Monday, December 31, 2012

Update

Although I've been on break for school for the past week, I haven't been able to do any programming because I've been helping my dad and friend replace the roof of our RV.  It's been an intense project!  Today was the first day that I had free from working on it, and I've spent most of it programming.

For my robotics team, I spent today playing around with the WiringPi library on my Raspberry Pi.  We want to have access to it's GPIO so we can use it as an embedded microcontroller onboard our ROV.  The GPIO utility it has (for turning on inputs and outputs from Bash) is pretty awesome!  I'm looking forward to writing some interesting embedded Qt apps for this.

I also found out today that my Raspberry Pi has a habit of breaking off the corner of my SD cards (above the contacts on the corner with the write-lock).  Debugging that issue took up a fair amount of time, sadly.  If you have the same issue, just take a piece of paper and put it between the SD card and the SD card holder (but not between the SD card and the contacts).  That will apply just enough pressure to maintain contact.

I'm looking into writing a Git client for Android devices at some point (probably this summer).  I tried to do a proof of concept today using QProcess to launch the Git executable that came with TerminalIDE (there is a Qt Git library, libqgit2, but it won't even compile on my Kubuntu VM), but I kept running into issues.  Hopefully I'll be able to resolve them and start working on the app soon!

Thanks for stopping by and expect more Android apps soon,

Chris K

Edit:  I just made a Qt app (for Android) that can execute Git commands.... (right now just the installed version).  User must have TerminalIDE installed for this build to work, but I plan on changing that soon.  Happy New Year!

Sunday, December 16, 2012

Thumb Hypoplasia Update




I've been doing a lot of work recently on updating my hypoplasia app, and the results are looking pretty good!  It can now calculate the center point of the circle that fits the arc, calculate an average radius and use that information to calculate the range of motion of the patient's thumb.  It uses averages of many calculated center points (each one calculated from 3 randomly selected data points) to find the center point of the circle.  Then, it averages the radii from each datapoint to the center point to find the average radius.  Once it draws the circle on the screen, it uses some trig to calculated the range of motion of the thumb (from straight up to the blue line).  I've written the app to ignore extraneous data points (i.e. points caused by QPushButton clicks being registered on the QGraphicsScene).  I also greatly improved performance of the QGraphicsView by removing all anti-aliasing and by changing when data points are recorded.  All in all, it is working out pretty well right now!  I just need to get it tested in the clinical environment.  I plan on putting it on Google Play sometime this Christmas break.

If you'd like to download the current version of it (0.3.1), you can get it here.

The GUI theme looks very different from previous versions because I used Necessitas Alpha 4.1 instead of Alpha 3.

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris Konstad