem (which does not seem minor when it happens to you) then complete freak out mess trying to fix it.

10:59 PM

@Bob The L for me is flanged

11:42 PM

medicalnewstoday.com/articles/290486.php Your computer could be killing you! "If these chips overheat, they could catch fire. TBBPA and TCBPA stop this from happening. " And they have taken all the fun out of it too :-)

We should request that they put back the magic fire, and the ability to run really fast when it happens.

StackEgg: We need to give priority to questions where possible to stabilize the answer stat.