Posts Tagged ‘App’

CRAZY stars on App Store! :)

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, September 3rd, 2010

CRAZY stars

CRAZY stars is now finally on the App Store. If you have an iPad, go to itunes.com/apps/crazystars to play with the free App! ^_^

If there’s 1,200 downloads in 3 weeks, it will be released Open Source! :D

Enjoy! Let me know what you think of CRAZY stars!

Posted in: iPhone, Projects.

Friday Night Robotics – CRAZY stars

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, July 30th, 2010

CRAZY stars

On Friday July 30th, I completed an App that I have been working on that uses openFrameworks to draw points (or combination of points) to the screen. Using openFrameworks is a great resource in case you don’t know the Core Animation APIs too well, but you have experience with other drawing programs, such as Processing.

CRAZY stars

The idea originally started out as a pinwheel application, but somehow evolved into exploding stars.

CRAZY stars

There is also an Open AL layer that creates interesting sound effects as you draw across the screen. Here’s a video of me explaining the App in action!

The App was submitted to the App Store for review on August 1st, so it might be up on August 10th! I will be sure to post an update when it is available. The App will run only on the iPad, and it will be free. You can do an in-app purchase for $0.99 to unlock the customization features.

If there are 1,200 downloads of the App in 3 weeks from when it is released, I will make the code open source under a CC-BY-NC-SA license. You will have to tell all of your iPad friends about the App! ;) ;)

CRAZY stars

Posted in: Art, iPhone, Projects.

KiloWhatt iPhone App!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

An App that I’ve been working on for several months now has finally been released onto the App store! It’s called KiloWhatt! The purpose of KiloWhatt is to assist in the general understanding of the relationships between power, energy, usage and cost.

Once these relationships are understood, the ultimate goal is for people to observe which categories they consume the most energy. Decreasing our energy consumption to conserve as much as possible based off of this understanding will be very efficient and effective. As the Law of Conservation of Energy states:
“Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another”. ^_^

Building this App was definitely a tribute to the incremental development approach. It started off from a simple SQLite3 todo list! I kept adding on more aspects once one thing was working. Though, at one point it did seem like there was more debugging going on than actual development. That’s learning, I suppose. :D

When I was finishing off the App, a lot of time was spent on the design. The table views have nice backgrounds and overlays, so that you don’t get that standard iPhone UI feel when you’re in the App. The App needed something nice so that people can show it off to their friends as something different! ;)

Another thing- the Info tab on KiloWhatt does exactly what the name entails. It gives you more information! There’s sections in there to read about the various components about the App. The info section is definitely a vital part of any App, and I hope that this is more fulfilling than a simple version number and website info page. ;)

Of course, there are still some improvements to be made. These will be coming with version releases. =) Oh yeah, and the little icon for the ‘Electronics’ category intentionally looks like an iMac G4 (haha)!

With that being said, go and check it out on the

App store

and let me know how you like it. =)

Posted in: iPhone, Projects.

iPhoneiPhoneiPhone… (Friday Night *)

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, April 9th, 2010

iPhone

If you’re ever looking for a challenge worth pulling your teeth out, making an iPhone App is a great place to start. Dealing with robots and living in Montreal, I’ve seen my fair share of challenges. Somehow, iPhone Apps are different. It’s overwhelmingly difficult, and oddly enough addicting.

The language, the concepts, everything is completely different from what is seen in languages like Java and C++. I’m starting to understand the concepts much more now. It really clicked once I saw the code of how table view cells are iterated through. In ObjC, things happen because of code that is called somewhere even though you have no idea what is going on. It’s a flowy type of thing- you don’t expect to see for-loops anywhere!

This is how a TableView is iterated through for its contents. In mine, it changes the font on the first and second ones… :P

  1. // Customize the appearance of table view cells.
  2. - (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {
  3.    
  4.     static NSString *CellIdentifier = @"Cell";
  5.    
  6.     UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier];
  7.     if (cell == nil) {
  8.         cell = [[[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleSubtitle reuseIdentifier:CellIdentifier] autorelease];
  9.     }
  10.    
  11.     // Set up the cell…
  12.        
  13.         //First get the dictionary object
  14.         NSDictionary *dictionary = [listOfItems objectAtIndex:indexPath.section];
  15.         NSArray *array = [dictionary objectForKey:@"Countries"];
  16.         NSString *cellValue = [array objectAtIndex:indexPath.row];
  17.         cell.textLabel.text = cellValue;
  18.        
  19.        
  20.         if([indexPath row] == 0 && [indexPath section] == 0) {
  21.                 cell.detailTextLabel.text = @"Edit Me\n\crhi";
  22.         }
  23.        
  24.         if([indexPath section] < 2) {
  25.                 UIFont *titleFont = [UIFont fontWithName:@"Georgia-BoldItalic" size:18.0];
  26.                 [[cell textLabel] setFont:titleFont];
  27.         } else {
  28.                 UIFont *titleFont = [UIFont fontWithName:@"Helvetica-Bold" size:20.0];
  29.                 [[cell textLabel] setFont:titleFont];
  30.         }
  31.        
  32.     return cell;
  33. }

As you can see, it’s abstract. REALLY CRAZY ABSTRACT. Even if you can’t see it, it’s abstract.

I’ve been working on Apps for a large part of time of the day for many weeks now. Usually from 11PM until I get keyboard-faced (around 2AM). Wake up at 6AM and do it all over again! :) It’s a slow and tedious process.

One of the Apps that I’ve been working on for ages now was finally approved. It was rejected three times previously!!! It’s called North Country Now (for a local newspaper), and it has links to their website, Twitter, and a map of the areas that they cover. It also has view transitions and works seamlessly (That’s kinda important)! Click below to go to the App store to download it onto your iPhone/iPod/iPad.

It’s a really simple concept, but it will prove extremely effective for local small-medium sized businesses that want to extend their reach into the next generation. If you’re reading this and want to know how much it costs for your business to have one of these Apps, contact me and I will let you know We worked really hard to make it a fair and equal price. :)

Never give up on a challenge! Give things time, and they will surprise you. =)

Posted in: iPhone, Projects.

CMUcam2 in Matlab! & Project updates!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

On Sunday, a breakthrough was made with regards to getting the CMUcam2 to send a frame back to Matlab! Amazing! It works!

Check out the screenshots:

Matlab &amp; CMUcam2

(something bright was being shone onto the camera)

Matlab &amp; CMUcam2

(lens cap on (yes they make lens caps that small))

It’s quite noticeable that the resolution is very small. In fact, it’s only about 10 pixels in size!

I started off small so that we could have something that works, then go from there. :D It’s only sending the green channel too, which helps improve the latency.

The way it works now is that it asks for a few hundred bytes of data. From there, we search through the array to find a 1, or the start of the frame, until a 3, or the end of the frame. This is stored into a new variable so that we can search through it (again!) and plot the data.

Plotting the data needs some improvement. Not too sure how to handle this yet– should I make a Processing app that will be able to save the image as a .png? Or can Matlab write images too? Hmm!

Post a comment if you want me to post the code, I just don’t want to post something that’s incomplete and will essentially confuse everyone. :)

Other projects statii:

PR2 Proposal

Out of the 120 Letters of Intent that WillowGarage received for the PR2 Beta program, one of them is one from Clarkson University!

There are ten robots that are going to be given away. Coincidentally, the research teams that win will be notified on March 26th — that’s the date of the Boston FIRST regional (which Team 229 is attending and is going to ROCK THE ROBOT HOUSE)! :D

We’re giving it our best shot, and it’s looking really cool! If you see me around, ask me about it! :D

This whole process has been super exciting. Our proposal is being wrapped up, though it’s only due March 1st (that’s in six days, we still have plenty of time). My two sections are pretty much complete except for some stuff. I’ll be blogging about it on March 1st at 8:00PM, so keep an eye out!

Sociable Robotics

The Socializing a Social Robot with an Artificial Society SURE abstract from the summer has been added to the Honors Summer Research 2009 page! Finally! ^_^

Also, I refined my paper with logic that can easily be followed now, and included Zoomify graphs of the results. This makes it easy for readers to scan and interpret the graphs themselves. Plus, Zoomify graphs are always fun.

As for the code… I still have to get on to documenting it. It’s a lot of work, so I’m just getting through it step by step. Lesson learned: although comments are distracting when you’re working on the code, it’s horrible to go back and then spend time to comment it. Always comment. No exceptions!

SecondLife Statistics Project

We finally parsed through the data and found something really striking. When the economic downturn in real life appeared, the usage hours on SecondLife rose, and kept on rising for a few months! The virtual economy was booming. It’s almost like as if people were tired of the real life, and wanted the easy success of the virtual world.

Though, there was eventually a decrease in the usage hours on SecondLife. This leads us to wonder if…
1) Is there a lag between RL and SL?
2) Did people notice that there weren’t as many opportunities on SL as when they first joined?

It’s really cool to think about this sort of stuff. It makes you wonder what Oreo sales have been like throughout this modern recession. I would love to study Oreo sales, I think they would be really representative of the economic situations. Either that, or Oreo sales always remain constant. :P

Team 229

This build season I helped out with the website a lot. We were coming from nothing, and now we have a beautiful source of information, all collected together!

It was quite a load of work, however help from the teammates and mentors helped very much. Go check it out!

Physics Team Design

In Physics II there are two lab sections that allow you to participate in a team based design course. The challenge is to model the velocity of a hobby train with given voltages. We do this using photogates… and a piece of National Instruments hardware that measures data at a rate of 400,000. I’m not sure what the units are, but it’s pretty amazing! The challenge sessions are where we apply this model, trying to predict the train’s movements based on the data that we have collected.

The way the data is collected is through LabView. Unfourtunately, the program that is used was deleted… so the professor/TA needed some help to fix it. After working on it for a few hours, we figured it out and got it to work! :)

iPhone Stuff

I’ve been playing around with core-plot and working on an app lately- it’s 80% done, and will be out on the App store within the next few weeks!

We’re still trying to sort out if we’re going to Open Source it, and how that would work (since we want people to buy the App too…!). Perhaps we could just *suggest* a donation whenever people try to download the code? Anyone have any experience with Open Source App business model plans?

Random

Coming back from winter break to school was tricky this time around… since I was outside the entire day playing hockey during the break!!! Although Clarkson has open skate, their ice mixture is really weird, and there’s no pickup hockey games :( Better than nothing, though.

I bought two shirts from shirt.woot, and they are awesome. One of them is ‘I Fought the Laws’, and has three pictures of crazy robots. The other is a robot that is plugged in to a wall outlet, leading to its heart. ^_^



That’s all for now! Keep it real, humans and robots. =)

Posted in: Art, Other, Programming, Projects, Robot, School.

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