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Soap Bubble Bot

July 2, 2010 – 3:51 pm
During my studies at the HFU, I have to participate in at least two semester projects. This time we built a new USB interface for some pretty old hardware. That old hardware is a robot arm built in 80′s (there is “Made in West Germany” written on it). I’ve blogged about it before.
Today we got to present our work. But how do you show something as abstract as interface hardware/software? So we came up with that demo which we consider pretty neat: we taught the robot arm to make soap bubbles. Well, we used a bunch of ruby scripts to grad the events generated by a gamepad (HID device) and interpreted them, so that one can control the arm. We also taped something (I’d call a soap bubble device) at the front of robot. Add some of the soap fluid and we could’ve made soap bubbles manually. But that’s too easy. So we added a sequence of positions (one of the firmware’s features) and used that to do the work. Video’s after the break.
By Christian | Posted in Development, Fun, Studies | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

Unix Friends and User Group Campus Camp 2010

January 18, 2010 – 1:22 am
The UnFUCK2010 just went over. UnFUCK is a three day event organized by students of the Hochschule Furtwangen University (incl. myself) which features a lot of talks on quite a variety of topics. This year – which was the second time UnFUCK took place – we had talks starting from the power of prime numbers to fiddling with the ARM Cortex-M3. The timeline gives some more information about what was going on.
All in all it was a weekend definitely well spent, I had the opportunity to meet a lot of inspiring people and to hear about new and cool ideas. Videos of this conference should be available at the UnFUCK wiki within the next days (unfortunately everything in German).
On Sunday I had the opportunity to hold my Informatik Rockstars (that’s no typo here, it’s German :-P ) talk again. It basically presents people who have delivered extraordinary participation to computer science (with a slight bias towards theoretical computer science) as a trading card game. As I’ve been asked a couple of times now to publish those cards I do so (unfortunately they’re also in German). They are in no particular order, far away from being complete and should be considered to be work in progress. Download link and license are at the end of this post.







You can also download the whole set here.
Creative Commons License
Informatik Rockstars Trading Cards by Christian Weichel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License
By Christian | Posted in Fun, Studies | Tagged | Comments (1)

Learn instead of building time machines

July 8, 2009 – 5:25 pm

Today I kinda messed up one of my exams (at least it feels like it). It’s probably not going to be an F, but not as good as I would like it to be. Because of that I felt inspired to “draw” a short comic in the style of by XKCD (altough not as pretty as the XKCD comics are):
comic

By the way, that WOOP is the sound the universe makes when it implodes.

By Christian | Posted in Fun | Tagged , | Comments (1)

Got root?

July 5, 2009 – 10:42 pm

Today I rooted my T-Mobile G1. Now I got the awesome CyanogenMod 3.6.2 (based on Android 1.5rc2) and the HTC hero theme running. Looks pretty cool and runs as hell.

Hopefully now I can connect to my universities network which requires WPA2 enterprise. One needs root access in order to modify the wpa_supplicant.conf to connect to a WPA2 enterprise network.

htc_hero

This screenshot is exactly what my phone looks like right now, but it gives you an idea.

By Christian | Posted in Fun | Tagged | Comments (0)

Listening to the A2

May 3, 2009 – 2:52 am

Short cut: Just listen here:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

But if you want to know how this all came to existence, read on.

It got kinda boring today, so I decided to play arround with the A2 automaton once again. Once again I reimplemented the A2. This time in C:

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#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
typedef int uint_16;

int neighborhood_aliveness(uint_16 *m, int x, int y) {
    int s = 0, i = 0, j = 0;

    for(i = 0; i <= 2; i++)
        for(j = 0; j <= 2; j++)
            s += get_cell(m, (x + 1) - j, (y + 1) - i);
           
    return s;  
}

void set_cell(uint_16 *m, int x, int y, int val) {
    if(x > 15 || y > 15 || x < 0 || y < 0) return;
   
    if(val > 0) m[y] |= (1 << x);
    else m[y] &= ~(1 << x);
}

int get_cell(uint_16 *m, int x, int y) {
    return x > 15 || y > 15 || x < 0 || y < 0 ? 0 : (m[y] & (1 << x)) >> x;
}

uint_16* nextgen(uint_16* m) {
    uint_16 *ng = malloc(sizeof(uint_16) * 16);
   
    int i = 0,j = 0;
    for(i = 0; i < 16; i++) {
        for(j = 0; j < 16; j++) {
            set_cell(ng, j, i, neighborhood_aliveness(m, j, i) == 2 ? 1 : 0);
        }      
    }
    return ng;
}

void print_m(uint_16 *m) {
    int i = 0, j = 0;
    for(i = 0; i < 16; i++) {
        for(j = 0; j < 16; j++) {
            printf("%i", get_cell(m, j, i));
        }
        printf("\n");
    }  
    printf("\n");
}

int count_alive_cells(uint_16 *m) {
    int i = 0, j = 0, s = 0;
    for(i = 0; i < 16; i++) {
        for(j = 0; j < 16; j++) {
            s += get_cell(m, j, i);
        }
    }  
    return s;
}

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
    uint_16 *field = malloc(sizeof(uint_16) * 16);
    field[0] = 0xAAAA;
   
    int i = 0;
    for(i = 0; i < 32000; i++) {
        field = nextgen(field);
        printf("%i\t%i\n", i, count_alive_cells(field));
    }
   
    printf("\n");
    return 1;
}

It’s not a particullarly beautiful implementation, but it gets the job done. After this was settled I plotted the amount of alive cells per generation.
fig01
After doing some more rather standard stuff with data like this (like calculating standard derivation and plotting it: nothing fancy here) I noticed that the plot kinda reminded me of a wave pattern one can usually find in the sound editors. So, why not use the data the A2 gave us to generate some sort of music. No sooner said, than done. Once I had Super Collider downloaded and running, I started to do some tutorials and fiddling around with the massive and powerfull tool. Eventually I managed to come up with the following piece of code:

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(
s.recSampleFormat = 'int16';
s.recHeaderFormat = 'wav'
)

(
SynthDef(\help_sinegrain,
    { arg out=0, freq=440, sustain=0.5;
        var env;
        env = EnvGen.kr(Env.perc(0.05, sustain, 0.2), doneAction:2);
        Out.ar(out, SinOsc.ar(freq, 0, env))
    }).send(s);
)



(
a = Pseq(#[14, 24, 14, 24, 22, 34, 33, 32, 47, 48, 38, 43, 47, 55, 57, 59, 67, 58, 60, 53, 65, 68, 75, 67, 65, 63, 77, 53, 74, 79, 86, 52, 68, 84, 61, 55, 55, 58, 62, 71, 74, 66, 59, 66, 78, 68, 64, 73, 71, 52, 80, 66, 56, 64, 67, 59, 69, 75, 62, 74, 62, 99, 49, 62, 54, 74, 57, 63, 70, 71, 67, 69, 75, 57, 65, 85, 72, 71, 68, 78, 67, 60, 81, 70, 52, 70, 83, 82, 57, 65, 64, 68, 61, 73, 69, 78, 41, 56, 58, 64, 73, 66, 54, 74, 62, 68, 64, 84, 72, 56, 66, 73, 83, 54, 78, 45, 68, 68, 79, 70, 59, 59, 77, 71, 56, 73, 53, 83, 84, 52, 62, 77, 59, 87, 62, 70, 65, 74, 80, 62, 56, 64, 73, 71, 79, 56, 71, 66, 86, 70, 77, 70, 76, 51, 57, 51, 65, 45, 56, 47, 79, 58, 87, 71, 71, 60, 59, 88, 55, 53, 68, 70, 78, 62, 79, 57, 55, 67, 66, 61, 68, 80, 85, 45, 55, 73, 56, 77, 58, 54, 71, 71, 67, 65, 73, 78, 73, 69, 81, 54, 66], 1).asStream;
Routine({
    loop({
    Synth(\help_sinegrain, [\freq, a.next.midicps]);
    0.2.wait;
    });
}).play();
)

That

Pseq

in line 18 contains the first 200 samples from the A2 automaton. This sequence is then used as MIDI notes a few lines below. The outcome actually sounds pretty neat. I did not expect to be able to create such nice sounding stuff within this short amount of time. But anyway, the A2 is still interessting and Super Collider is super cool. Alright, I really do need to get some sleep right now. It’s like 4 o’clock in the moring and a fellow student of mine and myself want to start playing around with CUDA tomorow.

By Christian | Posted in Fun, Maths | Tagged , | Comments (0)

The most geekiest way to tell your feelings

February 9, 2009 – 11:18 pm

Without words

in_love

By Christian | Posted in Fun, Maths | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

Why software is like baking a cake

February 9, 2009 – 9:45 pm

Software is like sex, it’s better when it’s free – Linus Torvalds

But hey, I’ve found another analogy between software and something more physical (yeah, I really should stop those kinda jokes ;-) ). As I baked a cake a little while ago (and there surely was for a good reason for that), I found that little analogy …

ingredients In order to bake a cake, one needs several ingredients. Those ingredients can be seen like the libraries required by a program. The libraries are referenced from a program using include statements and recipies reference their ingredients explicitly. libraries
kitchen_tools Once you got your ingredients ready you need some tools to handle them. It’s basically the same on the software side. You need several tools to compile your sourcecode (aka recipee) and libraries to the finished product. tools
cake That finished product is either the finished cake itself or the executable. All in all the process was pretty much the same: Use a sort of recipee (source code), put together all your ingredients (libraries) and use some tools to glue everything together application

Despite all those simillarities, there are a few more. So for example one could think of closed source cake (the stuff you can buy in the bakery) as well as open source cake (like the recipees one can find using google). And as that wasn’t enough, cake does indeed have some hackable potential. So one could make a cake that serves a special purpose besides tasting good, like providing you with the perfect nutrition for a day …

Alright I know this does not completely work out but it’s still fun though :)

The cake icons came from snmsnl and the kitchen icons from atomnett

By Christian | Posted in Fun | Tagged , , | Comments (0)