Divergence

So it has been a while since my last post. I moved into my new place, which is wonderful. The best part of the place is the range, which I have to turn a valve to let gas to(and turn off to avoid blowing up the house), and then light the stove or the slightly more exciting oven with a match.

As for geek speak, I haven't been working on the MPX stuff much as I haven't been in the lab, but the obsession of the week for me now is ray tracing. I have looked around, and decided I will use Yafray(yet another free raytracer) as my reference design, and build up a simple ray tracer using CUDA. I am hoping to avoid branching problems that many others have come across that seriously effect the relative performance of the GPU. I have also been poking around with GLSL shaders, as all of the GPU ray tracing I've seen has been done this way, but I'm leaning towards CUDA for the flexibility. I hope to eventually create a plugin for blender, but thats probably being overly ambitious.

I haven't given up on the MPX stuff yet, once I get settled into school again I'll have more time in the lab to work on it. Until then, its raytracing at home.

MPX + Blob support + v4l2

Today was monumentally successful as I not only compiled MPX, but also compiled blob support, and even interfaced it with my slightly buggy blob tracking code. The result was the capability to pass blob input to MPX via webcam, which is exactly what I had hoped for. (To test it I was actually using the red laser from the mouse =P.)

While this sounds wonderful, it was actually quite a hack, so there is still much work to be done. When I get it working reasonably well I plan on running a fresh install of Ubuntu or Debian and figuring out exactly what packages are required. Of course I will also put up source code when that is properly organized and implemented.

On a related note, I managed to compile the MPX branch of metacity being worked on by Paulo Zanoni. Unfortunately I found it more buggy than running MPX with the vanilla Metacity, so I didn't actually use it for testing.

Anyways theres still not much to show, hopefully in the coming weeks I will have a working video demonstration.

-George

First Post

So I'll now be blogging, mostly just about the programming stuff I'm doing. Right now I'm working on a v4l2-blob X input driver for MPX.

Anyways, I'll be adding any significant progress here.

-George