Back to Journal Contents Page
Today was a new mission, retouching community murals on the East Side that have been defaced by a vandal who targets Mexican-American symbols. Packed a small paintbox and started on Ramon Maldonado's murals at Chicano Park, then proceeded to Holly Power Plant to retouch a mural by Ambray Gonzales, and one of Joe Perez that I had painted.
Except for the cart as vehicle, this is something I have done for almost 15 years, and the technique has been well honed by my poverty and laziness. Still, its been a sad struggle to compete with the forces of destruction to try and maintain the visual richness of our neighborhood.
The new cart is gestating sweetly. I'm slowly beginning to bend the tubes into complex curves, eager not to make any mistake that would waste the pricey stainless tubing.
Barely in time, I honed the suspension design. Starting with a Japanese truck leaf spring with down ward chamber, bent ends with a hole to take the 14 mm axles, a 1/4" stainless plate "fork box" holds the spring in place with a center screw allowing chamber adjustment according to load and terrain. A Chapman Strut, consisting of a suitable pneumatic cylinder as a dampener, bridges from the axle up along the shock path. An anti roll bar also prevents scrubbing outward of the tread upon jouncing.
Now the cool part- While agonizing over minimizing roll v. good ride, I began to think of an active suspension. The simplest trick would be to have a self leveling capability up to about 15 degrees (7.5 degrees up or down per side). This would be very cool traversing slopes or leveling the desktop or setting the wind tower plumb (or into the wind a bit) on uneven ground.
Even cooler still will be to develop a dynamic capability such as lowrider cars have, to rock and jump about in a wild dance. To do this will be rather easy, given the basic design of the suspension; a small 12V automotive airpump, a small plastic reservoir, a handful of 12V valves, and presto..... a dancing cart.
Finally, the ultimate touch will be to automate the dancing with the onboard computer.
This exercise completes a circle of exploration of robotic legs and wheeled devices, arriving at the same result as the Lowrider movement, of making wheels become as limbs.
The cart carried the solar banner at the Sierra Blanca anti-nuke dump march on the Governor's mansion and capitol. The dancing Mexican children had the best effect though. A memorable moment was seeing the child protesters in Indian garb, stomp dancing along, running into a gaggle of school kids on a field trip, most of whom had cameras. They snapped away as they struggeld to understand what the issue was. By a seeming miracle the nuclear dump was canceled the next day.
As the march ended at the capitol, and I met by chance an old friend, Pam Ross, who works for a legistlator. We made a lunch date, and I soon rolled the cart into the capitol with three DPS marshalls following as in a trance. The smallest, a veritable Barney Fife, held a door for me as I thanked him and said I was going to Senator Luna's office, by invitation. They let me go, with anxious looks. I went to the senator's office, and sure enough, after about ten minutes, Barney had followed, sick with worry, just donig his job.
Pam gave me an inside tour and we ate in the basement cafeteria. hurling the cart down the long august halls was cool, and I exited bouncing down the front steps. Having tested such hallowed waters, I look forward to returning on various odd missions, until the cart is just another regular fixture of that strange space.
The new cart is progressing. Tom Lupton scored some stainless steel thin wall tubing for the frame, which will make this the Delorian of carts, back to the future, and all that. Its definitely a coup to use such quality material. I've completed many drawings, finalized plan, side, and front views, and lofted these into full size patterns. The design has evolved into a beautiful pregnant oviform crossed with a drag racer.
We started bending the thin wall tubes in a fancy bender, but the radiuses were two small for the sweeping curves, so we need to score some conduit benders to complete the job.
In consultation with my brother, Quintin, a nice audio strategy has developed. The problem was to maximise weight v. sound, with the goal of thumping base and screaming treble. Boom boxes are ok, but have the problem of being over integrated; if the stereo is placed low in the cart, for better weight distribution, its a real pain to constantly dive down to fiddle with the music. Boom boxes lack large woofers, and in any case, a pair of large woofers is too heavy to bear.
So it occured to us to use a high end computer audio system with a single subwoofer. These systems come in light plastic cases conmpared to traditional home audio, but lack a tuner, CD, or cassette. So we plan to have an audio source switch and use "walkman" type CD/tuner audio sources, which can be placed high in the cart control console for ease of use. The large subwoofer can be low, just aft of the battery and the detachable midrange speakers can be mounted wide and higher or placed off cart to direct at will.
Some interesting features include switching from computer sound output to other exotic sources such as PA/musical instrument amplification and multi band scanners.
Great feats of ritual running are done by the Taraumara Indios, running farther and longer than any other known people, as a religious act. The runner kicks a small ball along, a cross between soccer and mountain climbing. The cart has a similar companion role as the little pelota, more as a technology medicine ball. Jane Goodall once documented a low status chimp who discovered that he could bat and kick a 5 gallon can before himself. He charged through the troop making a tremendous racket, scattering the dominant male clique. For a time the chimp shaman was dominant until the can was removed. A good measure of the same power seems to kick in when I show up with the cart at some public meeting or other. Its as if a battleship had just appeared off the coast, every port is happy to surrender.
Dogs react most strangely to the cart, especially as it rolls ahead on its own with the music blaring. Most dogs fear it, the rest are either just fascinated or try to attack it, but not knowing where to bite. Old folks, women and children love it, but the reaction of the average tech engineer is one of admiring and jealous questioning, as the idea is so sound, so obvious, yet so cool. The nicest aspect of the cart as conversation piece is that it filters out the most interesting folks in any crowd. Its equally attractive to the homeless, families, politicians, media types, hackers, and any sort of eccentric. I'd hoped that odd cart rants were winding down.
Work on the new cart is ramping up as the design freezes. I'm designing in an anti shock/vibration mounted 19" (traditional rackmount) payload bay for customized mission components, especially for scientific missions. This concept is loosely based on NASA's "getaway specials", which are standard size modules carried on the space shuttle. The carts payload spec includes electrical and temp parameters, within which any third party could develop a plug-in payload. KO.OP radios mobile broadcast unit would be a good example of such a payload.
Channel 36 earlier stopped me and asked to do a story, which would be nice for some action clips to put on the net. All cart video to date has been either from the cart itself or with me behind the camera shooting the static cart.
Sending off a collection of light composites to the laser cutting outfit in Seguin, for testing. Model aircraft have always been super labor intensive to build well, and the idea is to precisely cut complex shapes directly from a CAD file, from sheets of custom kevlar/carbon fiber/S glass foamcore sandwiches. These are delicate parts almost too insubstantial for hand work. Laser cutting would allow superbly baroque structural detail in our microblimp structures, while cutting labour way down.
Some swans just paddled up like old friends to check out the rig. I admired them in turn. This is a very nice little point across from auditorium shores, and today's novel nature event is a cloud of white butterflies (moths, actually) somehow imprinted to just this landmark. The carts fan often serves to keep insects off my face, and is doing so now.
Archeological digs has been suggested by Kevin Dericks' cousin as an excellent application of the cart. I showed off the cart to Kevin's visiting relatives just before hitting the trail today and Kevin took some video of the set up drill.
Its nearly 20 degrees cooler than the summer's hottest, so one best jumps into the frigid spring water without delay, while the run's heat is still on. Even then its a bit of a shock to immerse chakra by chakra, the kundalini shimmy. Gnats and flies are bothersome and I may need to consider a whisk and repellent. These insects were unable to buck the droughty furnace earlier in the year, and are enjoying life before the Northers blow in.
So many little adaptations to season. I aim the cart to a changing solar compass. The ice in my bottle lingers. Sweat doesn't sluice down the handle bar onto the computer while running. Running itself is almost effortless in the growing coolness. I'm thinking ahead of chilly weather, avoiding wind, how my fingerless Walmart gloves are too thick for natural typing compared to the delicate Andian versions I once owned.
There is a funnel of migration through a piece of solid system hardware such as the cart. Moore's law shrinks high tech so fast that components go from unwieldy to evanescent in a couple of years. Thus the applications that are practical are constantly increasing, provided the obsolete components are shucked off to make way for the new. The platform itself, with its solar panel (and windcharger in new version), are relatively mature technically, and almost immortal compared to the shifting fashions in computers.
Just over several days downtime. The last mission failed due to *two* flat tires and it took two hours to hitch home. I was too cheap to buy countermeasures after the last flats. So I broke down and bought three lines of defense- a pump/patch kit, "Green Slime", and thorn barrier strips. Is it possible flats are now a nonissue in thorny Texas?
Also found a developing crack in lower solar panel mount, tore off the failing piece and refitted the panel to remaining cross plate.
While the cart was down the speedometer/odometer was added and seems to work well. I covered 17.6 km at about 12 kph avg. with a top dash speed of 24 kph. These figures are about 5% high due to encoder error.
This run, yesterday, was to Red Bluff Studios to visit Daniel and Diana. Today I'm near home trying out the new flying wing on a cool telescoping fishing rod. It flies well, but an overlong thread and too floppy a rod soon resulted in a high speed crash, breaking a wing. Last night I had bravely glued all the breakaway parts thinking I was beyond crashing phase.
Thinking about how best to fly a flaming aircraft, especially as a "Hombre en Llamas". Firebreathers seem to have the right system perhaps kerosene gauze wrapped over an aluminum foil covered airplane would work well enough. Problems might include too high airspeed suppressing flames and heat buildup on even short flights. Countermeasures include pyrotechnic materials and heat resistant materials. Whoa, how about a flying flaming piniata? The kids would go wild waiting in turn to don a fireproof suit to try hit it.
Have searched for prior art in carts and discovered the origins of the present cart as one of the original baby joggers, which was only recently invented (1988). There is a long and still active military history and a Civil War "medivac" stretcher on spoked rubber wheels looks amazingly modern. Various armies have battlefield carts for ammo and stretcher use, but none seem to have gone far in developing energy/communications platforms. Another all terrain cart niche is for portaging kayaks and canoes. Some of these look suitable for leaving in place; the vessel is amphibious by merely rolling over.
