Freesteel Blog » Home now with the blues
Home now with the blues
Thursday, July 28th, 2016 at 11:25 am
I don’t know which direction to go now, so I did a quick bit of video editing of a flight in Italy. I got plans to write this story up in more detail if I can get over the writers block that’s making it difficult even to complete my logbook.
I am losing control over direction. I should be running the machine tool on something, to keep it oiled. But then there is the GroundWindow app that I’m converting to work in Yorkshire with the cave data we have there. And also analyzing my flight logger data, which I seem to put hundreds of lines of code into a week, but continues to get nowhere. It’s strange.
The WebGL situation with GroundWindow is diving into a real rabbit hole. I have long known I needed to learn how to code GPUs, but could never find a way in. GPU technology, as I have observed, makes much of the software engineering I have done over the years entirely redundant.
Last week I spotted that the genius who made the early webgl water demo I’ve been hawking around to prove my point finally written a blogpost about one small aspect of the demo.
In it he referred to another blog about the GPU graphics pipeline (written in 13 parts), that I am trying to work through. I’m getting about 50% of it at most.
The question then comes down to whether there are any meaningful new machining algorithms that can be built based on this technology, using OpenCL or whatever, because that’s one of the few things I am uniquely qualified to research better than most — even if I can’t persuade someone with a budget to pay for it.
That’s just normal stupidity and mis-allocation of capital by those in control of developmental budgets.
For example, let’s take the massive public engineering program called Trident just authorized by Parliament this month to build four nuclear powered submarines to provide that essential round-the-clock service of threatening indiscriminate annihilation to targets unknown at a few minutes notice.
Now some MPs believe that investing in high technology is good merely for the sake of it, like Toby Perkins, who said in the debate:
The most depressing exchange was with representatives of the GMB union in Barrow [where the submarines are built], when… [the MP] for Islington South and Finsbury suggested that they might like to make wind turbines instead. They politely but firmly informed her that they were involved in designing and producing one of the most complex pieces of technology on the face of the earth, and that wind turbines had already been invented.
Setting aside the fact that nuclear submarines have already been invented too, the difference is that wind turbines produce electricity, which has value. Military nuclear submarines, on the other hand, have no return on investment. They are not put for up sale as part of the international arms market to foreign dictators (and you won’t get away with selling used ones to Canada again). The subs are not applicable to a modern resource war, like the invasion of Iraq where the plan was to win the wealth back by stealing their oil, because the victims don’t have navies. And there is no program for technology transfer, given that the nuclear power industry has been entirely outsourced to France on a strategic level
In fact all the engineering being budgeted for this program is wasted and will be subtracted from the engineering brains available nationally, just when we need them most and the availability of immigrant engineers is going to be choked off.
Nuclear war, in terms of the way the politicians handle it, is worse than low-grade Science Fiction. So at this time I picked up the 1964 Heinlein post-apocalyptic novel Farnham’s Freehold, where an all-out nuclear war blasted the Goldwater republican right-wing Americans (with the same mind-set as the author) two thousand years into the future from their private fall-out shelter. Here’s one of the characters in the future civilization looking back at the recorded history trying to interpret the events:
The war itself he didn’t find hard to believe. He had experienced only a worm’s-eye view of the first hours, but what the scrolls related matched the possibilities: a missile-and-bomb holocaust that escalated in its first minutes into ‘brilliant first strike’ and ‘massive retaliation’ and smeared cities from Peking to Chicago, Toronto to Smolensk; fire storms that had done ten times the damage the bombs did; nerve gas and other poisons that had picked up where the fire left off; plagues that were incubating when the shocked survivors where picking themselves up and beginning to hope–plagues that were going strong when the fallout was no longer deadly.
Yes, he could believe that. The bright boys had made it possible, and the dull boys they worked for had not only never managed to make the possibility unlikely but had never really believed it when the bright boys delivered what the dull boys ordered.
Not, he reminded himself, that he had believed in ‘Better red than dead’–or believe in it now. The aggression had been one-sided as hell–and he did not regret a megaton of the ‘massive retaliation’. [Chapter 14 p190]
Two things: Being ‘red’ is actually a temporary phenomenon (unlike radioactive and dead). Just ask the East Germans.
Secondly, the Cold War was stoked and prolonged by the dull boys in America, from their endless lies about the missile gap, to their intrusive U2 surveillance flights across Soviet airspace that utterly wrecked the four powers peace summit that had been scheduled to de-escalate the Cold War in 1960.
Ironically, those U2 flights were collecting intelligence that proved there was no missile gap whatsoever, yet the President and Presidential candidates continued to lie about Soviet capabilities to paint their political opponents as “weak on defense” in the forthcoming election.
It’s the old game of elites clinging to power by scaring the bejeezus out of the public, and then offering dangerous answers that don’t work, and successfully displacing consideration of the real problems at hand that require solutions they don’t want anything to do with.
The problem with our thinking is that future exists only in the human mind, and we are not carefully discriminating between the challenges ahead that are entirely within the various states of mind, such as the threat of war and the causes and consequences of property distribution and financial debt– and challenges out there in the physical world that are not going respond to any of our puny beliefs, like climate change and the polluting energy systems in the modern world.
In a sane world the Committee on Climate Change would get the £200billion engineering budget to start building the stuff we need now, like tidal barrages and CCS, and the nuclear warriors would instead sit in smoky committee rooms writing strategic reports on paper and getting sent off to international conferences to sign treaties– in other words do the sorts of things that would solve those problems completely.
That’s the way round it should be. But it’s like we think we’re looking through a window on the future, and instead it’s just a mirror reflecting the past behind us. And this would be fine, if it weren’t for the point of reality that time does not in fact run backwards.
1 Comment
1. Greg Haisley replies at 4th August 2016, 6:19 pm :
I have an opportunity for you – there is not a true 4th axis CAM package out there any where. What I will try to explain is what true 4th axis program code looks like. were ; = EOB Simple code clearance start point, approach point, cut point, retract point.
I’m not talking about wrapping 2D around a diameter, but creating roughing helical cuts and finish helical cuts. For helical or spur gear type parts and or 3 lobe rotor type parts with helical twists. These parts need the accuracy to perform as designed.
G91G28Z0;
tool change
G0 X.6 Y0;
G43 H1 Z3.0;
G1 A-1.5 Z1.0 F10.;
X-12.6 A 31.5 F30.;
G0 Z3.;
This would be a 1 helical cut for a 12 inch length of cut with a 30 degree twist.
The CAD/CAM UI would look like a 2D drawing of the end of the part. The Y and Z points would be driven here. Obviously the WCS would be the center of rotation. The tool path would be a 2D projected with the helical twist and twist direction determined by the user. This way each tool path would be a tool shape positioned (Y and Z) for each helical cut. As you probably already know the current 4th axis attempted solutions out there have way too much noise from the STL file they are projecting a tool path against. HSMWorks posted code will deviate as much as .020 inch from the axis centerline and post over 500 lines of code (noise). When in reality the Y should not even be posted or be Y0 for a true helical cut.
This is something I have yet to find on the net anywhere. When I find what looks like a solution there is no posted code to look at. So I’m assuming it is not a true 4th axis solution. There is a market for this. The only way I know of creating the code is by hand. Please enlighten me with your brilliance.
Have a great day Julian!
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