Climberbot III

A little one is born. After a lot of 3D refinement there is a working prototype on the road… keep reading!

Climberbots II - work in progress

So, here we are again, with Climberbot II, of the babelbots project.
Last version was made out of recycled scrap and household stuff. And it worked, partially. But the tracks were not good enough for further development.

Climberbot... climbing!

This is a prototype model made out of household stuff.

The tracks are made out of a kitchen mat and the wheels with bottle caps.

Press-casting with polymorph

While waiting for a 3D printer to arrive, I wanted to try press-casting with polymorph....

Adjustable aluminium mount for RGBDtoolkit

To be able to adjust the parallax to improve the calibration of the DSLR and the kinect camera, I designed this mount.

FFT audio frequency spectrum analysis with Processing in android devices/emulator

A friend of mine asked me for help in accesing the audio recording function of android's API with Processing.org, to develop an audio analysis app.

Keep reading!

Realtime OCR experiments with tesseract and openFrameworks

A few weeks ago, while trying to scan and OCR several pages of a book, I wished there was some app that could recognise the text from a webcam's snapshots straight away.

Installing full Ardour 3 from binaries in Ubuntu Precise 12.04 LTS 64

I want to try learning some music composition in Linux. After some search, I found people do recommend several nice audio software for Linux.

One of these applications is Ardour. You can install 2009's version 2.8 from the official Ubuntu repos. The newest version is available for free as source code or in a limited demo binary from the Ardour webpage. You can also get an unlimited binary paying a small amount. But I wanted to test the newest version without limitations before contributing to the project.

Designing little robots

For the Tower of Babel project

Logitech c920 and c910 fields of view for RGBDtoolkit

I'm considering these webcams to use them with the RGBDtoolkit. I wanted to know their field of view, and if they would match the Kinect wide angle lens.
In the technical specifications of the c910 and the c920, Logitech provides only the diagonal FOV, but does not say if that data refers to a 16:9 or to a 4:3 aspect ratio. Most common sensors are 4:3, and judging by the capture frame sizes, so are these too.

RGBDtoolkit, wide angle lens and automatic calibration

I finally got a wide angle lens that let me match the FOV (Field Of View) of the Kinect, a Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM, borowed from the Fine Arts College facilities where I work, in the Universitat Politécnica de Valencia.

I made a small application as a proof of concept towards an automated Kinect - DSLR calibration process, and also for a possible further automated recording-download system controlling remotelly the DSLR via USB.

RGBDtoolkit first thoughts, hints and issues

There is an interesting tool to improve the use of Kinect's mesh look in audiovisual projects called RGBDtoolkit. With it you can calibrate and record your DSLR's footage together with the depth data, and later use both to generate a 3D textured mesh of the scene from any point of view.

Kinect realtime hand & finger joints tracking

This just a quick performance/accuracy test of the HandTrackingLib provided by FORTH. The test was done by just running the demo that you can download here: http://cvrlcode.ics.forth.gr/handtracking/

Visualizing Kinect's 3D mesh with Processing

If you use Processing and SimpleOpenNI / openKinect you can visualize the mesh / surface reconstructed from Kinect's pointclouds with a simple algorithm...

Raspberry Pi mod to avoid reset / shutdown on USB hot-plug

A few days ago the Raspberry Pi arrived and we got our hands on it to test what it is capable of. If you want to know how we solved the USB hot-plug reset / shutdown issue just keep reading!