I spent a couple of days playing with the advanced features of the ADXL345 accelerometer. These are all configurable in the various registers of the chip, is just a matter of studying a bit the specs and doing some tests. I’ve been able to implement: power management (the chip goes to sleep after some amounts …
I needed to execute a given command for a specified number of seconds on my Linux system. I wasn’t able to find a program for doing that so I ended up writing this little and simple Bash script: #!/bin/bash cmd=$1 seconds=$2 echo “Executing: ${cmd} for $seconds seconds” $cmd& cmdpid=$! sleep $seconds if [ -d /proc/$cmdpid …
Executing a program for X seconds then killing it: a simple bash script Read More »
Arduino is a rapid electronic prototyping platform composed by the Arduino board and the Arduino IDE. I’ll use it in my Master of Science project to create some kind of tangible interaction prototype. So, let’s have a look at it! Why Arduino? It is an open-source project, software/hardware is extremely accessible and very flexible to be customized and extended It is flexible, offers …
What is Arduino, Why we choose it, what can we do with it? Read More »
For a project I’m working on, I had the need to send some float variables computed on the Arduino board to a Processing program running on a computer over a Serial communication Link. Arduino doesn’t have any “out of the box” way to send float variables over the Serial interface but one could simply send …
In the years before MySQL 4.1, the first MySQL version which provided a complete and good support to different character encodings, developers who needed their databases to store UTF8 encoded data used different encodings (usually latin1) for table and databases while still storing real UTF8 data inside. While the DB and tables were, as an …
If you are interested in audio/video conversions and general manipulation you should really have a look at ffmpeg. ffmpeg it’s a little command line utility which will let you do some really great things with multimedia files. During the time, I collected some examples of usages of ffmpeg which I found useful. I posted here …
In a comment from Ciskje on my sensor fusion implementation, I’ve been asked to explain how the Processing graphical uses rotations to visualize the orientation informations coming from the sensor fusion algorithm. The question was basically, what’s the reason about using the Yaw, Pitch and Roll in a “strange” order in the following lines of code in my …
From the AHRS sensor fusion orientation filter to a 3d graphical rotating cube Read More »
X.org version 7.4 with xorg-server 1.5 introduces a new way of handling input devices (keyboards, mouses, touchpads, trackball, etc..). Instead of using some configuration rules in xorg.conf like in Xorg 7.3 and previous versions, input devices are now automatically configured and enabled in Xorg once the system found them. This process is called Xorg input hotplugging and …
This is my first try in creating an homebrew DIY breakout board for the ADXL345 accelerometer. Yes, I know: it’s pretty ugly.. but it works! This is the first try.I’ll try again soon using all the things I understood this time! This is how I did it: Design the PCB using Kicad Print the PCB …
UPDATE 2011-02-10: Check out FreeIMU project page for all the informations about FreeIMU! In the past months I worked a lot on accelerometers, gyroscopes and digital compasses. I’m now pretty intimate with the ADXL345, the ITG3200 and the HMC5843. I’ve been able to design and construct homebrew DIY breakout board PCBs for all of them (ADXL345 and ITG3200) and to …
FreeIMU: designing a free (as in speech) 9 DOM/DOF MARG IMU Read More »