"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see." Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788 – 1860)
I own one of the most hated Porsche’s ever produced, one of the 911 996 versions produced between 1999 and 2004+, specifically a 2003 911 C4S. I have a serious love/hate relationship with the car, mostly brought on by it’s age and high required maintenance and care.
I’ve been living and eating based on Ketogenic principles for about the last year. I started this lifestyle because over the years I’ve heard the Dr say things like “your blood sugar is borderline high”, “your blood sugar is high” , “You are pre-diabetic”. After following the comments to their logical conclusion: High Blood Sugar to Pre-Diabetes to Diabetes, I did some research into what health researchers seem to recommend for people with Diabetes. As you can see from some of the first videos below, the research seems to be very positive for using the Keto diet to correct blood sugar issues with the interesting side effect of weight loss. After doing a lot of watching and reading I decided that Keto was going to be something for me to try to beat diabetes before I actually had it.
So a year ago I started and wanted to share my “Keto Notes” on how I’m living Keto. The results for me have been really good, results I wasn’t able to get using other methods. I went from 217lbs to about 190lbs, which at 6′ with a large frame is a pretty good weight for me. I did it without starving and still being able to enjoy going out, having a beer and eating tasty foods. Going Keto really breaks down to three things. Continue reading “Eating Keto/Low Carb – One Year In”
My blog has been dormant for a very long time. After leaving my last role a couple of years ago I decided it was time to take some much needed rest, relaxation and re-invigoration time. As I’m getting to the end of this time off and getting re-focused, it seems like a great time to re-invent my online presence for the 4th time. While I’ve been mildly blogging since 2007, I feel like it’s time to start putting pen to paper across a lot of topics. I’ve been gradually writing longer and more thoughtful content but have quickly come to the conclusion that posting to Social Media like Facebook and Twitter, where there are too many people acting a fool, was not going to be the best option for me. Continue reading “Reinvention v3”
We spent about 5 days using all of the knowledge that we acquired building our Vex robot to compete in the robot challenge on the last day. We had most of the core code done by Tuesday afternoon and were able to optimize on Wednesday and a little Thursday morning. The robot was very consistent and even with the air conditioner vent messing with the flame most of the time, it was about to find it’s way out of the maze, find the flame, move to it, blow it out and then give control to Norman to go and get the ball.I’m going to leave the code for the very end of this post because it’s pretty long. Scroll down to the bottom to see the video of the robot going through the contest.
Here is the full front view of our robot.
Continue reading “Complete Mt. Sac Fire Sensing Vex Robot Challenge”
Continue reading “Part 17 – Using IR Sensors for flame and line detection for the Vex”
Continue reading “Part 16 – Ultrasonic Rangefinder and other sensors…”
Continue reading “Part 14 – Building Sensors for your robot”
Continue reading “Part 13 – Distance Sensing with Ultrasonic Sensor and Arduino”
For me this was the missing piece to the platform, being able to do some kind of real-time debugging of values during execution. The Serial. library that comes with the Arduino allows you to interact with it while it’s running, which is great. Besides some of the Serial.print(ln) functions that I showed in quite a bit of the Lab 10 code, this lab work was really focused on getting input through the Serial interface. The code for this exercise is below…. Continue reading “Part 11 – Using the Serial Port”