Carlitos' Contraptions » Software

Carlitos 1, Xilinx 0

Carlitos — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 08:02:31 +0000

Xilinx Spartan

I spent countless hours trying to install the free version of the Xilinx software on may windoze Virtual machine and I have finally succeed.

I must say that although I have never used Xilinx ISE Webpack, I already hate it. It come in a huge installation archive (2.7 GB) and an equally huge update archive (2.4 GB). The option to use the “slim” installer (88 MB) is worthless since there is no ways of saving the required files for an eventual reinstallation (which was needed twice in my case).

Anyway, after installing/uninstalling/installing many times I finally got it to work. And this very lengthy and painful process reminded me why the Open Source world is so much more convenient. Installing a full linux distribution with tons of extra programs takes half the required storage and a third of the time. Too bad FPGA programming tools are ruled by the chip manufacturers.

All this painful process was required in order to get my new NanoBoard 3000 running. Hopefully I wont have to use Xilinx ISE anytime soon. Altium Designer was much easier to install and requires less storage.

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Tiny Firefox

Carlitos — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:58:33 +0000

I know this has been said before, but I cannot find it, so here it goes again.

Ever since I got my EeePC, I got obsessed by the amount of screen real-state Firefox takes for the top menu, browsing control buttons, address and search bar, etc.

The quickest fix I always apply every time I am in front of a Firefox windows that is not mine is to move the Bookmarks toolbar content right next to the File menu and to disable the Bookmarks toolbar. This removes one full toolbar, and unless you have a really heavily populated Bookmarks toolbar, should function very well.

But I wanted to go further (especially since I saw that Chrome uses less screen real-state). So I installed a few add-ons that make a significant difference:

AHS. autoHideStatusbar does precisely that. It hides the status bar unless it is required (i.e. a page is loading or you hover a link) or you go near it with the mouse pointer.
Smart Stop/Reload. It combines the Stop and Reload buttons (since they are never used at he same time).
Tiny Menu. It transforms the File menu into a single item. This extension saves a lot of real-state and the menu remains nice ans usable.

By using these extensions and moving things around in the toolbars, you can achieve a very tiny navigation interface that is perfectly usable.

Tiny Firefox

Note the Tux theme (I a’m using Personas)

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Kubuntu Karmic Koala is out!

Carlitos — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:20:52 +0000

Kubuntu Karmic Koala

Kubuntu Karmic Koala is finally out! I use it since the Release Candidate came Oct. 22 nd, and it is absolutely awesomely mind-blowingly fabulous. All of the kinks in Jaunty have been fixed and a lot of new features have been added.

Kubuntu?

Why am I talking about Kubuntu and not about its more popular sibling Ubuntu? Well, very simply because KDE kicks Gnome’s ass any day (while blindfolded and with all of its finger stuck in its nose). I know that seems like a very bold and unjustified statement, well it is indeed very bold but totally justified.

The main difference about KDE and Gnome, besides the fact that the KDE foundation is much more solid, flexible and portable, is the mindset. In KDE you can configure (trough a nice GUI) pretty much everything, whereas in Gnome, you get a bunch of very comfortable defaults that (although they can be modified) are not intended to be fiddled with too much.

Also, KDE is much more than a desktop environment and provides a full suite of programs that do almost everything you could want to do. These programs also integrate very well together and provide as many more features and options than any sane person would need or be able to use (but who likes sane people anyway?).

Quick Review

My Desktops (Grid View)

I am currently using the 64-bit version of Kubuntu and it is performing incredibly well. The system (my laptop) boots in around 40 seconds and turns off in less than 15 seconds. The graphical performance is flawless and I can benefit from smooth performance even when doing very processor intensive tasks (such as stitching photos together).

Also, It comes with Ubutu One (a remote storage service) which is pretty convenient for sharing and backing up files.

I’ll try to do a screencast and post it in order to show off the Koala.

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Panoramaker

Carlitos — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 01:55:03 +0000

As promised before, here is the Python script that runs my panoramic camera hardware. It is a very quick prototype and is by no means intended for widespread use since it requires manual calibration. Nevertheless, it might be very useful to those seeking to learn how to position the servos or control a digital camera through Python.

This script requires my Pololu library and includes some codes from here in order to control the camera. Besides the basic requirements of lib_pololu, the script also requires gPhoto. If you are running Linux, you most likely already have it but in case you do not, you can install it through your favourite package manager or by using the console (e.g. for Ubuntu/Debian):

sudo apt-get install gphoto

If you are using some other OS, you can download gPhoto from here.

The Code

Download

# Adding the path to the lib_pololu.py file to your modules path.
# Assuming that the file is at /your/path/to/the/library/lib_pololu.py
import sys
sys.path.append(‘/your/path/to/the/library’)

# Import the lib_pololu module
import lib_pololu

# Import the serial communication and time modules
import serial
import time

# Open serial port
port = serial.Serial(‘/dev/ttyUSB1′)
port.baudrate=2400 #set an appropriate baudrate

# Camera Code (from vmlaker.org)
import os, re
from subprocess import call, Popen, PIPE

def run(command):
print ‘Running:’, command
p = Popen(command, shell=True, stdout=PIPE)
lines = p.stdout.readlines()
for line in lines:
print ‘Stdout :’, line,
return lines
def capture():
c = ‘gphoto2 –capture-image’
sout = run(c)
firstLine = sout[0]

expr = ‘New file is in location (.*?) on the camera’
comp = re.compile(expr, re.DOTALL)
path = re.findall(comp, firstLine)[0]
dir, fname = os.path.split(path)

c = ‘gphoto2 –get-file %s –folder %s’%(fname, dir)
run(c)

c = ‘gphoto2 –delete-file %s –folder %s’%(fname, dir)
run(c)

c = ‘gphoto2 –storage-info’
run(c)

# Calibration Parameters
# These parameters set the limits and reference positions of the rig.
# They have been obtained trough trial and error.
horizontal = 93.5
front = 95.5
back_l = 84.5
back_r = 107
top = 70
bottom = 110

# Create two motors
# There are associated to the panning and tilting motion of the rig.
tilt = lib_pololu.Servo(port, 0, 1150, 4650)
pan = lib_pololu.Servo(port, 1, 1200, 4987)

# Define a capture routine
# This is a simple loop that takes pictures in order to produce a
# 360 deg panorama.
def capture_pano():

# Capture parameters
steps_h = 16
steps_v = 4
step_h = (back_r – back_l)/steps_h
step_v = (bottom – top)/steps_v
pos_v = bottom

while (pos_v >=top):
tilt.set_pos(pos_v)
pos_v = pos_v – step_v
pos_h = back_l
while(pos_h <= back_r):
pan.set_pos(pos_h)
pos_h = pos_h + step_h
time.sleep(2)
capture()

# Initialize the motors
tilt.set_pos(horizontal)
pan.set_pos(front)
time.sleep(2)

# Capture the panorama
capture_pano()

Again, many thanks to RobotShop who provided the hardware that made this project possible.

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Pololu Python Library

Carlitos — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 04:54:29 +0000

Pololu Micro Serial Servo Controller

I started writing a library for controlling the Pololu motor controllers with a computer trough a serial port.

I’m writing this in Python so the code can be cross-platform but I would be very glad to have some feedback about running it on other OSs than Linux. Actually, any feedback would be very welcome.

As of now it can interface with the Pololu Micro Serial Servo Controller that I got form RobotShop. I am planning to use this code in my upcoming project RobotShop is sponsoring. I will supplement this library as I get newer hardware to work with.

I know there is already a python interface for it but I really wanted to have an object oriented way of managing motors (i.e. they can be instantiated and controlled more easily).

You can download the library here: lib_pololu.py (you will need to change the extension of the file to .py instead of txt).

In order to properly use this library you will require:

If you use a civilized OS you may be able to get all this by typing this in a command prompt:

sudo apt-get install idle python-serial

Here is a sample script that will use the library in order to control a servo: servo_example.py (you will need to change the extension of the file to .py instead of txt).

Download

# Adding the path to the lib_pololu.py file to your modules path.
# Assuming that the file is at your/path/to/the/library/lib_pololu.py
import sys
sys.path.append(‘/your/path/to/the/library’)

#Import the lib_pololu module
import lib_pololu

#Import the serial communication module that should already be installed
import serial

#Open serial port
port = serial.Serial(‘/dev/ttyUSB0′)
port.baudrate=2400 #set an appropriate baudrate

#Create a motor assuming that the motor is connected to the connector
#number 0 on the controller. The two numbers (1150 and 4650) are
#the calibration values corresponding to the 0 ans 180 deg positions
#respectively. These are the numbers that should be sent to the servos
#using command 4 with the methos send_command() in lib_pololu
motor = lib_pololu.Servo(port, 0, 1150, 4650)

#Playing around with the motor
motor.set_pos(45) #sets the posotion of the motors in degerees.
motor.set_speed(100) #sets the speed at a value between 0 and 127

Note for Redmond OS (aka Window$) users: you will need the Win32 Python extension for pyserial to work.

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Making Panoramas

Carlitos — Sun, 10 May 2009 00:34:06 +0000

In my trip to San Francisco, I had the chance to see many beautiful things. And I wanted to be able to remember them and show them to my friends and family.

San Francisco Seen Form Twin Peaks Park

Besides taking simple photos, sometimes you need a wider view- angle to really capture the scenery. The obvious solution to this is making a panorama. This means you take many pictures of different sections of your subject and then align them and stitch them together so to form a bigger picture.

Many people believe this is a very difficult procedure and that the results are never as good as expected, and they are partially correct. In order to get a nice looking panoramic picture hat will align and stitch together correctly you need to follow some rules:

Make sure that contiguous pictures have a good 30% overlap between them.
Make sure the overlapping areas contains some hard object, like a building. If they overlap only over the sky or some water, then the stitching together will be more difficult.
Make sure you follow a simple pattern when shooting the photos. Follow a horizontal line, for instance, and shoot the pictures in order. Also, if your making a taller panorama, I suggest you shoot many horizontal lines that will stack up together. This will make things easier when recognizing which photos to stitch together.
Make sure all the pictures have a similar exposure. This should be no problem if you are shooting your pictures all at once.
Make sure your subject is always on the same focal plane. You can have many focal panes but it will make the stitching more difficult.

Once you have shot all the pictures you can start the stitching. In order to so so, you can use an excellent software package called Hugin. Of course since I’m using it, Hugin is open source and (thus) cross-platform. Is is a very intuitive program to use and since there are many good tutorials about it, I won’t be outlining the instructions on how to use it.

Once you stitched your images together (which can be done in the three steps the wizards takes you trough) you will end up with a big TIFF or JPG file. Now you are basically done. Now you just need to crop it and made any desired adjustments with a picture editing program lie Gimp.

The only problem is that if you want to share this picture it can be hard since it may be too big for sending by email and will take a long time to (upload and) download if you put it on a website.

Now you can use the Google Maps Image Cutter. This little Java program developed by UCL enables you to use the Google Maps engine as a picture viewing system. It creates many copies of your image at various resolutions and chops those images into small square pieces. Then when you view the image trough the google maps engine, you are only loading the small squares at which you are currently looking at the resolution corresponding to your zoom level.

Here you can enjoy a few examples I made (click on the title to view them in full screen).

Title:	Downtown San Francisco
Description:	A panorama shot from the Twin Peaks Park.

Get a better browser!

Title:	Downtown and East San Francisco
Description:	A larger panorama shot from the Twin Peaks Park.

Get a better browser!

Title:	South San Francisco
Description:	Another panorama shot from the Twin Peaks Park.

Get a better browser!

Keep in mind that Hugin is very powerful and can do much more than simply stitching a few images together. Also, there might be a few issues with the file writing routine when trying to run the Google Maps Image Cutter in Linux.

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To WordPress from Blogger

Carlitos — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 06:56:49 +0000

I recently moved my blog from Blogger to an independently hosted WordPress installation and I needed to dynamically redirect the visitors going into the old pages so that the could see the new ones.

There are many tutorials on how to do this on the net but they usually involve fairly complex procedures and require modifying the Blogger HTML code and installing some plug-ins in WordPress. But, what I really wanted was a simple way of redirecting each blog post into its new version.

My solution:

I decided to write a little java script code that will do the job since it is a fairly simple task. All that is required to translate one of my permalinks is to strip the “.blogspot” part, and the “.html” part (see the example below).

Example:

Old address: http://carlitoscontraptions.blogspot.com/2009/03/smoking-cyclops.html

New address: http://carlitoscontraptions.com/2009/03/smoking-cyclops/

The script:

This script consist of two parts: (1) a function that strips the unneeded parts from the current page URL, and (2) a time delay that executes this code after 5 s.

The only thing left to do is to insert this code into an HTML/Java script box in the Blogger layout editor and that’s it. No messy template edition required.

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Arduino Launcher for the KDE menu

Carlitos — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 20:17:00 +0000

The Arduino software is good and works very well under Linux. Nevertheless, it doesn’t create a menu item when installed and it can be tricky to create one for those who are not very used to Linux (like me).

In order to add a KDE menu launcher for the Arduino software, open the KDE Menu Editor, create a new item and put

cd /opt/arduino-0007/; ./arduino

in the Command field. Also, make sure that Run in terminal is checked and replace /opt/arduino-0007/ by your own installation path.

I’m sure there are thousands of other ways of doing this (including many than only require a few commands in the terminal) but at least this ways is pretty simple and and can be done without knowing that much about Linux.

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Nice Linux Software

Carlitos — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 21:43:00 +0000

Amarok
Forget about iTunes, and even Winamp. Amarok is the best music library organizer there is. I was a big fan of Winamp before now Amarok is my player of choice.

With Amarok, you can download album covers, lyrics, see songs related to the one you’re playing, have artist info from Wikipedia, submit player tracks to last.fm, keeps lots of stats about your songs, manage your iPod (and other portable players), subscribe to podcasts, burn CDs (through k3b), and many many other features.

Inkscape
Inkscape is a free vector drawing program. It is full of features, allows to create professional quality vector drawing and is really light. Really, amazing software.

OpenOffice.org
OO.o is the office suite you always wanted. Imagine an office suite where all the features work as they should. Where you can apply styles to your text and be safe to think the program wont mess it up by applying the formatting it thinks is right. Where you can do “advanced” page numbering (e.g. numbering only some pages while leaving other pages unnumbered for instance) without having to spend lots of time getting it right (if you ever manage to get it right). OO.o is all that and more (that I have not discovered yet).

For those wondering about M$ Office compatibility, I can say that Word compatibility is not that good, Powerpoint compatibility seems flawless, and I have not tried the rest.

Beagle
Beagle allows to index and search files on the computer. IMHO it is much better than Google desktop search. It searches inside almost every file type and even in rss feeds very fast.

Automatix
Although installing software on Ubuntu is quite easy (you simply select it in the package manager) some things may be slightly more tricky to install (such as nVidia drivers). Automatix allows you to install all the most popular programs with very few clicks.

VMware
Although you might be thinking that compared to all this, other mainstream OS seem useless and costly, they are sometimes necessary. For instance I need to use Photoshop, OrCad or SolidWorks (they have not released a Linux version for these programs yet) and sometimes (unfortunately) M$ word (if I have to write a text for someone who only uses M$ software).

There are many solutions for this situations: (1) using wine (which allows to natively run win apps on Linux, but compatibility is still poor), (2) dual booting (which is not very good since you have to restart each time you need to change OS), (3) using VMware (the best solution IMHO).

With VMware you can run any OS on top of Linux. The mainstream OS runs as fast (or just slightly slower) than its normal speed on top of Ubuntu on my system. VMware even allows to connect peripherals to the virtual machine so you can print or your an iPod for instance.
Note that many of these programs are cross platform so they work on other OS as well.

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More Linux

Carlitos — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 05:52:00 +0000

The good thing about Linux is that it is light and manages the hardware well. This means that my computer runs fast nicely. This was not the case when I was running a commercial mainstream OS, my computer was so slow ans sluggish that i thought I needed a newer faster one.

Now I can run heavy applications such as Azureus without any trouble (before, I had to use Bitcomet since Azureus was really really excruciatingly slow). I can even run lots of applications at the same time fast and reliably.

Also, the startup time is pretty fast.

Desktop Environments

I thought Linux did not have any eye candy and that eye candy is heavy and makes your machine slow. Wrong. You can configure pretty much everything of the Gnome appearance. There are skins, wallpapers that support transparencies (PNG SVG), icons of any size you wish (PNG, SVG), nice transparent docks, etc.

For those who have a 3D graphics card (like me), there is Beryl. Beryls is truly beautiful. There are lots of screencasts on the net about it so I’ll let the video speak for itself.

Amazingly enough all this beautiful eye candy works on my computer pretty well.
For further and really extensive customization there is KDE. If Gnome is configurable, then KDE is the definition of configuration itself. Pretty much all the parameters can be easily changed through a GUI in order to obtain a desktop experience that fully suits your personal needs and taste.

Here are some extra screenshots of Nautilus (the gnome file manager) and Konqueror (the KDE file manager, FTP/SSH client, internet browser, image viewer and coffee machine). Notice the nice nautilus thumbnails, the function packed Konqueror and the tight integration between the KDE applications (e.g. Konqueror and Akregator).

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Switching to Ubuntu

Carlitos — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 05:09:00 +0000

I was tired of having a slow computer, I did not want to deal any longer with bugs and annoyances (and these where paid annoyances and bugs). This is why I decided to use Linux, instead of a well known mainstream OS.

At first I thought I’ll give it a try since I was not sure it suited my needs. I thought Linux was hard to use, that I’ll be using the command line a lot and that I would not have any of the functionality a more standard desktop computer has.

Guess what, I was wrong. Linux is a beautiful piece of software that enables your computer to perform at its maximum capacity. It is stable, slick and fast.

Installation

Installing Linux, Ubuntu more specifically (a Linux distribution) is very fast. It takes about 45 minutes and when you’re done you have a full desktop environment with a beautiful user interface, lots of software, including OpenOffice.Org (an office suite), The Gimp (a Photoshop like application), Gaim (instant messaging), Rithmbox (music player/organizer), Evolution (email client), Firefox (no introduction needed), and lots of other nice software out of the box. The best is that it all takes about 1GB.

All you need to install Ubuntu is downloading and burning a free CD, booting the computer with the CD (putting the CD in and restarting it for most users), and following the installation instructions. You can keep your mainstream OS if you wish and have your computer dual boot (you choose which OS you want at startup).

You can also use the CD to run Ubuntu without installing it, if you want too give it a quick try. I think the Ubuntu people have simplified this process even further by now, the CD is not even required any more (quite neat).

FYI a more popular OS takes more than one hour to install, eats up more than 1GB all to itself ad doesn’t come with all the wonderfully functionality out of the box.

By the way, all my hardware was recognized flawlessly without the need of installing any driver (except for the video card for which I had to install the driver in order to enable 3D rendering).

Ubuntu also worked without any troubles on my brother’s laptop (including the wireless internet connection).

Now that I use a good operating system my computer runs fast (as hell) without any troubles. I also have no worries about viruses, spyware and the like since there is non of it for Linux.

For the record, this is the hardware I use:

1 GHz AMD Athlon Thunderbird
nVidia gForce II 32 MB
Yamaha low end sound card
640 MB of RAM @ 133 MHz
ASUS A7V Motherboard
4+1 ports USB2 PCI card

20 GB Maxtor HD
160 GB Western Digital HD
16x, 10x, 40x LG CDRW drive
floppy disk drive

Logitech Wheel mouse
Logitech Internet Keyboard
HP photosmart 1115 (printer & memory card reader)
Canon LiDE 20 scanner
Smasung SyncMaster 753df 17″ display.
Altec Lansing 2.1 speakers
2GB iPod nano 1st generation
1GB Lexar USB key

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