Five Arduino users in all of USA?

Dear Fellow Arduino people...

Forgive an off topic post? (At least heap vilification on me via a personal message, if villify you must!)

There's a little bit of fun out there at...

... which is a map of Arduino users.

Now... I would be the first to caution people about what personal information they make available online, but I have had a flag on ArduMap for many months, no regrets.

Besides being fun... to me, anyway!... it is another way to persuade neophytes that the Arduino community is Big and "Bad". Speaking of which.... heard about the Raspberry Pi?...

... A fun idea, and part of me wishes them well. While they don't offer as much as an Arduino, they could still draw away some energy which would be better spent on Arduinos, and building the Arduino community. They DO accomplish some of the good things an Arduino has.

Go along to ArduMap... help promote Arduino!

tkbyd:
Speaking of which.... heard about the Raspberry Pi?...

Raspberry Pi - Wikipedia

... A fun idea, and part of me wishes them well. While they don't offer as much as an Arduino, they could still draw away some energy which would be better spent on Arduinos, and building the Arduino community. They DO accomplish some of the good things an Arduino has.

Yes.

I got one, it didn't work. After a week of struggles, and emails to their top tech guy I finally got it working - for about 15 minutes, when it then nuked my SD card.

I have replacement now - kind of scared to use it in case it blows up on me again.

Yes, it is a nice idea, but it is unfortunately poorly executed and has some rather large design flaws.

I completely slated it here: http://hacking.majenko.co.uk/raspberry-poo

In summary, the main design flaws are:

  1. It's powered by USB, but USB isn't powerful enough to power it.
  2. It only supports a handful of SD cards (SD is supposed to be a standard, even the Arduino supports more cards than the Pi)
  3. The GPIO header layout is just plain wrong - 5V next to 3.3V on a pin header on a 3.3V device? If the 5V and 3.3V touch (which is waaaay too easy) then you get 5V pumped into your 3.3V bits (which is basically everything) and pop goes the Pi.
  4. The USB host / ethernet chip can't support more than a very very low power keyboard and mouse - any more than that and the chip dies. (You have to use an external powered hub for anything more than that).
  5. There is no USB connection in the USB input - it should have at least CDC with linux serial console on it for access without a TV (I mean, who has a TV handy when debugging an embedded system?)
  6. The status lights that are supposed to show you what is going on are pointless - they don't actually tell you anything.

I spent more on getting the thing to work than the cost of the Pi itself.

Re the Ardumap, there was a similar thing a while back started by Mowcius. I tried to add myself but got an error saying the my forum user id "is a number". ??

As for the Pi, I won't be getting one as it's not appropriate for the things I do, thank goodness by the looks of it. Are you saying that the Pi is supposed to be powered from USB despite needing 700mA?

Just today I took delivery of some LCP Xpresso boards, I hope they aren't as much trouble :slight_smile:


Rob

Graynomad:
As for the Pi, I won't be getting one as it's not appropriate for the things I do, thank goodness by the looks of it. Are you saying that the Pi is supposed to be powered from USB despite needing 700mA?

It's supposed to be powered via a micro-usb socket that is only used for power - so you need a micro-usb power supply that can provide >700mA. Why on earth they chose that is anybody's guess.

Just today I took delivery of some LCP Xpresso boards,

It's only been a few hours but so far I love this system, everything has just worked.

I wrote a few 1000 lines of code before I got the hardware and course there were bugs, one that caused a hard fault that the debugger trapped, I looked back up the stack frame and quickly found a bad index into a list of pointers to functions. That would have taken all night and more to find using printf-debugging on an Arduino or similar.

I hope the Due (and new IDE?) has similar functionality.


Rob

This map has been around a while...
https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=106367500863692290311.00048bf511125d88d5fc7

Yep, that's the one Mowcius started.


Rob

majenko:
It's supposed to be powered via a micro-usb socket that is only used for power - so you need a micro-usb power supply that can provide >700mA. Why on earth they chose that is anybody's guess.

It's the new cellphone charger standards, which I think they're betting will make 5V micro-USB wall warts widely and cheaply available.

Graynomad:
Yep, that's the one Mowcius started.


Rob

This "ArduMap" and the Mowcius map - both bring up something: First, the regular Google map that Mowcius started has it's problems - namely the fact that some people are "out in the ocean" and their locations can be shifted by others (IIRC). That's a problem; locations can't be fixed by the user, or defined properly. The second issue, though, is ArduMap requires you do create a profile and login - that stinks. The regular Google map is much easier to use in that regard (maybe you need a google login, can't recall).

What we really need (well, "need" might not be the right word - after all, we seem to function well without knowing where on the map everyone is - heck, if people would just put their location info in their profile, that would make a number of us happy) is some kind of extension to the forum, or maybe an automated "scraper" that could take each member profile from the member list and "post" it to a map (skipping those without location info). The code wouldn't be that difficult.

Ok - making an automated scraper is going to be a bit more difficult than I thought; after my first wget attempt, I realized that the user listing is only shown to members. So I tried a simple wget 2-part script using the --post-data options, only to find out that login requires entry of a captcha (can you tell it's been a while since I last tried logging in?).

So - this kind of script would be a fairly in-depth challenge; you'd probably have to use CURL or something so you can "pretend" to be a browser, grab the captcha, perform the decode magic on it (non-trivial!), then log in - and then finally grab the list of members (sorted by posts), scrape it and then pull the profile info for each member to get their location, skip those without a location listed, compile a "dossier" (name, website, location, and maybe a couple other bits) for the google map pin, pin it via reverse lat/lon lookup using google map geocode service, with a pin and the "dossier" info - keep doing this until you hit somebody with zero posts and you're done.

Basically - the hard part is getting logged in (with the subset of that being the captcha decode - which, if you can break that, you could easily sell the tech to spammers) - everything after that is fairly trivial. So - I don't see this becoming an externally implemented system unless someone comes up with a system to break the captcha (there was a bit of discussion on how to do this in a way during the ML class I took; it wouldn't be easy, nor fast).

So that leaves it being a system the web-devs of the arduino.cc site/forum to set up - which means we're likely to never see it come to fruition. :frowning:

Apologies! I never meant to start a frayed thread!

Very interested in the Pi notes... but will never find them again in a thread about Arduino maps. I only meant to argue the case for USING the map I knew about it.

As for "which map?"... Why not list yourself on both!

To list at ArduMap, as someone said, you must supply your Arduino forum User ID... no, not your "screen-name", or whatever it is called. What ArduMap wants is a four digit number. Go to your profile page, and then look at the URL in your browsers address bar... it is there. Sorry that is so arcane... don't know a better way, and I have nothing to do with ArduMap other than user and advocate.

Yes... yoyu do have to "register"... a pain, I agree... but as I said in original post, they don't ask for much, and don't seem to abuse what they have. And because you have "an account" there, you can overcome some of the problems identified with the other map.

Hello everyone. Just had to post in the forum to get my userID to plant a flag on the map. From the U.S. too by the way. Go Arduino!

OK, I added myself using my five-digit user code but I don't see any marker on Bundaberg, Australia


Rob

tkbyd:
As for "which map?"... Why not list yourself on both!

Done.

tkbyd:
To list at ArduMap, as someone said, you must supply your Arduino forum User ID... no, not your "screen-name", or whatever it is called. What ArduMap wants is a four digit number. Go to your profile page, and then look at the URL in your browsers address bar... it is there. Sorry that is so arcane... don't know a better way, and I have nothing to do with ArduMap other than user and advocate.

Yes... yoyu do have to "register"... a pain, I agree... but as I said in original post, they don't ask for much, and don't seem to abuse what they have. And because you have "an account" there, you can overcome some of the problems identified with the other map.

Yeah - that wasn't very intuitive; they need to make the step of the "user ID" more clear, and they'd probably have more people join. From their front page, it looks like you have to create an account/login (which you can, but it doesn't look like you -have- to).

Still - it's a kludge to get around the system here; really, such a map should be a part of -this- site, tied in to the user data, etc. That, or there should be an exposed API with some kind of access key (perhaps each user could be assigned such a key; not sure how that would work securely off the top of my head) - so that only users with a certain post level or something could access the API (and only then to a certain point).

It's all pie-in-the-sky though; I guess these maps are the best we can hope for right now...

just added myself

I just got on the Ardumap but, got put in South Carolina instead of Illinois. I have to wait to fix the problem it appears.

@YohiFan501, I work close to St. Louis, and I go to a robot club meeting on occasion is STL.

I'm there now but I see us Aussies, Sth Africans and indeed many others that don't appear to be English have Union Jack flags, some may take exception to that :slight_smile:


Rob

A few more in the USA, only 1 in Canada, but is looks like Italy is infested overrun well populated with Italians...

Graynomad:
Re the Ardumap, there was a similar thing a while back started by Mowcius. I tried to add myself but got an error saying the my forum user id "is a number". ??

As for the Pi, I won't be getting one as it's not appropriate for the things I do, thank goodness by the looks of it. Are you saying that the Pi is supposed to be powered from USB despite needing 700mA?

Just today I took delivery of some LCP Xpresso boards, I hope they aren't as much trouble :slight_smile:


Rob

Hi, I'am the developer of the ArduMAP, you can find your userid on you profile page:

I did manage to join a while back. Still no Australian flag though, people might get the wrong idea and think I'm a Pom* :slight_smile:


Rob

*Pom = English person