I arrived in Helsinki at March 10 and attending now the IP in Lahti from March 14-27. I lost my Notebook on March 6 at Frankfurt Airport and couldn’t write anything. But I got it back when I passed by on my way to Finland. Finally I have Internet now at the University of Lahti and can write again.
It is -11 dregrees Celsius outside, but the landscape is beautiful. I’m running out of time at the moment, but I will write when I find the time!
After the morning briefing, the Phyton Lab was unfortunately full and so I decided to do another sightseeing trip around the area of the Tower Bridge and come back later the day for the challenge presentations. I went through the city to the Tower, took the Queens Walk along the Thense and finally been to the Museum of London. I had heard more German then English today! I was really surprised to meet so many German people in Manchester, but in London there were even more. I asked tourists in German to take a photo of me and I talked the Germans in the Museum. The weather was rainy this morning like every day, but at my trip was a kind of sunshine. Although the constructions on the subway had a negative influence on my travel pace, the beautiful buildings from roman and modern time made the trip very successful. Our train back to Manchester is leaving at 6pm from Euston Station. It was a very nice time in London and the attendance of a UK conference for Developers was a great experience and I was glad to meet so much computer scientists and to benefit from their experience.
This time we made two circuits for Multiplexing of LEDs and PWM for an engine control. The Arduino language made the programming part very easy though. Especially the functions analogRead(pin) and analogWrite(pin, value) made the PWM very easy opposed to the effort you have to do in C. The Arduino Language Reference page shows the available functions that make your life easier.
I.e. the to get a (analog) value from a pin and write it to another is done in two lines of Arduino:
sensorValue = analogRead(sensorPin) / 4; // analogRead gives 0 to 1023, want 0 to 255
analogWrite(motorPin, sensorValue); // analogWrite uses 0 to 255
I try to find the code, I had written in C for PWM, that you can see the difference. I would like to have more programming next time for people in the advanced workshop, we spent lot of time with the hardware and not Arduino in particular.
After the short briefing like every day at 10am, I joined the Project Zone and we talked with Ben O’Steen about projects for face recognition, open source book scanning with OCR and also a bit about an open source 3D printer device (yours for 300£); took some photos with a Nikon mirror reflex, which was different from the Cannon one I am used to; and then continued programming for the Geo Data Challenge.
I never worte any line of Ruby code, but today I attended the Ruby on Rails session in the Coding Lab. Tim Donohue gave a short crash course in Ruby and Rails, both. And after, the programming starts in the prinzip of a coding dojo. The challange was: “How do you find a subject expert on your campus?”, more about that on the wiki page. The room was really crowded and altough I had been signed in before, I could not participate in the programming itself, but the prinzip of a coding dojo was really interesting though.
We used the Freeduino base plate, which is an open source version of Arduino board and a little developers board for the first steps. Garry Bulmer advised us about security issues and told us a lot about the technical build up of the Freeduino board and also about other similar boards like Nanoduino and of course about the programming language.
We programmed the ATmega168, which is very similar to the micro controller I programmed before, see my ATmega class page, hosted on the website of my professor.
The first steps to see if the compiling and upload to the controller works:
open ./audrino and do:
File-Examples-Digital-Blink
Tools-Board-(select the second with ATmega168)
Press the Upload button (has an “Arrow” symbol on it, pointing to the right; compiles and uploads)
I had some problems to compile the code with the libs from the standard SUSE repositorities, but I got cross-avr and avr-libc from following pages and it works (as super user ):
7.00 Departure Manchester Picadilly
9.00 Arrival London Euston
10.00 Expert Zone: VRE3 Projects – Briefing and Lightning Talks
14.00 Expert Zone: API Competition Challenges, Lightning Talks & followed by panel discussion
18.00 Check in Palmers Lodge
20.00 Games Night
After around two hours in the train from Manchester, we arrived London Euston at 9am. We had registered for the days at ULU and went directly to the VRE3+VRERI meeting in the Expert Zone (Room 3E), which started at 10am with a briefing. After that, 23 of the 40 attendees, from which were 2 woman, had been presenting their Lightning talks. As the name of this event says, it was all about Virtual Research Environments (VRE) and connecting research groups together, about building technologies and communities for research support not only in the UK, about connecting researchers and developers closer together and the work which has been doing since 2004 within the JISC projects.
After a great lunch at the location, I had been attending the API Competition and Lightning Talks with issues about internet applications, mobile and visualization APIs, and information sharing using APIs for services like WordPress or the internet archive. We walked three hours to Palmers Lodge and back for the check-in. The night ended with a Games Evening with all the Computer Scientists. I met a lot of nice people yesterday and it was really fun. I just couldn’t upload, because my connection didn’t worked properly.
Once a year a big part around the center of my home town Dresden is blocked from the police, because some people remember and several demonstrate. The remembrance is about the massive destruction of Dresden in the second world war, 65 years ago. Nationalists try march, much more autonomists block. Politicians visit the graveyards, remember and give a speech after, at the reconstructed church. The nation watch and read. The city is in trouble, five thousand policeman try to secure. Many people try to avoid the city center these days, others don’t care. I’m in Manchester and wondering if something could have changed since last year.
