Richi's blog

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  • PointLineWeb research prototype

    Google employees can spend 20% of their working time for their own projects. We at cubx (The CAD development department recently split from BORM) have now something similar. We get to spend every second friday afternoon for some projects of our own. The only restriction is that it has to do with computer graphics.

    I chose a project that I had in mind for almost as long as I have been working for BORM. I wanted to run PointLine as a web service on a linux box. Wit the old core, that was so tightly tied to MFC, this would have been impossible. But the new unfinished core is designed to be platform independent. So, I took it as a base.

    Some three years ago, I looked at vrml and x3d for the 3d in browser part. These standards didn’t have as broad support as I thought. You couldn’t do much without buying proprietary browser plugins. So I never made much progress on that. But then came WebGL. All mayor Browsers support it natively, and on top  of that, my favourite web application framework recently got a WebGl widget.

    So far, my research prototype doesn’t do much, but I already learned a lot that I can also use in my everyday work. I gained a better understanding of rendering pipelines, learned about shaders and ray picking …

    As a side project, I set up a jenkins continous integration server that compiles the project on ubuntu and windows after every commit. Additionally, I learned about CPack, so that the result of the jenkins build is a binary deb package ready to install.

    You can see the web application as it progresses here:

    http://webglcad.ulrichard.ch

    Usually, I would also provide a link to the sources, but this is closed source, sorry…

  • Accepting BitCoin

    As of today, we accept BitCoin as payment method for our tandem flights at paraeasy.ch

    BitCoin is a decentralized online currency. It was in the news lately. While banks and politicians made it sound bad, it’s actually a great experiment. True, it has some shortcomings, but these shouldn’t bother us for the next couple of years.

    If you want to learn more about BitCoin, check out these podcasts:

    http://chaosradio.ccc.de/cr169.html

    http://linuxoutlaws.com/podcast/215

    http://chaosradio.ccc.de/cre182.html

    http://www.weusecoins.com/

  • New Server

    The Alix served well for the last two years as my webserver, but then I decided, now it’s time for something a little more beefy. I’m in the process of migrating everything to the new server.

    With the new server, I move everything to my http://ulrichard.ch domain.

    (more…)

  • Propagate deletion of C++ Objects

    Last year, I spent some time rewriting internals of how groups are handled in our CAD software. Before that, groups were just to help with the selection of elements that belong together. The grouping was only one level deep, and the elements were organized flat on the document. All the calling functions had to uptate the relationships in the pointers and containers which were publicly available. This was a constant source of bugs and completely unsuitable for nested symbols that we wanted to import.

    (more…)

  • RepRap Mendel Part1

    My wive wanted to give me the first kit for a RepRap Mendel for Christmas. She was really sorry that the kit didn’t make it under the tree, as it was sold out. I was excited about the Project for more than a Year, but it was too expensive to just give it a go. Some of these projects that seem very interesting fade away with the time, or cheaper alternatives apear as it happened with the quadro copter, but the RepRap didn’t go out of my mind. So, Mirella gave me the first kit, and from here, I will build it step by step. (more…)

  • Why I gave up on voip (for now)

    Voip used to be a big hype, but nowdays you don’t hear a lot about it. I thought that was because it gained wide adoption. But maybe not. At least in the company I work, we went back to a regular telephony system after having constant trouble with the voip installation.

    From time to time, I hear or read about Asterisk and Freeswitch. That made me curious for some time now. Also I wanted an alternative to Skype for a variety of reasons: It’s protocol is proprietary. It’s not available on all platforms (e.g. openmoko). On Android, it drains the battery and friends tell me they get constant log-in and out notifications. And finally, the computer has to be on to receiceive calls. (more…)

  • openwireless.ch in Brunnen

    I heard of mesh networks before,  be it from the OneLaptopPerChild or the German Freifunker community. But the recent episode of ChaosRadio about the MeshPotato got me interested enough to give it a try. The meshing community here in Switzerland is organized at openwireless.ch. Sure, I could buy a compatible router and install the provided firmware. But being a true geek I wanted to see how it works on hardware that I already have. So I started with these three devices:

    I wanted to allow access to the internet, but only through an anonymizing service, so I wouldn’t get into trouble if somebody does something illegal over my wire. (more…)

  • v2.0 released (it’s a boy)

    Last saturday February12th, five minutes before the deadline (midnight) we received our second son Noah Lauro. Everything went well, and meanwhile the whole family is home again.

  • Convert news web page into rss feed

    At the company I work (BORM), we have an internal web page with the company news. We’re required to log in and check every once in a while.

    Now to get notified automatically, wehen some news are to be discovered, I hacked together a PHP script that logs in, downloads and parses the news. It then serves an rss xml file to my feed reader.

    In the past I didn’t do a lot of PHP scripting. Only editing some bits and pieces. So this is my biggest endeavor to PHP.

    Tested with liferea and BeyondPod.

    I won’t tell you where the script can be accessed, as the company news requires login. But the script itself is here:

    (more…)

  • Arduino code to interface the MS5607B Intersema barometric pressure sensor through i2c

    It was not quite as easy as I anticipated to interface the MS5607B sensors that I had sitting around for quite some time now. Sure, wiring them up is a lot easier. Although I still don’t like soldering SMD.

    In the end, it worked out, and the code can be downloaded with the links below.

    IntersemaBaro.h

    Variometer.pde

    The bad thing however is that the reduction in program code that I was hoping for didn’t happen. My ChopperRemote project uses an Arduino Bluetooth which has only about 15kB of storage for the programm (sketch). That was not enough to fit in all the communications and sensor readings that I already had plus the MS5607C sensor. The Code to read the sensor used about 7kB alone. So I hoped with the i2c interface that would reduce. Now it didn’t! So I thought for holding the altitude, the Helicopter doesn’t need to know the height in cm. But could use the pressure directly and treat it as if it was linear. Lets see, how that works out…