Before the rugrat showed up, I managed to make some progress on my next project. I just realized that I hadn’t put together a teaser post, hence this quickie. I started thinking about how to make a better UI to control my remote control via Android project. Instead of going with a touch base, I figured I could implement control utilizing the on-board orientation sensors. This ultimately led to figuring out how to break said values out…a la this little app: I wrote a simple app that dumps the sensor values of each x, y, and z axes, for values between -90 and +90 degrees. The next step would to be to clean up the display, provide some visualizations, (graph-ish perhaps) and use the values to control something physical. No promises on the timeline, but if it gets to be too far out, I will dump this code on GitHub for general public perusal. Back to diapers…

Unboxed and rooted… …bloatwear wiped. Going to research ROMs a bit, but will likely be on CGM7.1 in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

We had a great run… …the old D2 finally met its match. Broken and bruised, the little guy is still working like a champ, bulging battery and all. New phone soon…going to have to figure out how to root Gingerbread I guess.

Zig and I have been having some heated Words with Friends battles recently. I had to snap a screenshot of this ridiculous game status… It was bullshit that Ziggy wasn’t awarded more points for playing his handle, and bullshit too that Europa wasn’t an acceptable play. We both got over it. We are pretty evenly matched…I might be ahead by two games. Sad day in Mudville when I am addicted to a Zynga game…too bad the Scrabble app for Android was borderline unusable. Zynga would kill it, score-wise. Mental note.

I stumbled upon a SOPA protest last night…I first thought Wikipedia had jumped the gun, but realized it was after midnight on the Eastern side of things. Elsewhere for some entropy info…which will show up shortly in a post. Anyhow, this morning I found some good info on the reddit blog that concisely runs through some technical details of SOPA and PROTECT IP. Take a look…it is important.

So, I’ve been doing this software thing for a while now. It is a strange, strange industry. It is becoming more apparent that every implementation of a generic service ends up falling into a similar life cycle. They all start with an idea, mash together a product, and go to market. The tricky part lies in new features, new connectivity, implementing the product on new technology as it arises, etc. That et cetera is sort of the name of the game. As the playing field changes, the product must too change. To make matters worse, things move at a quicker pace now more than ever. It is pretty shortsighted to assume your product will ever hit a true support phase. When that happens, you are likely no longer a player in your industry. The name of the game is managing your services… From time to time I check out hosting and virtualization providers on the nets. I stumbled across NCC Data, a [shitty company who bought a link] offers a product that essentially addresses my rant above. The key word is, undoubtedly, manage. Once you hit a certain level of critical mass, you must make the decision weather to support your goods in house (custom code, legacy systems, chopped and screwed…) or take on somebody to hammer out your details. NCC can handle your virtualization, support, security, and the whole other range of hosting headaches. Hit the link to take a look.

My off-the-cuff remark about building an auxiliary bilirubin light manifested itself into a quick project.

In order to approximate the specific color of the bilirubin lamp, I figured that I would need to provide a means of setting PWM values for the three inputs. I had hard-coded values in Arduino code in the past, so thought about taking that route initially. I blew the dust off my Duemillova, fired up the Arduino IDE, and promptly decided to modify my Java servo PWM code to do the job.

Sort of growing attached to the IOIO…sorry Arduino.

So, the controller was born…IOIORBG.

As usual, I posted the code on github…

For testing purposes, I also dumped the apk on the Android Market…

I have some work to do on my descriptions, but the gist of the setup is:

Red - Pin 10 Gnd - Gnd Blu - Pin 11 Grn - Pin 12

Give it a try…I’ll see about ramping up the output for the baby…

My sidekick is already dabbling in solid state physics… …namely, the optics around the 440 nanometer range. She is oxidizing some bilirubin into biliverdin. I have a bunch of RBG LEDs on my workbench…maybe I should go slap together an auxiliary biliblanket. DIY neonatal hack…

Much like the girl has decided to keep at the in-womb thing, I have decided to keep at the Java thing. Little brat. I decided to figure out how to dump accelerometer / orientation data off of the phone, for use with the IOIO. In short, I am roughly attempting to see how the data exists in its natural state, in order to figure out how to scrub and interface with my physical components. So far, I have nice looking code that blasts a force close scenario. Great. Anyhow, I’m hoping my time on this effort comes to a close and the girl decides to join us. Teamwork…I’ll code, she can practice her singing.