Clay's Blog » Hardware Hacking

Gmote on the MyTouch 3G and an Ubuntu 9.10 HTPC

Clay McGovern — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 23:02:39 +0000

Finally got a chance to play around with Gmote on my MyTouch 3G running Android 1.6. Installed the Android app a couple of months ago and then never set it up on any of my desktops. This afternoon I installed Gmote server on my custom HTPC hooked up to my Samsung HDTV. It’s running Ubuntu 9.10. I’m writing this post on the beautiful 1080p 42″ screen, as a matter of fact.

I downloaded the server tarball from the Gmote website and ran the shell script to start and setup the server. It didn’t run the first time. Ended up having to install the latest JRE – no big deal. Ran the script again and the server started up prompting for a password to be created and to tell the server where my media files were. The server uses VLC to access and play media files on the host machine. I’m less interested in that functionality. The thing I was interested in is the remote mouse access functionality. Essentially you make the phone touchscreen into a remote touchpad for the server. Sweet.

I turned on wifi on the MyTouch and fired up the Gmote client software. If you’re on the same network the software will go out and find the server on the default port number (8889). If you need to access it across the 3G network you can port forward that port from your router. I’ve already got another PC setup as a DMZ and I’m not doing any other port forwarding. The only downside for the wifi for me is the battery that the wifi radio eats on the phone. Pretty cool little piece of code. Now I can sit in my recliner and control the machine from 10 feet away, which is good, ’cause that’s where I left my Bushmills…

Frakencamera or Camera 2.0

Clay McGovern — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 20:42:35 +0000

Marc Levoy and his graduate students at Stanford are creating an open source camera platform for researchers in digtital photography and computational photography to write code on top of. Proprietary cameras make it difficult or impossible to write custom software to take advantages of new advances in fields like computational photography.

Levoy and his group hope to have their prototype sent to manufacture soon so that they can provide them at cost (hopefully just $1000) for researchers to experiment on. A couple of the ideas they mention are applying high dynamic range tools inside the camera rather than through editing software like Adobe Photoshop, and having a camera take internittent high quality stills while shooting lower resolution video and then combining still frames algorithmically with the video frames in software. Check out this video about their work:

Antikythera Model Completed

Clay McGovern — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 17:29:10 +0000

A couple years ago, I wrote about the world’s earliest known computer, the Antikythera, finally being decoded as a result of X-Ray Tomography. Now two years later, Michael Wright, a former curator at the Science Museum in London, has built a working model of the device. I absolutely love that the Antikythera was finally cracked by an interested “amateur” – though this is probably a misnomer. In any case, Wright is clearly an extraordinary hardware hacker, rather than a research scientist. And I really love that he was able to do what many others have not. Here’s the article on Wired.com, which includes a video interview from New Scientist with Michael Wright.

Digital Projection, Spatial Augmented Reality, and Shape Grammar – SIGGRAPH 2008

Clay McGovern — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 18:38:40 +0000

It’s been an inspiring conference so far. The classes I’ve attended have been excellent. On Monday I attended the half-day course on projectors and spatial augmented reality for (I think) the 4th year running. Ramesh Raskar and Oliver Bimber were fantastic as usual. They were joined this year by Aditi Majumber who spoke about large-format displays and Hendrik Lensch who spoke on computational illumination for 3D scene modeling. One of the things I really get excited about in this class is what Raskar calls RFIG. In essence, this entails adding a photosensor to an RFID tag and then projecting structured light from a handheld projector on the photosensor in order to acquire a relative position for the tagged item. With the unique identifier and the relative position, we can query a database and then project useful information about the identified items directly on the items themselves using our handheld projector. All this is made possible by very small and relatively inexpensive handheld computers with wireless network access and attached projectors. You can check out their work, including the full-text of their book, Spatial Augmented Reality, on the supporting website: SpatialAR.com. Great stuff.

On a related topic, I attended a session today by Johannes Behr and Dirk Reiners (who happens to be at University of Louisiana, Lafayette) on virtual and augmented reality applications that transcend the WIMP interface model. WIMP stands for Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointers, which has dominated computing in recent decades. Again, this is all made possible by the availability inexpensive hardware and extensions made to the X3D standard provided freely by the authors. Having seen the example code in the class today, I think I could implement some simple 3D stereoscopic applications with little difficulty. This would be a perfect fit for the projects the ILC has in mind for our work with Tulane’s Middle American Research Institute which I mentioned in my last blog post.

And finally, for this post at least, yesterday afternoon I attended a fascinating class offered by Mine Ozkar and Sotirios Kotsopoulos called “Visual Thinking Via Shape Grammars”. This was my first formal exposure to the idea of shape grammars, though I have heard the term before. The theory was initially presented by Stiny and Gips in 1972 and includes the idea of shape computation following rules defined in a grammar of shape. The theory has both fascinating explanatory power and useful generative power, depending on the purposes for which it is applied. Kotsopoulos gave many examples from architecture employing the theory both as an explanatory analysis and as a generative tool. I have to say, this class was right up my philosophical alley. Similar enterprises have a long-standing history in philosophy, culminating in Anglo-American analytic philosophies of the middle of the last century, but having expression in the work of Spinoza, Leibniz, and Alfred North Whitehead to name just a few.

Multi-Touch Displays Redux

Clay McGovern — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 17:55:15 +0000

In an earlier post, I wrote about Microsoft’s Surface technology and work done at NYU on multi-touch display technology. Peter Hutterer at the University of South Australia’s Wearable Computer Lab has just demoed a new version of his MPX, Multi-Pointer X Server under Linux. There’s an article on his blog and a video of his multi-touch extension of MPX under Ubuntu. Here are the hardware details. Now I just need to get my hands on a compatible touch screen and try this out

Antikythera Decoded

Clay McGovern — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 15:09:20 +0000

Scientists using the latest X-Ray Tomography equipment have finally gotten a clear picture of the complex mechanism that represents the oldest known computer. The Antikythera was found in a shipwreck off the coast of Greece and dates from circa 200 BCE. The computer was used to track and predict moon cycles. Tony Freeth and Mike G. Edmunds from University of Cardiff, Wales, published their findings in the journal Nature. Here’s the NYT article.

Replacing an Apple iPod Mini Battery

Clay McGovern — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:13:35 +0000

So my mom and dad weren’t using an iPod Mini they had laying around and the battery wasn’t holding a charge for more than an hour, so they asked if I wanted it. My wife didn’t have one of her own, so I figured I could get a replacement battery and change it myself. How hard can it be?

Turns out, it ain’t that hard at all. Did some quick Google searches and found a nice howto on C-Net:

Tutorial with Video

Ordered a replacement battery from BatteryGeeks.net:

iPod Mini Battery Kit

It’s a higher capacity battery, so battery life should be longer. Sure beats paying $100 or more for someone else to replace it. $14.99 including tools.

If you want to see the guts of our new iPod Mini, take a look:

iPod Guts Flash Slideshow

One word of advice: Use a hair dryer to loosen the glue on the plastic covers on the top and bottom of the iPod before you start trying to pry them off. Much easier when warmed up.

Re-Purposing That Stupid CueCat Optical Reader

Clay McGovern — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 21:37:36 +0000

Back in the early days of the Internet boom, a nasty little company created a piece of hardware and software called the CueCat. If you were a Wired or Forbes subscriber, or if you were a frequent RadioShack shopper, you may still have one of these little kitties laying around your home or office. I did.I had read some years ago that the little scanner had been reverse engineered allowing it’s use on a personal computer as a free barcode reader. If you are lucky enough to still have yours, all you need is bit of freely available software that decrypts the information read from the scanner and outputs it to any text entry area on the machine. More on why you might want that in a second.

Just a little background on the CueCat’s origins. Wired magazine, to which I have subscribed since its beginnings, partnered with this nasty little spyware company, Digital Convergence, that had the grand idea to market magazine advertisers’ products by connecting the print ads to the company’s website via a barcode and the little scanner. There was even some hair-brained idea to use audio signals embedded in television commercials captured by a PC with a microphone running this companies spyware. This was somehow consider a "service" Wired readers and others would desire. I guess they figured we were too lazy to type the URL of a company’s site into a browser if we were interested in a product. I assume Digital Convergence pitched it to advertisers as being able to draw customers to special websites with targeted marketing materials and special deals on products. You know, the usual marketer lies and deceit. The thing is, if that were all that happened when you scanned a barcode, the plan would have been relatively innocuous – hair-brained, but still innocuous. But there was a catch. In order to use the CueCat, you had to register with Digital Convergence and a unique hardware ID was associated with your CueCat scanner. The software running on your system gathered information about what you scanned and associated that information with you through the hardware ID. This information was then pedaled to advertisers as "business intelligence," or whatever the pond scum marketers called it back then. I remember the uproar over the privacy issues (which were conveniently mentioned only in the fine print of some click-through EULA). In addition, the scanner driver and tracking software was a poorly written resource hog that caused stability problems for those fool enough to install it – something that added insult to injury to the ever-so-stabled Windows 95 – the operating system of the day.

Digital Convergence, happily, is no more, though in their last gasps they sent cease and desist nastygrams to the folks who maintained sites helping people make something useful out of their dust collecting CueCats. As bitheads are wont to do, they saw this free little optical scanner as a potentially useful tool when freed from the Digital Convergence software. Thus was born CatNip – a very tiny little piece of code that decrypts the content from the scanner and outputs it to pretty much any application that accepts text input. (The link above to download catnip comes from a neat little site that also includes instructions and screen shots of CatNip in action: Using the CueCat Optical Reader to Catalog CED Titles.)

"So what?" you ask. There are several very nice pieces of software out there to help people with large collections of "stuff" keep track of their "stuff." My personal favorite is a fantastic suite of tools for cataloging books, movies, music, games, mp3s, and comic books by a company called CollectorZ.com. This database software allows you to scan UPC or ISBN barcodes with an optical scanner instead of using text entry for record creation. Once the barcode is scanned the software hits Amazon, the Library of Congress, and other online databases and extracts information including nice images of covers from the online sources and imports them into the local database creating a new record. It’s totally automated and completely painless. Enter the CueCat. With CatNip running on your system, your dusty old CueCat, once an office oddity perhaps drawing comments from cubicle visitors, becomes your very own feline data entry slave. If you aren’t lucky enough to have one from your ancient days as a geek in the mid-1990s, you are in luck: Ebay to the rescue. You can get one dirt cheap.

Having to replace a few books this go-round with Hurricane Katrina has made me realize that if I had lost everything, my book collection would have been one of the things I would really mourn and would find it hard to replace, simply because I would not remember which books I own. In addition, I now have insurance documentation and some idea of the value of the collection in order to carry sufficient coverage to replace it should another big one come our way. An added feature of the Pro version of the CollectorZ software is loan tracking – a surefire way of keeping your sticky fingered friends from "adopting" your books because you have a memory like a sieve, ditto for your movies and CDs.