Software Development

844 Articles

3D Games For The Arduino With Raycasting

September 9, 2012 by 18 Comments

For all the Arduino-based video game builds we’ve seen, we’re really only left with a bunch of 2D platformers and other sprite-based games. [Reimecker] wasn’t satisfied with this level of computational complexity, so he ported the 3D game engine made famous by Duke Nukem 3D to the Arduino (German, Google translation).

[Reimecker]’s project is based on the very popular Build Engine written by [Ken Silverman] and used in games such as Duke Nukem 3D,  Shadow Warrior,  Blood, and TekWar. The Build Engine can be used to make a first person shooter, but more on the level of Wolfenstein 3D instead of Half-Life.

The hardware [Reimecker] used is a regular ‘ol 8-bit Arduino with an attached LCD touch screen displaying 320×240 pixels of a ray cast environment. From the videos of the build (available after the break), [Reimecker] has a fairly decent game engine capable of displaying a 2.5D environment. The frame rate might not be very high, but it’s still an amazing build considering the hardware [Reimecker] is working with.

Continue reading “3D Games For The Arduino With Raycasting” →

Visualizing Water Droplets And Building A CT Scanner

August 26, 2012 by 9 Comments

Since his nerves were wracked by presenting his project to an absurdly large crowd at this year’s SIGGRAPH, [James] is finally ready to share his method of mixing fluids via optical tomography with a much larger audience: the readership of Hackaday.

[James]’ project focuses on the problem of modeling mixing liquids from a multi-camera setup. The hardware is fairly basic, just 16 consumer-level video cameras arranged in a semicircle around a glass beaker full of water.

When [James] injects a little dye into the water, the diffusing cloud is captured by a handful of Sony camcorders. The images from these camcorders are sent through an algorithm that selects one point in the cloud and performs a random walk to find every other point in the cloud of liquid dye.

The result of all this computation is a literal volumetric cloud, allowing [James] to render, slice, and cut the cloud of dye any way he chooses. You can see the videos produced from this very cool build after the break.

Continue reading “Visualizing Water Droplets And Building A CT Scanner” →

Rendering OpenSCAD In The Browser

August 20, 2012 by 13 Comments

If you haven’t heard of it, OpenSCAD is a really wonderful tool for 3D modeling.  While it doesn’t have the traditional graphical interface of AutoCAD – it’s basically a programming language for 3D models – OpenSCAD is able to create very complex parts with only a few lines of code.

That’s all well and good, but what if you wanted to edit OpenSCAD parts in your browser? Enter OpenJsCAD, an OpenSCAD interpreter written entirely in Javascript and able to be embedded in a web page.

OpenSCAD allows for two types of modeling – constructive solid geometry, or taking 3D primitives and stretching, scaling, and intersecting them to create a 3D shape, or extrusion from a 2D outline. Quite a few RepRap parts were designed in OpenSCAD, and the lightweight interface and open source nature means it’s perfect for designing stuff to print on your Makerbot.

Tip ‘o the hat to [Gordon] for sending this one in, and we really have to commend him for writing his own online scriptable CAD exporter before finding out about OpenJsCAD. He may be a little late to the online OpenSCAD party, but we have to agree with him that an online 3D solid editor would be an awesome feature for Thingiverse to roll out.

Writing Javascript Without Using Any Letters Or Numbers

August 13, 2012 by 19 Comments

Did you know it’s possible to write Javascript code without using any letters or numbers at all? Well, it’s not just Javascript, but that’s the language used in this demonstration. [Patricio Palladino] shows how code can be written using just eight characters, and all of them are punctuation marks.

Typecasting is the name of the game here. By starting out with an empty array formed by a pair of square brackets, [Patricio] can generate the number zero by casting the array with the plus sign. From there he can use an exclamation point (a boolean cast) and addition to generate any number. The image above is an example of the digits 0-9. This would get very tedious for larger numbers but there’s another shortcut. Cast the digits to strings, concatenate them, then cast back to a number and you’re in business.

The technique is fascinating, and basically unreadable. As a proof of concept he wrote a parser that will convert any Javascript into this hieroglyphy. Check out his Github repository to give it a try.

[via Reddit]

Adafruit’s Custom Rasp Pi Distro Eases Some Pain

August 3, 2012 by 22 Comments

Many of you have still not yet received your Raspberry Pi. When you do, you’ll find that there is work to be done in the operating system to get things working as you might want them to.  The wonderful folks over at Adafruit have tackled this by releasing their own distribution of Linux for the Raspberry Pi.

Based on the shipped distribution “Wheezy”, Adafruit’s distribution “Occidentalis v0.1. Rubus occidentalis” or “the Black Raspberry” now includes the following:

 

Remote Uploading To An Arduino With Codebender

July 25, 2012 by 15 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCHqhV6xPMg&w=470]

A few weeks ago, we saw codebender, an online replacement for the Arduino IDE that allowed you to upload a sketch to your board from a web browser. Over on the codebender blog [Vasilis] and his team are rolling out a way to remotely upload code to an Arduino over Ethernet. Now you don’t even need a serial connection to program an Arduino; it can be done over the Internet to a board in the next room, or on another continent.

The star of this hack is the Ariadne bootloader, an implementation of TFTP that allows any Ethernet-enabled Arduino to receive updates over the Internet. There is still one small problem with the Ariadne bootloader: uploading code over Ethernet requires someone to press the reset button on the Arduino, completely negating the benefits of programming an Arduino over Ethernet.

This problem has been solved before for earlier Arduino boards, so we’re sure [Vasilis] and his team will be able to fix the reset issue in very short order. If you’d like to check out the remote TFTP bootloader and play around with codebender, you can grab Ariadne over on GitHub.

Editing Your FPGA Source

July 22, 2012 by 18 Comments

[Dave] noted that in a recent poll of FPGA developers, emacs was far and away the most popular VHDL and Verilog editor. There are a few reasons for this – namely, emacs comes with packages for editing your HDL of choice. For those of us not wanting to install (and learn) the emacs operating system, [Dave] got Notepad++ to work with these packages.

Notepad++ already has VHDL and Verilog highlighting along with other advanced text editor features, but [Dave] wanted templates, automated declarations and beautification. To do this, he used the FingerText to store code as snippets and call them up at the wave of a finger.

As [Dave] writes his code, the component declarations constantly need to be updated, and with the help of a Perl script [Dave] can update them with the click of a hotkey. Beautification is a harder nut to crack, as Notepad++ doesn’t even have a VHDL or Verilog beautifier plugin. This was accomplished by installing emacs and running the beautification process as a batch script. Nobody can have it all, but we’re thinking [Dave]’s method of getting away from emacs is pretty neat.