Planet maemo: category "feed:db85272b5cc4c48c874836930690af4e"

monkeyiq

Accelerometers hit Canola2 and PDF viewing

2009-01-19 02:22 UTC  by  monkeyiq
0
0
Of course, if a unit comes out with an embedded accelerometer in it then using a "slightly clunky" wiimote will no longer be needed as the source of motion data. I recently added the ability for libsixdof to control closed source applications as well as properly patched open source ones. This was mainly to let Google Earth finally take some advantage of proper sixdof devices, but it works equally well for Canola2 on maemo.


Controlling Canola2 using libsixdof and a wiimote from Ben Martin on Vimeo.

Two big features that libsixdof brings is the ability to configure what happens when the controller is moved on an axis, and how frequently that happens. So, if you don't like your images flicking past at 20 images / second in Canola, you can limit it to whatever / second. In the video, having maximum axis movement will only ever scroll 3 images / second. So when I hold the unit causing a continual next image movement I can still see what is happening and Canola2 does not get overloaded with events.


Flipping pages in a PDF by moving the n810 from Ben Martin on Vimeo.

Again the wiimote is actaully held behind the device. I'm sort of getting the hang of the controlling code etc so that you can use more subtle rotations of the device to issue commands to the running program. This is using the same stuff that the Canola2 video did, I could patch a PDF viewer, but for discrete events like next-page it doesn't really make a huge difference. Panning is the big thing that screams out for patching.
Categories: maemo
monkeyiq

Like a walk in the park..

2009-01-18 17:27 UTC  by  monkeyiq
0
0
A walk through the botanical gardens the other day with a digital camera and I had a nice little harvest of background images. Unfortunately the initial scale and crop of the scaled creature to 800x480 means his head is hidden somewhat under the status icons. But many of the other more generic ones work well for backgrounds. Plus I get the added bonus of having a collection of prescaled 800x480 images for demoing Canola hacks.







Categories: maemo
monkeyiq

Didn't your n810 come with an accelerometer?

2009-01-14 19:53 UTC  by  monkeyiq
0
0
Shown below is a video of the forthcoming 0.1.0 release of libsixdof with a wiimote. I have hacked up maemo-mapper to have initial support for libsixdof, I'll have to clean up the patch before letting other human eyes see it's nastyness :| I decided to use the C++ sixdof API which means there is a single C++ source file in my build of maemo mapper, it was just faster to get it coded that way. Perhaps I'll convert to the libsixdofc ANSI C API before sending the patch.


Didn't your n810 come with an accelerometer? from Ben Martin on Vimeo.

Although libsixdof supports other 6-degrees of freedom controllers too, getting those controllers to work on maemo is a little more of a challenge. For example, I would love to use the portable spacenavigator usb device with maemo. Even though most folks have the USB cabling to hook up the unit, and it gets detected by the n810 when you have USB in the right mode, getting XInput events from evdev on maemo might be another battle. It is not like that part is trivial on a desktop distro either right now unfortunately. I might end up hacking support for direct /dev/input/foo kernel devices into libsixdof to get around that issue and have "real" 6dof devices working under maemo.
Categories: maemo
monkeyiq

Hello, planet maemo

2009-01-14 00:21 UTC  by  monkeyiq
0
0
OK, so now I have relevant posts aggregated onto planet maemo, hi everybody </dr-nick>.

For those who haven't discovered it, I run a personal repository of packages for maemo. If you break your maemo device by using my repository, you get to keep both pieces. I have a few n810 units and of course my primary open source software suite, libferris, is ported to maemo and available in my repository. Libferris is a virtual filesystem which includes rich index and search capabilities. There are many nice choices for index+search for maemo, with Tracker coming out soon in the standard maemo distribution, strigi available for the n810 etc. Of course, I use libferris on maemo for my indexing ;)

My repo also contains a few handy misc packages like unison, sshfs, fuse, and tinc. Anyone notice the hints that I like filesystems? The unison package could be made to have a few less dependencies, but it works well already. I have compiled afuse, obexftp and obexfs for maemo but those are not in my repository yet because I'm having trouble getting the 810 bluetooth to work from the normal obex packages instead of through the osso-gwobex layer. It would be nice to be able to mount a mobile phone's sd card through FUSE on the n810 and share storage a bit more, but I digress.

You'll also notice cwiid and libsixdof added recently to the repository. I have been playing with a wiimote on the desktop and on the n810. The libsixdof on the 810 can read the state of the wiimote OK. The wmgui tool locks the CPU of the n810 at 100% when using the accelerometer mode, so clearly you have to be somewhat smarter about what you update for each event on an embedded device. I have hopes that I can hack maemo mapper to use libsixdof soon and thus be able to control it on an n810 using a wiimote ;) Getting other six degree of freedom controllers to work will be more of a problem on maemo because you need to use a very recent evdev with a patch for some devices.

One of the issues that still plagues libferris on maemo is the lack of prelinking. Starting an application that uses libferris causes the CPU to spend a bunch of time resolving symbols before it can start executing anything. I've enabled hidden symbols, compiled with a later gcc than the scratchbox normally uses and played games to speed things up, but getting close how quick a desktop machine can resolve symbols at application startup has still escaped me. I might end up rsyncing / to nfs:/foo and running prelink on an n810 just to see if/how much that helps things out.
Categories: maemo
newer