Time to get serious once more...

It has been a long time since I wrote some serious s*** on this blog, mainly due to the lack of time caused by a Master's degree and the job I have in Strasbourg.

The embedded systems love I nurtured since the start of this blog is still with me, although now I have a more realistic vision of its real potential in a real life situation, my life to be more exact. Even though it is a very interesting domain, the fact that I don't have millions of euros to invest in new ideas, renders my impact in this domain to be limited to this blog, and the wacky contraptions that can be made using a PIC micro and some elbow grease. That is it! There is the option of working for a company that has the power to change something, but those are rare and far between, plus the feeling of accomplishment is truly not the same.

Next I thought that the next best thing is to work on devices that are already designed, and just try to take advantage of their hardware and public. Of course Iphone comes to mind, but it is not the only player in the market anymore, since Android, Symbian opened their SDK's to developers.

Unfortunately for the Iphone the ship has sailed a long time ago, meaning that there are already 140000 applications in the AppStore and counting. Next is the Android Market has around 60000 apps, but the trick with this is that for a developer to actually make some money he needs a bank account in a handful of European countries. Bummer! Apple just announced the iPad, which out of the box is just an oversized Ipod Touch, not bad to start with, but useless without real applications to take advantage of the untapped use case scenarios it presents.

For me, this year is all about web programming. and the subject of the next few posts will be Google's GWT and a project called VisualLinks. It is a school project I have to do with a few of my colleagues, in order to receive some credits.

I provided a link to the Google Projects page here

Colmar my love

Postez de la servici!!

Acest servici imi mananca ficatii, in principal pentru ca s-a mutat locatia unde o sa invat cu spor Javascript. Ma aflu in pitorescul oras Colmar, aflat la 70 km de Strasbourg. Daca as fi turist as iubi orasul asta, cu cartierul Mica Venetie si casele de lemn aflate la tot pasul, dar nu sunt turist, sunt ucenic la o sucursala mica, cautatoare de suspans si trairi intense. Ma scol la 6:30, iau tramvaiul, apoi trenul si timp de juma de ora ascult muzica (asta cand imi aduc aminte sa imi iau Ipodul cu mine). Intr-un final ajung si ma pun pe invatat. Seara plec acasa iar cu trenul, iar cu tramvaiul...

Proiectul pe care lucrez este in colaborare cu Alcatel, noi trebuie sa construim interfata cu utilizatorul pentru 2 tipuri de telefoane de birou Bussiness Class ale lui Alcatel, utilizand controale Dojo si niste widgeturi facute de echipa pana acum. Nu am mai vazut amestecul asta de tehnologii in viata mea, este o adevarata aventura sa urmaresti procesul de apelare si afisare a unui widget pe ecran. It's murder I tell you!

Sper sa nu mai par asa inmarmurit in fata ecranului prea multa vreme si sa accept ca nu am ce face si ca trebuie sa invat cat mai bine tehnologiile astea, mai ales ca mai am un coleg cu mine care este coleg si de master. E mai simplu el asa, dar azi imi raspunse la cateva intrebari destul de avansate, si e doar de o luna aici, deci asta inseamna ca se poate si mai bine!!!!

Abia astept weekendul!

From this day on I am an Engineer

Today was the day I showed my Project in front of a board of professors from my faculty. Everything went as planned, no problems, my Artificial Horizon managed to keep the board interested.

That concludes 5 years of Faculty. Not very much to say, just that I have some new ideas I want to put into practice.

Until next time, Happy Holiday!

Finally a concrete result.

I finished the hands-on part of my licence Project, I will let the video speak for itself:



Because of the problems I had with the PC/104 System, I had to construct my own Data Acquisition board. It reads the 3 voltages for the 3 corresponding axis and adjusts the Horizontal Sphere on screen through a serial link with the computer. All is well when it ends well!

At last some news

It has been a while since my last post, mainly because I have been very busy with school and stuff, but know I finished most of my school duties and I can now focus on my personal projects.

Needless to say, I had a lot of time to think about new projects, and some of them seem interesting, but first things first, I have to finish what I have started a few months ago and that is my Etch a Sketch embedded clone.

Las time I wrote in this blog, the hardware part was finished, all that was left was the software, both the embedded software and the computer software. Let me specify that I have worked on this project in my spare time(very limited indeed) and some things have changed, my previous post has now become veryyy obsolete, and as a lesson learned, I will reframe myself from posting code until it is working 100%.

The main changes are as follows:

• OpenGL was not needed for this project
• I used Visual C# to write the computer frontend
• The embedded software now waits for a request for data from the computer, acquires the data from the 2 potentiometers, and sends it back to the computer software, this repeats several times a second

I have learned some important lessons in hardware design like how to arrange wires as to not interfere with each other. This is important because the approach I used in my last software design was to send data through the wire only when the data read was different that the last reading. In theory this sounded perfect, the simulator worked perfect, but as I was told again and again, a simulator never replaces the real thing. In real world operation the data read was very gettered, and oscillated between several very close values, and ended up that the hardware was sending data very often, the exact thing I was trying to avoid.

I will begin work again to finish this project and to move on to another. In order to consider this project finished, I have to implement an error detection system on the computer side to ensure that the data read from the hardware is formated correctly. At the moment the software sometimes goes nuts and displays strange lines as a result of bad input.