Gene sent me the first camera stand and bracket today. I am actually to the point now where I have enough mechanical items to start doing some more bean testing, but as I feared, I have now become the bottleneck. I have decided Flask and Python are probably not the tools I want to use for the machine interface server, so I am switching over to Node.js. I am trying out the Visual Studio Code IDE to develop the app. So far (which is not very far), I am very impressed with it all and think it will make the whole enterprise easier to develop, deploy, maintain and extend. I might change my mind after I get a little deeper, but so far so good.
Thanks Gene!
I am stuck. Over the last week and a half, I have either stayed at the same place or actually even gained weight. I talked to the Physician’s Assistant at my annual checkup last week about it. She said that after losing this weight over an extended period my metabolism has slowed down and I am going to have to change things up to keep going down. She also said (and this was my original plan) that I have about twenty pounds to go. I have been averaging a good chunk under 700 calories per day for several months now so I really do not want to reduce the amount I eat any more. I think what I would like to do is actually increase my caloric intake up to 900-1000 calories and start exercising more. There are so many things on which I want to work that I use the idea that I don’t have enough time to get to the gym, but that is completely bogus. I have identified a program that looks like it might work for me and purchased the (e)book. We will see what happens.
Trisha rightly the, shall we say, more cavalier and less histrionic, mothering methods of my upbringing as related to health issues. The advice tended toward the “toughen up and quit whining” variety of sympathetic mothering (see 
Gene made the camera mount for our camera stand. This should drop write into our prototype. Progress continues. I know he is really busy, so I appreciated this a lot. We are moving forward on several fronts right now. I think I am going to be the bottle neck fairly quickly so I have decided to continue down that path of working out the UI so we can get an embedded bean-drop controller setup for both Montana and Texas before I continue on to any more control stuff. Kelly is going to help us by developing and implementing a market survey that, if this thing looks at all promising, we will continue each year while it is still interesting.
Kelly got all four wisdom teeth removed today. After weeks of histrionics, it turned out to be about a 40 minute affair where they actually gave her the same kind of anesthetic given to guys my age who go in for what used to be quite an uncomfortable procedure, but these days, because of the wonders of modern drugs, is actually quite pleasant and restful. At any rate, Kelly’s Mexican mother is up in Seattle doing the Mexican mother thing (you have to see it to truly understand the magnitude of it all) while I remain safely in Centralia safely away from it all.
The indicator light tower for the bean sorting project arrived today. Really nice, but really cheap, too. I hope it works when I hook it up. Honestly, I had gotten pretty burnt out on all the user interface programming I was doing and, combined with a ton of stuff going on at my day job and a trip to Canada, I was getting a little weary and was planning to take a break. Then, some new hardware came in the mail and I realized I was not going to be able to hook it up and get it going until I finish with some UI enhancements, bug fixes, and robustification.
Lorena and I are back from Burnaby. Somehow, I managed to stay on my diet while on the road and actually lost a little weight. When I got back, I had dropped enough weight that I passed one of my important thresholds and am now over 40 lbs. lighter and two thirds of the way to my stated goal. The picture here is of me now with Kiwi in the picture for comparison. Now than I am down a bit, it is getting obvious I need to drop an additional 10-15 lbs. more than my original plan. I just do not have as much muscle mass as I did when I was in my thirties. All good. Hopefully, I will be able to get back into weight lifting again before too long and build a little of that back. For now, I will have to continue to relegate myself to walking.
Things have not slowed down much now, even though the new floor installations are complete. We have moved my office from the double size room at one end of the upstairs to the other end of the upstairs in a much smaller room. We then moved the guest bedroom furniture and some other pieces into the big room. Actually, we think it will work out quite well. I like it a lot. We put the hide-a-bed in there, so I have a sofa for reading and for Lorena to use while I am working. We will need to get some blinds for the room because of the glare problem in the office and privacy in the now very big guest bedroom.
The floors are all in. Thankfully, we are done with hardwood floor installation for awhile and maybe even forever in this house. That does not mean the house is not still in complete upheaval. Lorena wants to paint the master bedroom before we put anything back into it. Then we have a ton of furniture moving and reassembly as well as some trips to the dump and Good Will. Seeing all the rooms in an uncluttered state inspired us to realize we still have too much “stuff.” In this last series of moves between North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, and Texas, we rid ourselves of much of it, but there is still a lot to go. If our goal is to truly downsize in the house after this one, then it will be quite a big job. There is just so much stuff we carry around that we will never, ever use again.
It was a long and busy day today. I expected it to slow down, but work poured in right at quitting time and I am just finishing up what was possible to finish. The good news is that the relays to control the LED’s for the bean sorter project arrived today. They are small, cheap and should be perfect for this project, but not as the strobe control I/O’s we need. They are mechanical relays that can switch at a maximum rate of 10ms to active and 5ms to inactive. That is way to slow for what we want to do. The good news about the bad news though is that I thought I was only getting one board, but I got two and I will be able to use them to do a lot of the development work while I wait for some faster solid state switches AND I will be able to use them in the product to control the indicator lights that show machine status.
The browser based GUI for the bean sorting project is now up and running and being served from the Raspberry Pi. I only have one camera running right now because I only have one camera, but it does all the things that need to be done. There is a lot underneath the hood on this thing, so it should serve as a good base for other embedded machine vision projects beside this one.
Lorena, Kelly, and friends might have gotten to go to dinner and a live musical, but I ate dinner with the true stars of the show: Bob and Larry.
Kelly and her roommate Shani are taking their mothers to dinner and a musical tonight. Mama Mia. Should be memorable.