Quick notes for the rest of the team or to quickly document some progress will go here from now on.
New ‘Asides’ Bar
Happy Boxing Day. ‘Shorts’ or ‘Asides’ or what I’ll call a ‘dev blog’ has been added to the sidebar instead of appearing in the main post section. Posters: just tag your post with the ‘Shorts’ category and it will go here. Keep it short!
Makefile Madness
OK–
I’ve just completely redone the way the team gets its code to the memory sticks. It’s heavily influenced from the open-source rUNSWift code, who know OPEN-R and Makefiles way better than I. The code is insanely modular which will allow our team to easily port among various platforms, code, and computer configurations.
We now use rsync to more efficiently copy files over, and use Makefiles instead of shell scripts. Moreover, I’ve added a lot more compiling flags to make our analysis of bad code easier.
This takes us a significant step closer to python integration.
Merry Christmas!
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }
.flickr-yourcomment { }
.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }
.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }
Meet the newest member of MY family–though I’m sure he’ll be spending plenty time grooving in the Bowdoin Lab.
This is a iDog. I will not program it to play Soccer.
On the development side, I’ve spent a couple of hours in the past few days getting to know the vision system–and I now actually understand the new techniques we use as well as the old compression we use for AiboConnect.
The only issue is getting me and Yi Zhuang, our vision guru, on the same page: China to Maryland via email discussing code that is stored at Bowdoin–tricky! Thankfully we have Subversion.
Winter Dev-Day One
The hectic days of exams are over and the winter has begun. I am home now and ready for a big push in developing for Northern Bites (Trademark forthcoming).
My goals for developing over the break are two-fold: creating a Python layer for the majority of the code-base, and really getting started with finer ball control.
I’ve snuck (or was given full permission) an Aibo home and have gotten the wireless to work on my home network. A two-thousand dollar robot is a great excuse to buy a forty-dollar wireless router.
The good news is the wireless is pretty fast: aiboConnect was able to maintain a fast framerate sending over the non-compressed images. However, the thresholded configuration from the lab is horrible in my low-lit basement. This won’t matter with great new vision system Yi’s implemented this fall (details later), but I may still need some basic hand-done thresholding for aiboConnect’s sake. Or maybe I’ll figure out how to compress the new vision system the same way the old one does (bytes and chars and ints-bleh).
Regardless, I’m going to take a few days off from active development and focus on drafting some research guides for the independent study dudes. Their only task this winter is to catch up to speed on their various areas of research. Dudes: I’ll be sending them out soon.
WP 2.0 RC3
Just upgraded to the beta WordPress 2.0 RC3 on my laptop. It went fairly easily with some hacks. Will hold off on upgrading this site until WordPress hits 2.0 fully and K2–the ub3r WordPress template this site uses– supports it. Looks like 2.0 will be official very soon….
The New Asimo
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }
.flickr-yourcomment { }
.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }
.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }
Video of the New Asimo, sadly not the size pictured above, is now available from Honda. See the Asimo run at 6km/h, exercise, or even receiving and delivering a tray.
Live Archives
I’ve updated the Archives page with a really cool plug-in called Extended Live Archives. It allows for quick, thorough searches of all the posts in the blog without having to refresh the page. The content of this blog is meager now–but later, it could prove quite useful.
Meet the new members of the Family
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }
.flickr-yourcomment { }
.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }
.flickr-caption { font-size: .7em; margin-top: 0px; }
Meet the two most recent additions to the Northern Bites family: two fiesty new aibos from the ERS-7M3 line.
We have named them… ‘aibo13’ and ‘aibo14’.
I will probably setup one of them to walk around the lab this weekend a blog things–that’s right, they can blog too. And speak spanish–it’s better than I can do.
Windows Crash
There’s been a report that this website has crashed a windows box when viewing with internet explorer. If this happens–we are very sorry–please leave a comment here or email us:
robocup AT bowdoin DOT edu
We haven’t been able to reproduce the error with numerous Windows boxes.