Day: September 16, 2016

Resistance In Motion: What You Should Know About Variable Resistors

September 16, 2016 by 42 Comments

Adjusting the volume dial on a sound system, sensing your finger position on a touch screen, and knowing when someone’s in the car are just a few examples of where you encounter variable resistors in everyday life. The ability to change resistance means the ability to interact, and that’s why variable resistance devices are found in so many things.

The principles are the same, but there are so many ways to split a volt. Let’s take a look at what goes into rotary pots, rheostats, membrane potentiometers, resistive touchscreens, force sensitive resistors, as well as flex and stretch sensors.

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Grand Theft Auto V Used To Teach Self-Driving AI

September 16, 2016 by 29 Comments

For all the complexity involved in driving, it becomes second nature to respond to pedestrians, environmental conditions, even the basic rules of the road. When it comes to AI, teaching machine learning algorithms how to drive in a virtual world makes sense when the real one is packed full of squishy humans and other potential catastrophes. So, why not use the wildly successful virtual world of Grand Theft Auto V to teach machine learning programs to operate a vehicle?

Half and Half GTAV Annotation ThumbThe hard problem with this approach is getting a large enough sample for the machine learning to be viable. The idea is this: the virtual world provides a far more efficient solution to supplying enough data to these programs compared to the time-consuming task of annotating object data from real-world images. In addition to scaling up the amount of data, researchers can manipulate weather, traffic, pedestrians and more to create complex conditions with which to train AI.

It’s pretty easy to teach the “rules of the road” — we do with 16-year-olds all the time. But those earliest drivers have already spent a lifetime observing the real world and watching parents drive. The virtual world inside GTA V is fantastically realistic. Humans are great pattern recognizers and fickle gamers would cry foul at anything that doesn’t analog real life. What we’re left with is a near-perfect source of test cases for machine learning to be applied to the hard part of self-drive: understanding the vastly variable world every vehicle encounters.

A team of researchers from Intel Labs and Darmstadt University in Germany created a program that automatically indexes the virtual world (as seen above), creating useful data for a machine learning program to consume. This isn’t a complete substitute for real-world experience mind you, but the freedom to make a few mistakes before putting an AI behind the wheel of a vehicle has the potential to speed up development of autonomous vehicles. Read the paper the team published Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Video Games.

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A New OS For Apple II Computers

September 16, 2016 by 33 Comments

Although this sort of work is usually reserved for KansasFest and other forums for highly technical and very skilled Apple enthusiasts, [John Brooks]’s release of a new version of the ProDOS operating system is no less important. It is, without a doubt, the greatest release the Apple II platform will see for the next few years. This swan song of the Apple II platform is simply ProDOS 2.4, an update to the last version of Apple’s ProDOS, last released in 1993.

For a bit of historical context, ProDOS was not the operating system that shipped with the Apple ][ in 1977. That OS was simply called DOS. ProDOS, released in 1983, included support for the new 3.5″ floppy drives, allowed for hierarchical directories, supported hardware interrupts, and kept the Apple ][ line going well into the 90s. Despite these improvements, not all Apple ][ systems were supported. The original ][ and ][+ were out in the cold. Now, with the ability to add Compact Flash and USB devices to an Apple ][, even the latest version of ProDOS is horribly out of date.

[John]’s release of ProDOS 2.4 fixes all of this. This release is the most important development in the Apple ][ ecosystem in recent memory, and will remain so for at least a decade. The only person who still uses an Apple ][ as a daily driver agrees, and ProDOS 2.4 is now enshrined in The Archive for all eternity.

prodos-2-4-bitsy-bye-768x543New features abound, although most of them are geared toward the now thirty-year-old Apple IIGS. These features include enhanced utility in GS/OS – the Apple equivalent of the Commodore GEOS – slot remapping, and an OS that is both smaller and loads faster. Older machines aren’t left out, and ProDOS includes the usual features and improvements found in ProDOS 2.x that weren’t available in the Apple ][, Apple ][+ and un-enhanced Apple //e.

The killer feature and one more thing of this release is the BitsyBye utility, a small ($300!) system program that allows you to boot various Apple II devices and programs. Think of this as the Norton Commander of the Apple II ecosystem, allowing slots to be selected, booting the most recently used ProDOS device, and basic file system exploration. BitsyBye also includes an easter egg. A few utilities are also included on the ProDOS 2.4 disk image including ADTPro, Shrinkit archive expander, and disk utilities.

A 140k ProDOS 2.4 disk image is available on [John]’s site and on Archive.org. Since you’re probably not downloading directly to an Apple II disk, grab ADTPro and load it over audio.