Tuesday already. Phill sent me a cool link about how they make LEGO bricks in the LEGO factory. Wow, that's a lot of LEGO! Finally finished editing papers for CPA-2008, now for some downtime. And then back to work on RMoX and NOCC. Did some poking around with NOCC the other week in an attempt to get floating-point stuff working a bit -- so far so good!
Had a successful open-day on the 5th July! Now spending some time editing papers for the CPA-2008 conference, some exciting ones here this year! After an unforseen power-outage (although the UPS did shut everything down nicely :-)), decided to have another go at installing the NVidia Linux drivers, version 173, with success! Had to butcher the rss-glx package into submission a bit, and nvidia-glx ... (but so far, so good!). And the really slick screensavers are pretty damn cool. Pulling about 70 FPS on my GeForce 8600 GT for most of these. Maybe time to give quake a go..
Busy doing various administrative and schools-outreach things. Ran some successful robotics workshops for year 9 on Monday, and a more advanced one for year 12 on Friday, yay :). Mostly
using David Barnes' material and some other stuff that we produced a while ago. Also got around to putting some of our
occam-pi on LEGO robotics material online. Been fiddling around with RMoX
some more, now with a prettier user-interface (of sorts!). Here are some screenshots:
More work on RMoX, rebuilt the windowing system infrastructure -- at least with concurrent processes, it's fairly easy to do small-scale changes without breaking anything else. Got something vaguely resembling an interface (going with the star-trek LCARS style for now, ish). It looks pretty, works nicely with a touchscreen, and is probably suitable for some of the intended applications of RMoX. Robotic-arm control program to be created at some point! Students have left University for the summer, so plenty of time for more research :-). Really need to write some of this work up, didn't publish very much this last year..
Into June now, more busy busy. Done marking exams now, a definite path to insanity. Steadily organising some fun departmental demonstration things for the University of Kent Open Day [subliminal message: come to the open-day on 5th July! come see the Computer Science department 10-2pm!]. Aiming to have some of our concurrency-related projects on show, including LEGO robotics (the transterpreter), embedded computing and concurrent OSs (RMoX), and complex systems simulation (CoSMoS). We'll also have a bunch of final year projects on show, multimedia demonstrations, a panel, and a talk on computer programming in the present day (from Michael). Put Linux on the PS3 on hold for now -- that's currently a for-fun-only project..
Spent most of my time recently working on RMoX, which seems to have paid off! Been working with our embedded PC/104 SBC-GX533, which has a nice NEC flat-panel controller and 4-wire resistive touchscreen. Got the Geode GX framebuffer driver working at long last -- stumbling block was that I hadn't turned off the VGA compatibility (which makes the whole thing behave like a standard VGA). Now running in 32-bit graphics mode (alpha bits included), mashed down to 18-bit on the physical display. Got the hardware cursor working with the pointer infrastructure, so the PS/2 mouse works (unaccelerated). But better than that, got the touchscreen interface working (and learnt a lot about the AC'97 audio codec in the process). So that now works happily with the pointer infrastructure, and looks to be accurate to within a couple of pixels (more fine-tuning needed probably!). Just doesn't "click" yet.. (pressure detection fun). Couldn't get the interrupt mechanism to work reliably yet (missing acknowledgement to some bit of hardware I think), but polling does the job. Ticket added to the RMoX Trac..
Also trying to get our Lynxmotion Lynx 6 robotic arm working. This came with an embedded control board (serial interface), which didn't quite work because it doesn't to flow control (and RMoX's serial driver doesn't do without-h/w-flow-control). The SBC-GX533 board has a bunch of GPIO pins on it, so tried driving the RC servos directly from that (after writing a driver for the PC87364 SuperIO chipset to which these pins are connected). That didn't quite work either because of timing issues -- once the kernel goes to sleep, wake-up accuracy isn't quite good enough. Could be forced by busy-waiting, or wake-up-early-and-spin behaviours, but that's not nice.. Need a micro-second precision timer somewhere (probably one lurking around on the board). Got some PC/104 prototyping boards, so some clever (and precise) interrupt timer mechanism should be easy with a bolt-on microcontroller. On that route, just soldered together a board with ZIF sockets for programming Atmel AVRs (got a pile of AT90S8515s, ATMEGA8s and things lurking around). That plugs into the AIM104-IO32 board we've got (and subsequent driver for). Just about to sit down and write some code for that.. Later, think about the LCARS interface and get testing the hardware rectangle-fill, blit and line operations.. Could also do with BOOTP and TFTP support to get ROMs for burning..
Been another busy month! Got the systems architecture research group web-pages up and running properly, looking quite nice now :-). Put a decent amount of time into some schools activities led by Creative Partnerships, a fun bunch of folk who do interesting things. The other week 60-ish of us from the University visited a school in Kent and did a variety of activities with the pupils there; think it was successful, and hopefully taught the kids a bit about what Computer Science is! Also visited Nexor and gave them a talk about the Cell BE processor. Spent some time doing Cell programming on a Playstation 3, which is pretty interesting. Got Ubuntu Linux running on my own PS3, albeit with 2.6.22 rather than 2.6.24 at the moment; couple of cool-points to Sony for producing a console that actually allows you to install another OS without completely breaking its use as a games console! Still not played any games on it yet, but will be experimenting with its Blu-ray video functionality at some point. Some of those cool points lost for requiring a display with HDCP to get hi-def output. HDCP joins my list of annoying technologies, designed foremost for copy protection, but in reality just irritating (and a bit flawed). Had our quarterly CoSMoS meeting, and learnt lots of fun things about immune systems and the like! Put lots of programming time into NOCC, in particular to support occam-pi PROTOCOLs (including protocol inheritance), better type-checks, traces-checks and some experimental support for a PLACED PAR (thinking of the Cell). At the point where basic occam-pi programs compile and run okay, although still some distance from compiling the CG-tests. Did at least fix the NOCC parser to cope with occam-pi's sometimes odd positioning of declarations.
Second blog entry for 2008..! Been busy.. Spent some portion of time writing papers (though they may not go anywhere!), writing slides, lecturing and other admin stuffs. Been hacking around on RMoX as well. Finished off the i8042 driver (for keyboard and mouse ports), and this seems to be working sensibly now! Not done much with the pointer data yet, but it appears to deliver the correct values :-). Put some more infrastructure into RMoX for handling pointer devices generally -- the PC/104 board we have (SBC-GX533 AMD Geode board and dev-kit), has a touchscreen on the flat-panel display which it would be nice to use.
Finished off (mostly) the multiple-choice-quiz software too, which seems to have worked quite nicely! (even if it is text-based and Unix only). Put this on the software page ("aquest"). Also spent some time knocking up a bunch of PHP scripts and PostgreSQL tables to look after our research group's data, but not live yet.
2008! January seems to have escaped a blogging, never mind.. Mostly been doing work stuff, reasonable teaching load this term (and renewing slides/module-content). Still need to solder up some H-bridge circuits, ended up using a design found on Chuck's robotics notebook, which successfully switches LEGO train points :-). Train simulator (screenshot) is mostly there now, just need to do the low-level bit and connect it up with the hardware. May end up using RMoX to do this, as we've got a collection of PC/104 I/O boards which can drive/sense the hardware quite nicely. Spent the last couple of weeks working on some software to do multiple-choice question asking. Unfortunately software like WebCT is incapable of doing what I want, and everything else I've looked at is a total sod to setup/configure. About 15,000 lines of C later and I've got something pretty much working — hopefully so anyway, as it's being used in coursework very soon! The program reads and writes XML files (yeah, bloat-mode, but easy to post-process with XSLT and the plethora of XML tools out there), and is capable of giving each student a different quiz (different questions and answers, randomly selected mostly). Questions have different weighting depending on their difficulty, with each section either having N questions, or a weighting of up to W. Some negative scoring and some partially-correct answers thrown in to make it more interesting (and to discourage random answering). Time to finish that off and write some instructions..
