Monday, December 30, 2013

Left rear guts replaced on my brakes

The cylinder was leaking and the line broke during disassembly, so I bent an 8" replacement to fit.

Friday, December 27, 2013

Thursday, December 26, 2013

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Sunday, December 8, 2013

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Raspberry pi Vision processing

  • Got all the pieces plugged in
  • First off, selected the Raspbian OS distribution at the first NOOB boot prompt. 
  • Got no VGA output on the first couple boot cycles, used "Safe mode" (hold shift key during boot) to bring up a shortcut to the settings, where I enabled the 2 lines for VGA.
  • In raspi-config, I selected the Enable Camera option, then Boot to Desktop. 
  • The desktop comes up with a default resolution of 576x416 - painfully large!
  • Used safe-mode editor to alter //boot/config.txt:
  • disable_overscan=1
    hdmi_force_hotplug=1
    hdmi_group=2
    hdmi_mode=16
    yielding a more comfortable 1024x768 @ 60Hz.  Supported modes can be found here.
  • If you don't like the Great Britain keyboard layout, nano /etc/default/keyboard layout to 'us'
  • Straighten out the Time Zone with 'sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata'
  • connecting a RJ45 gives access to the web. If you need a static address, instructions can be found here.
  • Then it's time get the latest version of rasbian and set up the compiler and tools.  I followed my own previous notes from January (git and build-essential were already installed)
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cmake libgtk2.0-dev python-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev
This installed 91 new packages for me.
Got the newest OpenCV 2.4.7 and extracted it to opencv-2.4.7.  Terminal:

mkdir Paladins
cd Paladins
mkdir OpenCV
cd OpenCV
cmake ../../opencv-2.4.7
make                   ##    This took about 9 hours to run!!
sudo make install


Then following along with Josh Larson's post on Chief Delphi and pulling his code from github.

In Paladins:

git clone git://github.com/Josh-Larson/CameraBoardAPI

which builds a sub-folder CameraBoardAPI

pi locked up when running sudo apt-get upgrade, which is unfortunate.  It was executing a series of "Remove 'diversion of ...' items, then indicated 'dpkg-divert: error: unable to sync file '/boot/start_x.elf.dpkg-divert.tmp': Input/Output error'.  Completely non-responsive since.  SD card failure? Out of space?  Guess I should go get another card and try from scratch.

What I cannot figure out, is when I insert a working card from my pi, it still won't show any activity at boot.

So, starting over with another 4gb SDHC micro, I installed 2013-09-25-wheezy-raspbian.img (available as a torrent) on that card, and could only get video by plugging into my HDMI TV.  There, I changed the config (as above) to VGA in //boot/config.txt again.  Success!

Now, the sequence is to update Linux first, then do OpenCV!

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade              ## 57 items updated
sudo apt-get install cmake libgtk2.0-dev python-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev  ### 89 items installed


Wednesday, December 4, 2013