Long Time No See :|

I stopped blogging on this site basically because I forgot that I had this site. Sorry. I am insincere that way.

My day-to-day life has changed a bit since I last blogged here. I enrolled for M. Tech at Tezpur University. It’s one of the best institutes in the region of the country that I live in, and I feel lucky and honored to be here… both the feelings, simultaneously. I have been doing a little bit of AI and robotics stuffs in the last few months. I hope to post more regularly here as I carry on my ‘research’ (a.k.a. ‘googling’). See you around. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Burn. Burn. Burn.

Do you know that the red wire from a battery corresponds to V_cc and the black wire to ground? I guess you do. I did. Turns out the guys who created my lead-acid battery didn’t.

I was working on a H-bridge and suddenly it got fried. I checked out the wiring and since everything was color perfect, I attached another H-bridge. And then the second one got fried. After much cursing, I finally debugged the error with a multimeter. To cut a long story short, I have two less H-bridges this morning than what I had last night.

Note to Self – Always check with a multimeter. Thank Thor for not screwing with my development board.

Going online with the gamepad

Hello guys. Last week was a cool one. I’ve been working on the prototype of Pronghorn. Most importantly, I got two L293Ds because the platform was a four-wheel differential drive and one H-Bridge was not working as good as I expected it to. Anyway, this post is about it’s HRI – Human Robot Interface.

GAMI – Gamepad Musical Instrument

Sorry for the delay in posts. I went to Kolkata for the awesome Durga Puja and also went to a coastal resort village there which is really awesome , but the bad news is that a day was cut off from our vacation due to the bad weather, namely Cyclone Phailin, which was actually very severe. We were very far away from the eye of the storm, so were out of danger. I have a few videos, I think I’ll edit and post it here sometime in the future.

So I got a new gamepad. Now what?

I’ve always loved playing computer games. But I’ve never been a fan of gamepads. This is largely because I love FPS games and keyboard/mouse combo provides a control in those sorts of games (just my opinion). Of course, I love gamepads and their force feedbacks while playing a racing game. But frankly, I would prefer the old school keyboard/mouse combo over gamepads.

May the force be with you

I got the Arduino starter kit from Proto Central recently… and Star Wars time.

From AndRo.bot To Pronghorn – The Mistakes, The Lessons and The Draft

Somewhere in another post in this blog I mentioned that I was planning to upgrade the AndRo.bot rover that I was  working on. This decision was made long before AndRo was even complete. AndRo was jinxed from the onset.  The initial plan to route all user communications through the cloud proved disastrous. The latency and redundancy introduced by the cloud was so costly for the real-time data communication, that I ended up using an embedded HTTP server instead. But then new problems started showing up. This was mainly due to me using Android. Not only was Java crappy, but even the phone’s myriad background services and puny processing power were taking its tolls. Even the hardware was pretty much basic (software was the priority). But people were impressed. And it was appreciated.

Let me put a veil on that face of yours

It is often required to blur out the faces of people in an image. Google Street View does this to protect the identity of the people in an area. Several military applications need this too. While this would seem a daunting task to any beginner, SimpleCV makes everything really… um… simple.

A Twisted Web-based MP3 player

It is really easy to create a web-based MP3 player. Just keep the files in a directory or a database and stream it over the web using HTML5 Audio or something. Well… the problem is that I don’t like easy.

Computer Vision Simplified

When I was working on AndRo.bot last year, I had to do lots of vision-related processing on Android. Three of the several tasks it was expected to carry out using vision were – Live Streaming, Line Following and Face Detection. Using Java and openCV, the three tasks required over 3000 lines of codes. I was satisfied, I guess. This was still better than not doing anything at all.