Through the Interface

Displaying your Unity model in 3D using HoloLens

This post shows something really simple, but I decided to share it here as it took me some time to track down. On Saturday I received the 3D model of an ABB industrial robot – the IRB 6620 I mentioned last week – from Tom Eriksson. He’s used a number of tools – including Fusion 360 – to create a gorgeous rendition of this particular robot in Unity. Tom very kindly agreed to share the model, and has spent quite a bit of time helping get it ready for HoloLens. The first version Tom sent unfortunately didn’t work for... Read more →

Controlling robots from inside AutoCAD – Part 1

Happy New Year! I hope that those of you who celebrate at this time of year, were able to take a nice, relaxing break. I certainly did. :-) Anyway, it’s now time for me to ease back into work. But rather than it being an abrupt transition, I’ve decided to take a look at a pet project that I thought would be pretty fun: controlling robots from inside AutoCAD. The thinking is to outline some possibilities for moving virtual robots inside a floorplan drawing and having their real-world, physical counterparts move as instructed. Perhaps along a specific path, perhaps... Read more →

Independence Day

Most of this week I’ve been heads-down trying to finish a sample demonstrating the API that’s coming for the new Autodesk 360 viewer (of which we saw a sneak peek in this recent post), so today I don’t have much to talk about. The sample is pretty cool and involves my favourite car. But hopefully you’ll be able to see it in action before too long, so there’s really no need to say more about it, for now. :-) A good portion of this blog’s readership is currently grilling meat and celebrating the 4th of July, so I won’t... Read more →

Leap Motion, Kinect Fusion, SensorTag

Yesterday I presented a condensed sneak peek of my upcoming AU sessions on Kinect Fusion and Leap Motion to colleagues in the Neuchâtel office (I’ll do the same at our office in Gümligen next week). It was good to make sure my various demos are working well in time for AU, as well as creating some awareness around the possibilities presented by these two technologies. We attempted a live capture of a chair using Kinect Fusion, which actually came out surprisingly well (the Kinect’s USB cable popped out as I was trying to scan the chair’s back, but the... Read more →

Blinking lights with a Netduino Plus 2

After blinking LEDs with an Arduino Uno R3 and its younger step-sibling the Digispark, I decided to give the same treatment to their beef-cake second cousin, the Netduino Plus 2. James Maeding had been telling me to take a look at the Netduino for ages, so when I ordered some parts for my (optimistically speaking) forthcoming Kinect for ZX Spectrum integration, I decided to throw in a Netduino Plus 2. Now the Netduino Plus 2 retails for $60 in the US (and 80CHF here in Switzerland, as the device is assembled in the US), which means it’s at least... Read more →

Blinking lights with a Digispark

I talked about some of the fun I’ve been having with Arduino in this previous post. I eventually added a pushbutton and a potentiometer to that particular circuit, modifying the code to watch for a hardware interrupt – to blink the LEDs only when the button is pressed – but also to apply a variable delay to the blinking (speeding it up or slowing it down depending on the direction in which you turn the knob of the potentiometer). I’ve now ordered an edge connector that will fit my ZX Spectrum: my next stage for the Arduino-based work is... Read more →

What I got for Christmas

One of the ulterior motives (although you might really consider it a mere side benefit) for my recent trip back to the UK was to pick up the Christmas presents I’d bought for myself on behalf of my wife and kids. :-) The first – one of the new Raspberry Pi Model B’s with 512 MB of memory – could have been ordered from Switzerland, but I was a bit frustrated at the mark-up added by the local reseller (the previous one I bought from the UK and had shipped directly here from China… that no longer seems possible... Read more →

My new ZX Spectrum

I had a fantastic surprise at the beginning of the week: a friend from work – to whom I’d shown my retro-foolings with the Raspberry Pi – brought a plastic bag to my desk containing an original Sinclair ZX Spectrum and power supply. He had talked about my project to a friend of his back home in Rome, who thought I’d like it (he was otherwise going to throw it away). The computer was in very good condition externally, at least: I was impressed by the condition of the keyboard, in particular, as these very quickly became dirty and... Read more →

Virtually done

Over the weekend, from Friday to Sunday, I spent far more hours than I’d have liked finishing off my AU Virtual class for this year, “Secure Your AutoCAD Environment” (I’m increasingly involved in security-related activities for the AutoCAD development organisation). Preparing material for AU Virtual is often pretty tough, whether it’s being recorded in person (I’ve done a couple of those) or being in advance and needing extensively editing. This year’s format was a bit different, in that it required multiple modules to be recorded separately as opposed to a single, monolithic recording. Better from a consumption perspective, apparently,... Read more →

Creating a face-recognising security cam with a Raspberry Pi – Part 4

This is the final part of the series on creating a face-recognising security cam. We started by showing how to get motion detection working, and then followed with an initial overview and then posts on the separate Facebook-downloader tool and the onboard face detection component. In this post, we’ll see how we managed to connect up a USB-powered LED message-board from DreamCheeky. I was originally inspired to use this device to present the results of the Facecam while having dinner at a friend’s place. He’s a fellow geek – even his welcome mat says so – so we Googled... Read more →

Retro computing with the Raspberry Pi

I’ve decided to interrupt my series on creating a face-recognising security cam to cover another Raspberry Pi-related topic, this week. I’ll try to finish my series write-up for next Wednesday. At the recommendation of an old friend from University, I recently devoured the excellent “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline. Ernest was apparently born about a year before me, so to say that the copious pop-culture references from the 1980s resonated would be a massive under-statement. I just wish I’d come across it sooner (in time to have a shot at solving the Easter Egg and winning a 1981... Read more →

Creating a face-recognising security cam with a Raspberry Pi – Part 3

In the last two posts in this series, we introduced the concept and architecture behind the Facecam, and looked at the desktop-based component to build our face recognition database (facedata.xml). In this post we’ll take a look at the Raspberry Pi-resident face recognition engine. This component is implemented as a daemon (which is basically the Unix/Linux equivalent of a Windows service, for those unfamiliar with the term) that looks in an “input” folder for images to process and populates an “output” folder with the results of the face recognition process. In the next post in the series, we’ll look... Read more →

Creating a face-recognising security cam with a Raspberry Pi – Part 2

In the first post in this series, we introduced the idea behind the Facecam, a Facebook-enabled security camera running on a Raspberry Pi device. Over the next three posts we’re going to look in more detail at the system’s components. In this post, we’re going to start by looking at the component – the only one that doesn’t actually run on the Raspberry Pi – that downloads the information from Facebook to build the facial recognition database to be used by the device. As mentioned last time, I’ve coded this as a .NET application – actually by extending the... Read more →

Creating a face-recognising security cam with a Raspberry Pi – Part 1

This series of posts builds upon the mini-series on building a motion-detecting security cam based around the Raspberry Pi. Once you have your motion detecting security cam up and running, you should be able to move on to the next stage: enabling that system to recognize faces that it has been trained against. My specific project (which I’m calling the Facecam, although I haven’t applied for a trademark ;-) pulls data down from Facebook and uses that to train the face recognition system, but that’s far from being a requirement: it’s also very possible to train the database in... Read more →

Creating a motion-detecting security cam with a Raspberry Pi – Part 2

In the first post in this series, we took a look at some fundamentals related to building your own motion-detecting security camera using a Raspberry Pi. In this post, we’re going to look at very specific steps to get one working. The first major step I took after the last post was to drop the Raspbian “wheezy” OS distribution in favour of Arch Linux ARM. This was an important change, as it increased the stability of the system significantly, and even allowed me to increase the capture resolution of the webcam back up to 960 x 720. Where “wheezy”... Read more →

Creating a motion-detecting security cam with a Raspberry Pi – Part 1

As mentioned in these previous posts, I’ve been spending some time developing a social media-enabled security cam using a Raspberry Pi and a standard webcam. The eventual idea is that the security cam will check visitors against a database of photos of a homeowners’ friends extracted from Facebook. I have a lot of the needed “social” components in place – more on those in a future post – but I did just want to document some of the steps needed to create a functional security cam that simply uploads captured videos to Google Drive and sends an email with... Read more →

A slice of Raspberry Pi

So starts the next leg of my journey to become platform agnostic. After using a Mac as my primary system for the last year or so (albeit only doing a modest amount of Mac-specific coding, for now, and almost always having a Windows session alive inside Parallels Desktop), I now have my first Linux system, in the form of an incredibly cool Raspberry Pi device. This is nearly the first time I’ve touched command-shell Unix since graduating from University – I’ve opened a Terminal window a few times to do something trivial on OS X – but I’m happy... Read more →

Waiting for my Raspberry Pi

While I was away on holiday, Scott Sheppard announced an Autodesk-internal competition of which the eight lucky winners would receive a currently-still-hard-to-come-by Raspberry Pi Model B (so named in homage to the computer that helped inspire a generation of British programmers, the BBC Micro). All that contestants had to do was submit an idea for a compelling use of the device (and then submit a video of the completed project, along with instructions to replicate it on Instructables.com). I’d been interested for some time in getting my hands on one of these cool little systems, and had a few... Read more →