Fighting with computers

Once in a while I need to mark exams. Exams do not tend to please students and marking exams is rarely a task anyone enjoys doing. But I cannot change that. What we do later is what I was trying to change for a while: For some years I have been using Scribd as a platform to make available the marked exams to my students. As I did not have a better tool, I started by doing the scan of the big pile of exams to later make it available as a document they can browse on the web (but not download). Making all the exams available to all the students is a liability that created me no trouble so far, but I can see privacy concerns plus fear of putting too much information in the hands of the students. To address the privacy concerns I did not made the document visible or public, but private so only those with the secret URL could browse it. On top of that, marked exams were kept available for a couple of weeks before being deleted. The idea of a student being able to review the whole marki...

I have wasted a fair amount of time today with a problem I solved the way I recommend to others: use a library. I needed to do a polygon offsetting in a program and I used what has worked for me in the past, the Java Topology Suite. I did my thing and it almost worked perfectly: However, I noticed a minor artifact once in a while. After some time I found that offset would sometimes did not work well as a weird line would appear crossing (line between to small circles) my beloved pumpkin instead or remaining on the outside (horizontal crossing was expected though). I as not trying to do a full offset but only of the part whose normals is between 0 and 180 degrees, as this project is related to 3d milling.  After a few hours of testing it all came down to a defect on the library (as far as I can tell) because with the same input data, but a smaller offset value, the operation was succesful as you can see below: I was unable to find a proper forum to ask other us...

Following my previous post about using an Arduino for controlling a DC motor with an encoder in a closed-loop fashion some people have asked me if one Arduino per motor was not too expensive. Well, if you use an Arduino Pro Mini it can be less than $2 each. However, I do feel too that maybe we can do better. The main reason of my initial approach was that I had several signals that need to be handled fast-enough. On one hand, the quadrature encoder of the motor provides two pulsing signals that are used to know the current location of the motor shaft. This is accomplished by counting pulses, if not done fast enough, missed pulses will translate into position errors (and we are going closed-loop instead of using steppers to avoid exactly this same problem). On the other hand, the motor controller has to be able to receive pulses from the main controller (an Arduino Mega running Marlin) that control the motion of the motor. These pulses can be quite short and frequent (up to 40K...