Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Monterey UI

Great news!  Monterey's first lines of code have now been written!  So far, I've laid the ground work for a QROV object that will hold all of the statuses of the ROV's various tools and components.  I've also started working on the GUI (which will look better as time passes, I promise).  My next major step is working on my QROVController object.  That will interact with the joystick and the UI in order to adjust QROV's properties (which are then sent down the tether to the ROV).

I've even created some new jargon for rov-suite:
TOBI (Topside Out Bottomside In) and TIBO (Topside In Bottomside Out).  I stole these from the SPI protocol's terminology because they made sense for an ROV controller.  Previously, RX and TX were used.  The problem with that is that the ROV's TX is the topside's RX and vice versa.  By using TOBI and TIBO, there should be none of that confusion.

I will post more updates on rov-suite to this blog as time goes by.

In other news, I found out about iFolder, which is a handy little Dropbox-like application that let's you use your own server.  I have an old netbook laying around that I just installed OpenSUSE12 (with KDE, my first time using Linxu without Gnome) and I plan on turning that into a Git server for backing up my code and an iFolder server to sync my other files across my computers.

I will admit, I do miss Ubuntu....  The other day, my friend (whom I converted from Vista to Ubuntu) came over to my house and had me install the "lmms" audio application.  From the terminal, I was able to download all of the necessary libraries, run cmake and build the application.  I then made a nice little shell script that sits on his desktop and acts as a shortcut to it.  I'm not used to OpenSUSE's terminal commands (good-bye, apt-get install.  hello zypper in!) yet, but I've only had it for 10 hours so far...

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris K

Thursday, March 15, 2012

NetworkingTest



Good news!  I've been working on touching up my UDP networking tools (NetworkingTest).  I've added a timestamped logging feature, cleaned up the code, fixed a bug, fixed the keyboard shortcuts and added an icon!  Plus, I have re-released the code onto my Sourceforge project.  You can find the executable here.  For the meantime, I have only released the OSX version.  I will recompile it on Windows and upload that ASAP.

The Android version of NetworkingTest has received a similar update (without the new icon, although I will probably change it's icon to the newer, improved one).  I will upload the *.apk of the Android version soon!

Chris K

Friday, March 2, 2012

Doxygen - Automatic Qt/C++ Documentation

I came across a nifty application today: Doxygen.  Doxygen is able to parse your raw source files for a variety of languages (with special support for Qt's signals and slots) and turn it into documentation.  I've seen the output of Doxygen before with Qwt and several other libraries, but I never realized that it could be automated.

I will definitely start documenting my code with Doxygen.  You can expect that Monterey v2.0 and it's corresponding classes will all be Doxygen'ed.

If you want to check out my *very* basic test of Doxygen, you can see it's automatic documentation of my QPID class here.

Hope this helps!

Chris