On the third day of my trip I went to Edoras. The real name of this place is Mount Potts station. It is located in the mountains, 150 kms south west of Christchurch. That was a long way through a gravel road to get there but it was worth it. After a turn I could see the big plain surrounded by snowy mountains and in the middle the famous hill where king Theoden built the capital city of Rohan. The city of course was unbuilt right after hte movie was filmed but there is still a white sign on top of the hill left by the filming team of Lord of the Ring.
On day 2 of my last week-end I went to Akaroa, a small town one hour and a half away from Christchurch. In the morning I swam with dolphin. These are the rarest dolphin in the world, the "Hector" Dolphins. That was awsome. Then walked around the town, which has a french past. In fact the first french people who to New Zealand arrived there. They bought land from the maoris and went back to France to claim french sovereignty on the whole country. But when they came back they discovered a british flag floating in Akaroa : the british were quicker. It was a matter of months, that New Zealand became french of english! Maybe that was the first sign of the legendary slowlyness of the french administration
One week ago I rented a car for 3 days to travel around. On the first day I went to Arthur's Pass, a small village in the mountain in the middle of the south island.It was a nice trip, the toyota corolla is a nice car to drive with and prices of fuel are great here : 25 euros for a full tank! Enjoy the pictures.
It has been one week since I decided to program a pong for my favourite phone. I made some progress :
First on the graphics (yes I call white rectangles "graphics"! ) : I ran into a major speed problem with SDL. With a whole screen update each iteration I got only 5 to 6 fps, so I had to look into a "dirty rectangles" technique to implement. That is, redrawing only what needs a redraw at each frame. Well, that seemed a bit too complicated for me. By the way thanks Aapo Rantalainen for all the explanations. So I followed Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri's advice and tried EFL. Hmm, a bit hard at first sight but after some hours of work I got something nice and smooth running :
On the control part : first I used the mouse_button_down event and divided the screen into to zone (left to move the paddle left and so on). That way I had to click like a fool to make my paddle move, poor touchscreen . Then I switched to used the mouse_motion event and the x,y coordinates but if by chance yor finger stays in the same location the paddle won't move...Is there any possibility to look whenever I want (not with a particular triggered event) the mouse x and y's?
So I programmed the graphics, the ball motion and acceleration after each hit, the score is displayed (first to 11 wins) and a basic AI...
What's next? A little menu where you could set options (like amount of points to win and so on...), moving the look and feel to an edje file and maybe an accelerometer controlled paddle. For the moment I won't release the sources because it would be a shame to release such an ugly and undocumented code , I am working on that too.
Two days ago I spoke about my previous internship at BVS. Here is a video featuring the robot I built waving his wrist in the air. Note that a eeePC is controling the system.
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Today I had to make a presentation (by the way, my first one in english ) and I thought this would be perfect to let you know about my current work.
I am currently working at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, New Zealand on a nano-positioning device using MEMS. It is a motorized satge which features in-plane motion (2 DOF). The possible applications are cell manipulation, lens positioning, Scanning Probe Microscopy (SPM) and data-storage. The objective is achieve an accuracy of less 50 nm within a range from 10 to 40 microns. That is quite a big challenge!
One year ago, I was on a work placement in small company called Brain Vision Systems (BVS) in Paris. During 5 months I worked on the design of a human-sized robotic arm and head, and the associated control system.
The idea was to simulate how a human would do to catch an object. The control method involves the gaze analysis (compute the neck and eyes angles) to calculate the distance and direction of the seen object and sends the command to the arm. As it was a projects start, we stopped at pointing task and didn't modeled the wrist and hand movement. Basically you can find relation from the different angles of the head and those of the arm : that leads to cosine and sinus equations. These can be approximate trough linear functions, and the error is not big and amazingly its distribution is quite close to the one evaluated on human performances!
This internship was really interesting and I learn a lot of things on biomimetism and neurosciences. My report (unfortunately in french only) can be downloaded here : Internship report 2007-2008.
Cette semaine, un grand lien! Comme le nom l'indique c'est un lien bienbienbien. Un blog sur, comment dire ..., un peu tout ce qu'il se passe sur le web: les buzzs, les pas-buzz et le reste. Des rubriques hebdomaires : un album photo, une vidéo des fin fonds de Youtube, et ma préférée (non pas au saumon) la baisse de productivité du jeudi : un jeu en flash avec concours de high-score et des lots à gagner. Aussi une série vidéo du mercredi "Timecode" sur les théorie fumeuses sur des séries qui le sont parfois tout autant. Bref, du très bon, c'est ici.
I recently spoke about my intentions to develop some little games for Openmoko. I can now announce that my first project will be a Pong (yeah I know, I don't start big...). I just begun coding and already run into some difficulties. But I made a big step forward : I created an icon for my project. What? Isn't that a big step? Well you' re right...Here it is :
Nice, isn't it? And here an in-game screenshot :
Well now let's speak about the problem I have. I am developping this game with SDL. I am just drawing one black box and three white boxes and polling events (SDL_PollEvent(&event)), to know if there was a mouse click. That is not much and it is already lagging. Maybe polling is not the right thing to do? Also I've figured out that the "enable repeat" does not work for the mouse. I want to avoid continuous clicking and have a nice smooth movement while keeping pressing on the screen... I will try to fix that during the weekend, more infos by the end of it.
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. Then I switched to used the mouse_motion event and the x,y coordinates but if by chance yor finger stays in the same location the paddle won't move...Is there any possibility to look whenever I want (not with a particular triggered event) the mouse x and y's?
, I am working on that too.
Internship report 2007-2008.
