zsoltslog

31 May, 2010

Eggs and Kids

Filed under: kids, robotics — zsolt @ 00:58

The eggs are running, mostly. There are still problems with the borders and irritating IR-signals but I have Ideas how to solve this issue.
You can visit this permanent robotic installation at BMW world Munich.

But the girls are all right.

1 May, 2010

Find your continent

Filed under: robotics — zsolt @ 00:27

While travelling home by train i thought about the navigation for the “egg” robots to find home into the allowed playground. I tried several possible methods mostly in favour the so called dead reckoning using sensor data collected from the wheels and compass. But this is all over complicated to handle and naturally erroneous in time. I came up with the simple approach to find back with the data of the last left IR-field and the compass. This is somehow like searching for continents but should be efficient.

This sketch shows the turn back angle depending on the last left ir field:
bmw_welt_infrarotkegel_backtofield

9 January, 2010

Running Mike

Filed under: robotics — zsolt @ 02:21

So after some real programming. Adapting the new laser scanner, changing the protocol version to the embedded board and some other adjustments Mike is running.
See him here: http://vimeo.com/8584913
Sorry for the bad quality, but old camera and bad conversion.
The video is 2 weeks old so some improvements have been done. Tomorrow we will travelling to Hannover. Hope “Daisy” will not stop us.

14 November, 2009

Implanting the eye

Filed under: robotics — zsolt @ 02:43

Today I mastered the second big hurdle for implementing a new eye into a robot system.
The story is: for a new show an autonomous tracking system, which is based on a hokuyo laserscanner, should be overhauled. It is for a robot of course. I post images later of my new friend.
For this show the laserscanners changed. They are now connected via USB and the protocol version bumped to 2.0. (SCIP). Today i integrated some sample libraries from hokuyo into parts of our steering software. Even the mapping is added. So far the data looks very right.
hokuyo_laserscanner_situation

28 November, 2007

direct link to live streams

Filed under: sound — zsolt @ 00:47

it is amazing how some radiostations try to hide their direct stream links, to make life harder for users who don’t want to click through tons stupid webpages, popups and don’t want to install even more stupid plugins.
here are some direct links from some of my favorite radiostations. i will update this list.

  • fm4: mms://stream1.orf.at/fm4_live
  • radio nova: http://broadcast.infomaniak.net:80/radionova-high.mp3
  • an other link for fm4. why the heck do they change it?

  • mms://streamy.orf.at/fm4_live
  • so listening to one station is as easy as: mplayer mms://streamy.orf.at/fm4_live
    why fm4 offers only a windows-media-stream is still a mystery to me. since it is a state founded austrian radio-station they could effort encoder machine with icecast on it, for sure.

    10 November, 2007

    emacs for lisa

    Filed under: apple, tipps — zsolt @ 17:44

    ever wanted emacs for mac os x, then check this out: http://emacs-app.sourceforge.net/
    it is much cooler than emacs over fink or the cocoa-port. it has a native aqua-interface and comes from a brand new trunk (23.0)

    6 November, 2007

    64bit lightning.xpi 0.7

    Filed under: 64bit, linux, tipps — zsolt @ 00:35

    since my calender_for_google_provider addon (really a nice tool) requiered lightning-0.7 i built one. for whatever reason there is no official 64bit-built for lightning.
    i followed this guide http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/build.html
    but the cvs-source isn’t really usefull, you need to have the 0.7 source, which could be downloaded here: http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/releases/0.7/source/lightning-sunbird-0.7-source.tar.bz2
    i built it with follwing params:

    export CFLAGS="-O2 -pipe -fPIC"
    export CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"

    as it is suggested here: http://blog.crox.net/archives/28-Lightning-for-x86_64-Linux-amd64.html

    you can download my built from:
    http://softmonsters.com/zsolt/stuff/lightning.xpi

    lisabook

    Filed under: apple, lisabook — zsolt @ 00:10

    and i got a “mac”-book…
    macbook

    resume scp upload

    Filed under: linux, tipps — zsolt @ 00:04

    i always wondered how to resume a scp upload to my server. i found this:

    rsync -av -P -e "ssh -l username" filetotransfer.tar.bz2 username@softmonsters.com:~/copy/

    -P == --partial --progress
    it resumes partial up-/download and shows a progressbar.

    5 January, 2007

    thunderbird spell check

    Filed under: gentoo, linux, tipps — zsolt @ 18:39

    since I’m a regular user of the thunderbird spell-check extensions i wondered how to quickly install foreigen spell-check extensions on gentoo.

    1. download the extension from http://dictionaries.mozdev.org/installation.html. rightcklick save as
    2. unzip it into a temporary folder. e.g.: unzip spell-hu.xpi
    3. copy *.dic and *.aff (with root permission) to /usr/lib/mozilla-thunderbird/components/myspell
    4. restart thunderbird

    the tricky part is that the spell-check extensions doesn’t show up in the extension list.
    alternatively you can install the extensions as root. but this doesn’t work for me with thunderbird 1.5.0.9…

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