Yann’s Blog

So, I got a WikiReader. The first thing I would like to say is that this device is very very hard to open (and yes I did remove the two screws in the battery compartment ). I haven’t attempted a full disassembly yet as I actually like the main functionality, and didn’t want to completely obliterate the case just yet.

Here is the WikiReader, unpacked. I wasn’t expecting a nice box and manual (even the iPhone doesn’t come with that), but was very pleasantly surprised.

Apologizes for the very poor picture quality – these are simply iPhone snaps – I didn’t take the time to break out the 5D.

The two main complaints I have so far are the scrolling of text and the keyboard. The scrolling makes the text largely unreadable – there are some different display techniques here which could improve the display. The keyboard could also take a few cues from Apple, such as the magnified key presses, which would go a long way to improving usability. There are some other bugs in the contents (such as the lack of full UTF-8 support), but those are minor at this point.

Aside from those complaints, this device is actually quite slick. The performance is EXCELLENT. Random takes no more than a second to load the next article, search automatically filters based on your entry very quickly, and the history feature even remembers where you were in an article. The device is light and portable, and the whimsical asymmetric design is a nice touch and not over-done.

But enough with the quick mini review, what technical fun toys are there for you to play with?

Well, the WikiReader has a built in calculator – while powering up the device, hold the center (History) button.

There is also a factory test mode available – while powering up the device, hold either the Search or Random button:

As you likely (can’t) see in the image, the bulk of the functionality is a set of Forth applications, including the aforementioned calculator. They’re largely there for factory test, but at least one of them lets you draw pretty pictures.

Not drawn using the draw application, but another LCD test app – you don’t want to see my artwork

The WikiReader also contains a thermistor, which appears to be there for maintaining LCD contrast automatically:

Last but not least, there is a Console, which probably is exposed in the hidden programming/debug port available in the battery compartment (peel off the big white rectangular sticker – not the FCC/CE/Regulatory sticker).

Our open-source beta-site has been getting some updates recently:

1. New alpha trade-finder, which can do route combining and removes some superfluous garabage which can’t be traded.
2. Streamlining some of the layout code to remove IGB dependence (to help us get a better design for the new in game browser
3. New upload methods to work with Contribtastic
4. Small cleanups across the board

There is still work pending on the continuously updated statistics engine (with caching), replacing our very aging market reports system. The exact implementation direction is not yet determined.

If you want to poke at the code, it is also available under the AGPL 3.0 license.

I took some time to learn a bit about computer vision, using OpenCV. The end goal here is to produce a Rock Band playing “robot”, using nothing but a specially modified controller (a AT90USB + bunch of FETs) and a computer with a video capture input.

Below is a video of my first attempt at using OpenCV. It applies several filters to isolate the keys on the racetrack approximately 2 frames ahead of the goal position. The primary heuristic right now is a threshold detect filter after all of the isolation steps. If you watch closely, you can see missed or over-pressed keys, especially when the whole racetrack lights up.

Note that the video output has an overlay color square which announces the software has detected a keypress. The actual gameplay is from another YouTube video – there is no closed loop control yet.

This will take some more tuning to iron out differences, possibly preserving some state from frame to frame. Right now color information is not used, but a separate classifier pipeline and some scoring mechanic might produce better results.

I will publish the git repository with the very-alpha implementation soon.

Just added a post over on the (new) StackFoundry Blog, featuring the Magnetovore.

The Magnetovore is an AVR xMEGA based development board which features external SRAM or non-volatile Magneto-resistive RAM (MRAM). Click through one of the above links for more details.

I have built a new binary of libevecache 0.1.2 for Windows. Included are several important fixes to the CSV export file.

Note that filename globbing (such as using *.cache) is NOT working under cmd.exe in Windows (PowerShell not tested), since Windows does not do filename globbing for commands. As a temporary workaround, use bash

My apologizes for the EVE-Central being down. Minor error on my part – the workers weren’t running under the correct user settings in terms of file handles, so they ran out. Everything should be kosher now.

Contribtastic work is moving in spurts. I’ll get something pushed out soon enough.

libevecache just gained two releases this weekend. Version 0.1 was a functional single shot cache file to .CSV file converter capable release, but had huge memory leak and pointer ownership issues, which made Contribtastic! very unstable and generally unusable.

After spending some quality time with Valgrind, all of the remaining issues are now resolved, and version 0.1.1 is available for mass consumption. Look for Contribtastic early betas soon. One new feature of libevecache in version 0.1.1 is the dumper is capable of digesting a whole CachedMethodCalls folder in one shot (just pass it the list of files on the command line). When you run dumper with the --market flag, you can safely redirect stdout to the file of your choice.

Success!

Thanks to some community contributions, libevecache has grown quite a bit this weekend!

New features include:

1. Shared object support (will give an object reference in place of the previous holder type)
2. DBRow decoding (needs more string identifiers for columns in other cache file formats)
3. The dumper utility now learned about --market, which lets it produce market CSV files from a cache file.

   atrus@atp (master) :~/Marketlogs/marketreader$ util/dumper --market tests/Lonetrek-Armageddon-2009.07.30\ 062647.cache > o
   atrus@atp (master) :~/Marketlogs/marketreader$ cat o
   Cache File Dumper
   File: tests/Lonetrek-Armageddon-2009.07.30 062647.cache
   price,volRemaining,typeID,range,orderID,volEntered,minVolume,bid,issued,duration,stationID,regionID,solarSystemID,jumps,
   54000000.0,1,643,32767,1185915256,5,1,False,2009-07-04 09:01:17.000,90,60004012,10000016,30001363,5
   54000000.0,5,643,32767,1187317153,8,1,False,2009-07-06 18:13:31.000,90,60002419,10000016,30001363,5
   55499999.0,1,643,32767,1217266843,1,1,False,2009-07-26 17:58:17.000,90,60000838,10000016,30001367,1
   ...
   52749999.0,1,643,32767,1221169229,1,1,False,2009-07-29 18:25:11.000,30,60003838,10000016,30001377,0
   57999999.88,1,643,32767,1221534269,2,1,False,2009-07-29 23:31:51.000,90,60002326,10000016,30001429,0
   57999999.88,2,643,32767,1221581224,2,1,False,2009-07-30 00:22:49.000,90,60003874,10000016,30001401,0
   45720000.0,5,643,40,1173825903,5,1,True,2009-07-05 16:35:12.000,90,60004027,10000016,30001368,0
   53999.99,1,643,32767,1190937468,1,1,True,2009-07-06 05:58:44.000,90,60004291,10000016,30001368,0
   46956001.5,1,643,3,1212303440,1,1,True,2009-07-22 23:37:54.000,90,60003841,10000016,30001376,0
   53784.31,1,643,32767,1131184395,1,1,True,2009-05-21 14:34:50.000,90,60003889,10000016,30001405,0
   

Update your clones today!

I am going to buckle down and produce an EVE-Central uploader which uses libevecache in the next week. Look for a beta version sometime by Friday.

Having quite a bit of fun with this development board. A fairly powerful embedded ARM, running at a core of 400MHz, with the whole system drawing about 2W of power. And yes, before anyone asks, I do have headphones plugged into it listening to streaming audio (hey, you have to test all the features, even if they don’t end up on the final hardware, right?).

I’ve done some polish work and integration of various libraries in Yann’s Eagle library repository.

Get it here..

Noteworthy inclusions:

• NAND and SDRAM footprints
• Merging of various MSP430 footprints into the “texas.lbr” library.
• More crystals, including subminature parts (ABM10)
• Cleanup of the Atmel library
• Some TVS components from Tyco and Vishay are included
• Freescale HCS08 footprints for the QB and QK series