Printed Terrain Model
Here’s a physical print of the sample scene from my heightmap to STL program!
Posted on Tuesday, November 5th, 2013.
Mobile Mouse 3 and mmserver
Interested in the news regarding my stewardship of mmserver, the unofficial Mobile Mouse server for Linux? Changes since the last release include partial support for clipboard sync (pull computer clipboard to phone clipboard with a hotkey), support for modifier keys applied to mouse clicks, a workaround to ignore duplicate click events, support for “keystrings” (text input when shift lock is applied – unclear what it’s for, but at least now it works), and last but not least, compatibility with the recently-released Mobile Mouse 3 apps. No easy installer yet, but anyone who actually uses mmserver has presumably already figured out how to pull updates from Github – so just do it again!
Posted on Thursday, October 31st, 2013.
Heightmap to STL
Hacked together a little tool called hmstl. It converts a heightmap – a grayscale image in which brighter pixels are interpreted as higher elevations – to STL, a format suitable for 3D printing.
Posted on Wednesday, October 30th, 2013.
Bitmap Bikes
Drawn on my telephone, just the way Picasso did.
Posted on Wednesday, October 30th, 2013.
Mobile Mouse Server for Linux 1.4.0
Bundling up a bunch of little tweaks to my fork of Mobile Mouse Server for Linux and calling it version 1.4.0. Get it here. Main changes include:
- Support for gesture commands (configured like hotkeys)
- Added option to ignore keyboard input
- Using
xdg-opento edit config file for greater compatibility across systems - Changes to icon and config file loading, towards goal of simpler external dependencies
- More detailed log messages and config file comments
At present mmserver must still be compiled manually. A goal for the next release is to make use of some package management system to take care of setup automatically.
Posted on Friday, September 27th, 2013.
Cesium Exposure
Last weekend I discovered Cesium, a sophisticated WebGL virtual globe engine developed as an open source project by AGI. Among other things, it can be used to interactively display satellite orbits in 3D in a web browser…
…which is exactly what I’ve been building in SatStatus, my summer “coffee shop programming project”. So, I admit I felt discouraged to discover I was not the first to develop the concept. However, it also feels good to realize that I, operating as a hobbyist and enthusiast only, identified the same niche and was able to build a visualization tool with comparable core capabilities (see screenshot at right).
SatStatus exists as pretty rough proof-of-concept code (I’m learning Javascript as I go), whereas Cesium appears to be put together with an admirably rigorous testing and review process. Cesium also has many more features than SatStatus. Some, like support for surface terrain and arbitrary feature markup, are beyond the scope of what I had planned; others, like ready-made reference time controls and multiple camera modes, were on my to-do list.
One difference is that SatStatus was designed from the start to be able to propagate satellite locations in real-time using a set of recent TLEs and Shashwat Kandadai’s Javascript implementation of the SGP4/SDP4 algorithm. If my cursory reading of the documentation is correct, this is possible in Cesium as well, but only by streaming satellite positions as CZML markup from another source. (To be clear, this is reasonable, given that Cesium is a general purpose display engine, whereas real-time satellite tracking is just one specific application.)
Now I must decide how to proceed. It is certainly satisfying to build something from scratch, but now that I know something very similar is already available, it would make sense to fast-forward my effort to focus on the web site I eventually planned to build around the 3D viewer.
Besides the goal of powering a new public real-time satellite tracking site, SatStatus was also intended as a “portfolio project” to learn about Javascript development, graphics programming, and the varied interest many Earthlings have in monitoring our space-based assets. That goal can still be met, with the added benefit of a good example to study, by participating in the Cesium project.
Posted on Saturday, September 21st, 2013.
Chipmunk Basic Stuff on GitHub
I’ve posted a bunch of my old Chipmunk Basic sample code to a Chipmunk Basic Stuff repository on GitHub. Much of it is still available on this page, but that page will not be updated and may be deleted.
As with the Applescripts I posted a few weeks ago, I’m stowing this archival stuff on GitHub for two reasons:
- It provides a nice online interface for glancing at the code and revision history.
- I’d like to prune some of the dustier old pages from this site without culling the content from the internet altogether. (Stats indicate a small but steady stream of people searching for Chipmunk Basic information do end up here.)
Posted on Thursday, September 12th, 2013.
Modified Mobile Mouse Server for Linux
Mobile Mouse is a neat app that allows you to use your iOS or Android device as a keyboard and pointing device for your computer. The mobile app works in concert with a small server program that must be installed on your computer to convert input from the app to actual keyboard and mouse events. Official Mac and Windows server programs are provided by the makers of Mobile Mouse. A Linux version was developed by Erik Lax and later updated by Kiriakos Krastillis. Now, I’ve made a few changes and posted my own version. Find it here: https://github.com/anoved/mmserver
My changes include:
- Revised mouse acceleration
- Enabled horizontal scrolling
- Enabled middle mouse button
- Keyboard and keypad input fixes
- Added more configuration options
I use it with Linux Mint on my old laptop and Raspbian on my Raspberry Pi.
Posted on Tuesday, September 10th, 2013.