FAMiLab

I mentioned a few posts ago about Riggins’ neat hack of an OpenCV face recognizer with our fugin sweet ptzcam. We said for months that we should set it up on a server at the lab, set the tune of a cronjob.

Well, we grew some balls and spent tonight installing dependencies, compiling OpenCV from SVN , getting Riggins’ imgur fork to work right, and setting up the rest of the python stuff.

CONGRATULATE US.

(Soon to come: temperature, light, pressure, and gas sensors with the Arduino analog inputs)

Riggins, Jeff, and I unexpectedly had a very productive night.

Jeff spent his time bashing some arsenugget who stole his iphone hack code to display 5 icons horizontally instead of 4.

Riggins was dead-set on getting his exploitable VMs set up on the ESXi server he made for us .

And I got all my Ruby on Rails tests passing in Cucumber with Culerity!

Wow. Go us. *back to coding*

Afterthought: Familab’s gotten a real loungy atmosphere lately. Is nice.

Abyss surprised us all by connecting to our new fancy high-def PTZ IP camera (hostname ‘ptzcam’ on familab LAN – play with it!) to the OpenCV face detection library! He created a twitter bot that updates how many faces it detects in the lab at each run. It tends to see faces in everything, but if it sees any faces at all chances the light is on and somebody is in the lab anyway :p.

famduino on Twitter
The Abyssknight’s Blogpost
famicam sourcecode on github

He still needs server space on our rack to get it running 24/7, so when it’s up there’ll be another post.

They called it the ‘CodeDojo‘ at BarCamp. In a professional sense, it’s a coding style and standards workshop. In a metaphorical sense, it’s a martial-arts training group for your code-fu.

Kata (n): a Japanese word describing detailed choreographed patterns of movements practiced either solo or in pairs.

They propose ‘Kata’ at the beginning of each meeting, and is solved appropriately according to best practices. With ‘Prepared Kata‘, a professional enlightens the attendees, step-by-step, the appropriate way to solve the problem, using TDD and BabySteps. With ‘Randori Kata‘, participants approach the board in pairs and spend 5-7 minutes solving as much of the problem as they can, often with the mentoring of the partner, then rotate out.

The next meeting is tomorrow, Saturday, April 10th, at Camden Apartments right next to Colonial and I-4 (link below).

CodeTown Event Invite
Location on Google Maps

CodeDojo WordPress Blog
CodeDojo Google Group
Google Group Mailing List Threat

Maybe we can offer them our lab as a meeting place. If it’s not too out of the way.

April 9th-11th, Ocoee, http://www.outintheboonies.com/Lake_Monroe/

This is the place. We call up this number on that sign and ask for a camping license at least seven days in advance.

Its got a nice campsite and many trails to go exploring. It’s basically pack it in pack it out. I dont know what crazy activities we will think up but it’s sure to be a lot of fun.

This site only has a hand pump water source as far as I could see and I am not sure if it is portable but we can work around all that. It may not have hot/cold running water or sowers but there is the Cadillac of porta-john’s.

FAMiLab is located at: 540 N State Road 434, Altamonte Springs, FL
in the South Seminole Business and Storage facility. We are in unit 134!

Some pictures from Micro-Controller Monday March 14, 2010 or our latest machinations as we hack micro-controllers.

Here is a video of a light cube from a few months ago.

And some hot scope action:

Rodney asked me to update the blog in his stead, but I’m not sure what to write, so:

On his, he Ides of March, he reat and alorous amilabians are holding the first of many-to-come uC Mondays! Come Ye Bretheren of the oldering words and the hields of rduino and lest ye MAKE!

(was that good Rodney?)

Mack brought in this “MegaView Display for MegaSquirt” device many weeks ago. I spent some quality time with it, and while we think the vacuum display may be broken, or the connectors oxidized, I believe I’ve successfully replicated the noteable behaviors of the MegaView display for MegaSquirt with my new fantastic and fun Freeduino.

The MegaSquirt is an automotive embedded computer system that does custom fuel injection, with cool custom displays like this – with vacuum displays! which I’d never seen before. The MegaView uses a MC68HC908GP32CP FreeScale microcontroller, and I will be using the ATMEGA328P-PU based Arduino.

The first step was to connect the MegaView display to the the usb->rs323 adapter shown above, and connect to it with minicom – set to /dev/ttyUSB0, 115200 8N1, and observe how it handles inputs, and outputs.

The results of all my testing showed that the MegaView succeeded at displaying V’s about every second, taking no input, and doing nothing else.

After several hours/minutes of whiteboarding and reading through test examples, I came up with this program to emulate all of the known behaviors of the MegaView Display for MegaSquirt

Now my Freeduino also produces V’s!

Freeduino V2.0 Serial
Assembly Guide
Arduino IDE Guide
Arduino IDE Download Page (I followed the Linux instructions on BackTrack 4, but had to apt-get gcc-avr and avrdude.)
MegaSquirt FAQ

If you’d like like to see my work, contact me or meet me at the Familab. I’ll help you make one for yourself

After a short Hangover-ish January 1st, the Makers and Hackers and Mooks wasted no time getting this year started off right! With plastic ‘poop’ jokes and superfluous LED blinkage!

Mack got his MakerBot printing! Apparently, as it’s last and final test, it prints out it’s own last part.

I got to make my first Arduino. You have no idea how much I’ve wanted those pins. I’ve tried everything else; parallel port hijacking, ripping apart keyboards, misusing joysticks… I have finally arrived.

A VPN to our doppleganger counterparts at FouLab in Quebec is hopefully coming soon. After all the fun of the 26c3 VPN, thought I’d set another one up .

Mack, Eddie, Rob, and David were here, laying down the Red Carpet for the MakerBot. More photos on the Flickr.

In all, great way to start 2010!