Chris's Programs and Projects

Anybots Internship

clwillingham — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 04:59:52 +0000

OK, so I haven’t blogged for about a month now (because I don’t really like blogging that much anyway), but I figured I should at least keep this blog a little bit up to date. So here is a short update of what happened since I last posted: first of all, I got invited on an internship at Anybots by Trevor Blackwell. Two weeks later I flew all the way to Mountain View California with my sister for the internship.we arrived on Saturday. On the first day we decided to hike a little bit up a local biking trail to see what was around, on the second day we hiked about 3 miles up the trail plus about 1.5 miles to Anybots and back to see where it was. We also hiked around to different stores to pickup groceries and other necessities. We then had a Very patriotic 4th of July dinner of pasta and completely failed to catch the fireworks on TV. Today we hiked around a bit more, got some lunch (leftover pasta), and then I worked on schoolwork most of the rest of the day. To finish off the day we had a very… interesting meal of rice and beans (we did not have a lid over the rice). When all is said and done, it is one of the most entertaining long trips I’ve ever gone on. The actual internship will start tomorrow which should be very interesting.

So thats it, 3 days of craziness compressed into one paragraph for your entertainment.

Back from Atlanta

clwillingham — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 18:36:36 +0000

perhaps i should have had a post last week saying that i was heading to Atlanta Georgia with the rest of my robotics team “Team Duct Tape” for the world Championship competition in the Georgia Dome. we didn’t win any trophies or anything but we had a great time. I am however happy to say that our alliance team at the state competition (Smoke and Mirrors) won the winning alliance world which means Florida won anyway.

WebCame + Galileoscope = cool moon images

clwillingham — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 19:47:23 +0000

well thats with a good camera. i was actually looking at a NXT controlled telescope when i found a video on how to attach a webcam to a Galileoscope which is an extremely simple telescope that i have found is actually a decent quality telescope with the exception that its very hard to focus on things because of its simplicity. this video however shows how you can attach an old webcam to a film canister with the back cut out and that in turn can attach to the back of the telescope instead of the standard lense. take a look:

seeing as its so simple and i happen to have a camera almost exactly like the one in that video as well as a laptop that i can run Linux on, i think i’ll try it.

it might also be interesting to go farther and connect an NXT to the tripod and then we have a fully robotic telescope. then connect the camera to OpenCV and program it for image recognition, give it a database of star locations so that it can detect its location and you have a fully automated robotic telescope (if you don’t forget the accelerometer and compass sensor for directional input).

XMPPWeb (aka GWeb)

clwillingham — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:09:18 +0000

sorry for the low number of posts, i just haven’t really gotten around to posting anything. but here is my latest project: the XMPPWeb

Idea:

make it possible to host a website through an XMPP Server such as Google talk. this means that someone can request a webpage that you are hosting through google talk. basically you have a web browser and you enter something like XMPP://bob@gmail.com/index.htm. the server that is listening to the account bob@gmail.com will recieve something like “REQUEST: /index.htm”and will reply by sending the content of index.htm to the XMPP account requesting the website. this is sort of like how you got to view this webpage except your looking at it because its hosted by a separate server. so why host through GWeb? because you can host from your own server at home through a firewall securely. what this really is, is a tunneling system.

Visual Explenation:

For those who like to see things in pretty pictures here is an oversimplified diagram showing how you currently connect to a website (Ignoring DNS Servers):

you have one server your connecting to, and your probably behind a firewall. if you wanted to host a website you would have to forward a port and lower your security a bit.

here is how you would host a website through XMPP:

Here we have two servers (Depending on your XMPP Host). one server is the XMPP Server which acts as the go between server, the other is the Web-server. so the web-server is a client to the XMPP Server and the users are Clients to the XMPP Server. this means that the Web-server must stay connected to the XMPPServer in order to host the website. a user can send a message to the XMPPServer which will send the message to the Web-server which will reply with the data requested by sending it to the XMPP Server and from XMPP Server to the User. and there you have it. an over-engineered solution to a nonexistent problem just for the fun of it.

XMPPTunnel

clwillingham — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:45:22 +0000

this is just an idea i’ve been working on for a while.

lately I’ve found people underestimate the power of chat protocols (sometimes with the exception or IRC). its fairly easy to control a robot with Skype with the API and XMPP is even easier in some ways. XMPP is a good way to transfer data from one person to the other privately. Skype is good for of course transferring Video (thats the point of it anyway).

after doing several projects though it accurred to me that maybe it can transfer more than that, what if you created an XMPP Tunnel. this means that you collect packets being sent to a certain port and send the packets through XMPP (Perhaps Google Talk). on the other end of the line somebody else recieves the message on XMPP, they then convert it back into TCP or UDP and send it into there network. this creates a secure easy to use Tunnel without having to deal with Port forwarding, or any complex settings. the router would just treat it as any other chat message and the message could even be encrypted for better security.

to my knowledge no such thing exists so i decided to create one. not much progress yet but when complete it should be able to transfer any data through XMPP.

The DuctTape of the Internet

clwillingham — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:25:03 +0000

after hearing about Perl a few times, i finally got curious and decided to test it out. after reading up on it i discovered that it is commonly called the “Duct Tape of the Internet” mostly because of its flexibility and ease of use. it is not a very fussy language like C or C++ or even Java, and if you forget something like the package declaration it won’t really care that much. since it is a scripting language it depends on you installing the runtime so its not very good for distributed software, however it can be used for Web Development, Experimentation, or really anything you feel like doing with it. it really isn’t fussy and you can write code pretty quickly. other than that though, theres not much else to say about it. like DuctTape, its simple, its quick and its easy. what more is there to say?

the new and not so improved OSDK

clwillingham — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:53:48 +0000

for those of you who do not know what a BootLoader is and think the below text is in a different language, click here.

for the rest of you, please continue reading and leave a comment if you don’t understand something or have a suggestion or question.

after searching for a very long time for some kind of operating system development kit i found absolutely nothing. there was Cosmos (C# Open Source Managed Operating System) but this was fairly limiting and communication was not so easy. then there was OSKit which had some Promising beginnings but it died out. it was fairly good but pretty hard to compile on Windows.

then there was another small project i found. this was the MSVC Kernel Framework. it was very easy to compile but i could only download an early version. the problem with this was that the compiler went through a two stage process to get an HOD format executable by first compiling into a PE format and then stripping the PE headers with some special program. this would have been fine except that for some reason the use of Strings caused an exception in the program that stripped off the headers. in short you could not use strings with the way the kernel was being compiled. so i tried another more complicated yet far more flexible method. i added a multi-boot header to the Kernel startup function which i copied off of a useful tutorial, then i downloaded GRUB which is not an ugly thing that moves around underground, it is a boot-loader. the thing about GRUB is you can boot just about whatever the heck you want including a PE format executable. the only problem with this was that GRUB is considerably more complicated than the other single boot-loader that was originally being used. after studying Cosmos though i found out how to automate the task of creating a bootable image file with GRUB and a handy tool called mkisofs. it turned out to be simpler than the original method used and also a very easy way to build the file system since mkisofs takes a folder and converts it into an ISO. after writing the post-build configuration of the ISO i was able to make the OS boot into a Virtual Machine and guess what: IT WORKED!!. when the entire thing was finished, you could compile the OS and hit run and your OS would run. so i therefore present to you the OSDK. a fully working all in one Operating system with one system requirement: you must have VS2008 (i don’t know if it works in express addition if someone finds out please let me know).

Open Command Prompt From Explorer

clwillingham — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 17:24:15 +0000

this is just a small trick i found by accident:

If you have ever used Linux you’ll probably notice the absolutely wonderful feature in most of the file explorers. the open terminal here button. you can usually right click on a folder in GNU/Linux and select open in terminal. but then if you are working on something a bit more complicated in windows and you need to open in a command prompt, wheres the button? i originally thought there wasn’t one until i held down shift. if you hold down shift and right click on a folder there are a few extra options. first one is another useful one: “Open in New Process”. this will open it in a new explorer.exe process so that if it crashes you don’t loose the entire interface. And then there is the all important ”Open in Command Window” this opens a command prompt window in your current working directory. it saves you a bit of navigational work.

Levitank Introduction

clwillingham — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:11:21 +0000

Levitank is a game that a friend of mine developed for fun before he joined the robotics team I was on. What intrigued me about it was that it was written in such a way that although you’re Tank is stronger and you are (probably) smarter than the AI enemies, your tank is treated just like any of the other enemy or Allie tanks in the game. In short, everyone plays by the same rules and can have the same weapons.

The basics of the game go like this: there are three types of tanks: a Levitank, a Trom, and a Drom. A Levitank is stronger than a Trom which is stronger than a Drom. There are also various weapons which any of the three types of tanks can use. These vary from the LV3 (handgun sort of thing) to Rockets.

When I first looked at the code I did not understand OOP (Object Oriented Programming) yet and it really looked like a bunch of gibberish because it was quite complicated and it doesn’t have much commenting. now that I have learned Java and OOP it looks like a bunch of gibberish because it’s quite complicated and it doesn’t have much commenting, however now that gibberish makes a bit more sense and if I examine one of the classes and ask a gazillion questions I can sometimes figure them out

After he showed me Levitank, I suggested trying to write a 3D version (I was still trying to figure out programming at the time, but I got better after learning RobotC thanks to FTC). It was kind of a crazy idea actually. Neither of us had ever made a 3D game. Just to try it I started with XNA Game studio (I got a free license from DreamSpark and I wanted to try it out). Although this did teach me OOP and C# at the same time, it took a long time to get a simple game to work, and the code made no sense when I was finished. After my friend saw it he suggested we try to stick to java.

I was a little hesitant on this at first because java has the false assumption of being slow. After googling “Java 3D game engine” however, all hesitation was gone as a perfect game engine came up on the first page. The Java Monkey Engine: this game engine is about as good as it gets in java game engines. There is no better Java Game engine that I have found yet (leave a comment if you have found one). From that point on me and my friend have been working on Levitank 3D. starting by writing a full Unified Modeling Language (UML) class Diagram of the entire game redesigned we worked in our spare time to develop a very odd little game about Levitank’s, Troms and Droms. The game is still in progress and I’ll try to make a few posts every now and then on the progress

OGRE3D Real-Time Render Engine

clwillingham — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 02:18:52 +0000

I have experience in java, C#, C, Basic, even Assembly, but for some reason i always seem to skim over C++. I’ve never particularly liked the language, but i have always wanted to learn it. so i decided finally to just dive right in and try to compile the OGRE3D Real-Time Rendering Engine (yeah i was a little ambitious when i made the dicision). this is a very powerful 3D rendering engine. the thing to remember with it is that it is a rendering engine and not a game engine. this means that the primary goal of the engine is not to handle all parts of a game, its goal is to render a 3D image in real-time. what does this mean? it means that it will render a 3D scene in its current state. and if this state changes, so does the image. a game engine usually includes this plus some added features such as Mouse input, keyboard input and (occasionally) AI libraries.

so why would you want to use a real-time rendering engine? quality. an open source community developing a gaming engine will try to make the best of everything. JME gaming engine is my favorite gaming engine because it is both easy to use and versatile. however JME will probably never be able to match OGRE3D’s graphic quality because it is a community project concerned with the broader field of gaming engines which includes more than just good graphics. it concentrates on ease of use, and making an overall environment for developing games. OGRE on the other hand concentrates on Speed and good graphics. this makes it considerably harder to use (notice ease of use in not there) however it is in many ways far more versatile. as a real-time rendering engine it develop more than just games (this is of course possible with JME as well, but not always as easy). you could make a 3D file browser or perhaps a modeling tool.

i am not saying OGRE3D is better than a gaming engine, far from it. a gaming engine cannot be compared well with OGRE3D because it is not a gaming engine. and its intentions are not always game development. anyway i finally got around to compiling it… and then failing to compile it… and then recompiling it… and then failing again… and then deleting everything as it stacked up 4GB of hard-drive space because i forgot to clear the build before rebuilding… and then re-downloading everything and building clean starting from CMAKE… and then SUCCESS almost… its still compiling i won’t know until its done. but it seems a bit more successful than it has been.

i will provide more details on building depending on how the build goes (don’t get your hopes up, i’m compiling on a 64 bit windows 7 computer what could go wrong with that? ).