Home / 2008 / November

New Toy!

Bought for the RCMS project, it’s a hand-held tablet PC (seen here in its docking station). Celeron processor and 256Mb of RAM and a whopping 60Gb hard disk space. Back when we got one for the CVRG robotics lab in 2002, it was the best thing available and cost thousands – today it cost me just over €160 by the time it landed on my door, with customs and vat and whatnot.

The plan is, get the touchscreen working (the fpit driver works but it’s not calibrating properly), and using python, the QT4 library, QT Designer and pyqt, to build a program that could replace the venerable RO Report form used in the rifle club:… Read the rest

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Python

One of the downsides of working on a pre-startup project is that you really can’t say much about it. Seriously. You think Cryptonomicon seemed paranoid about security? You’ve just never met the folks who safeguard possible IP for college spin-outs. Yowza. And it’s a shame because some of this stuff is really rather nifty, and it’s been good to not only do some high-level design of low-level stuff, but also to get back to implementing in C and for high-capacity stuff as well.

However, side projects are totally fair game 😀

At the moment, most of my side-project time has gone into a quick script for the rifle club in college. It has to read in a text file and do some basic statistics on the data therein. PHP would blaze through this in a web setting, but to my mind, PHP is out of its depth when not running on a webserver so I thought something else would be more appropriate.… Read the rest

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