Dimme's World

Harlem Shake with a Stewart platform

Dimme — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 23:46:42 +0000

I have a project assignment to do for one of my university courses (Numerical Analysis). The project is about modeling a Stewart platform in MATLAB. I took it a step further and animated a Harlem Shake of the final result. Enjoy the video after the hop.

Master Thesis Prototype

Dimme — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 19:36:49 +0000

Currently I am doing my Master Thesis at the Department of Electrical and Information Technology, Lund University. In this project we are aiming to demonstrate a new concept for improving traffic safety using wireless communication between vehicles.

This image is a sneak peak into our second prototype. Can you guess what the lower part is? The final report will be published here in the beginning of June.

Blocket Contest Solution

Dimme — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 19:15:44 +0000

As I mentioned last week I have participated in a contest. In total I got 17 points, which means 7 extra points out of 10 for my solution in the last challenge. That puts me in place 28, or in place 3, depending if you consider everybody with the same points in the same place or not.

Here comes my solution, the problem description can be found in the picture above.

Blocket Easter Eggs Contest

Dimme — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 03:23:20 +0000

Blocket.se

Blocket.se is a Swedish online market for buying and selling goods. They are very big and probably exist in your country too under a different name.

They are now hiring people and what better way to recruit programmers than setting up a contest? They have hidden 10 easter eggs (geeky riddles) in the guts of their website and the challenge is to find them and provide the right answers.

Me and a friend of mine have found them all. We also found out that the last egg has a follow-up task which you are not required to complete. However, I have completed it and I will post my answer here after the contest ends on the 7:th of April.

Arduino LCD Keypad Shield – Clock Application

Dimme — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 23:57:46 +0000

UPDATED: I removed all delay(); calls because they were not accurate enough and there was a time drift. Instead now there is a while(); that waits until the required time has passed.

Recently I found here a really cheap LCD shield with buttons for Arduino.

Today it arrived and I made a simple clock program to test it out. It’s little slow when refreshing the screen but it’s perfect for the price.

A really cool application would be to use it together with a Raspberry Pi to execute simple commands and see the status of a small web server.

Here are some pictures, a video and the code for the clock application. It is using the LCDKeypad C++ class which can be found here.

Old posts recovered

Dimme — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 23:40:24 +0000

I have mentioned earlier that I will upload old content to this website since some people were requesting it and there were many dead links out there.

I have finally managed to get my ass moving and published those old posts. Start reading here.

RFID tag emulation with an AVR

Dimme — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 21:24:00 +0000

Some time ago I read this article about using an AVR ATtiny85 microcontroller to emulate an EM4102 RFID tag and today I thought of giving it a try.

I used an Arduino as an ISP programmer to program the ATtiny85 with this source code. The electronics used:

1x AVR ATtiny85
1x 10uF capacitor
1x 22uF ceramic capacitor
1x Home-made coil from toilet paper cardboard

Here are some pictures and a video from the result:

Box2D Test iOS Application

Dimme — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 19:53:39 +0000

So I started learning some Box2D to improve skills in game programming. Box2D is a physics engine written in C++. Many games use a graphics engine but not a physics engine. The graphics engine usually accelerates the graphics on the GPU but what makes movements look realistic is the physics engine.

Because Box2D is written in C++ you cannot simply use it in your iOS project, but thanks to Objective-C++ support you can change your file extensions to .mm and then simply use C++ in your Objective-C project.

In this example im not using a graphics engine, only Box2D and basic UIKit elements (UIView). Next step would be to do a similar example using a graphics engine like Cocos2D.

Source code: https://github.com/Dimme/Box2DTest

My motorcycle

Dimme — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 14:31:02 +0000

Here is a video of my motorcycle from my recent visit to Greece. I just installed a new thermostat called “Thermo-Bob” and changed the engine oil and thought I should record starting the engine as it had been sitting for over a year.

Raspberry Pi Unboxing Video

Dimme — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 08:29:59 +0000

I have been waiting in the queue for months in order to purchase a Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi is a very small computer with very powerful (for it’s specs) graphics. It costs only $35 and of course I got one!

So here comes a small video that I made while unboxing it.

Layout.