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 place 3, depending on 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.se is a Swedish online market for buying and selling goods. They are huge and probably exist in your country, too, under a different name.
They are now hiring people, and what better way to recruit programmers than to set 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.
A friend of mine and I 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.
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 a 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 a small web server’s status.
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.
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.
Leap Motion is a company that started with the vision of making the interaction between humans and computers better and more natural. They believe in achieving that using a sensor device that detects your hands.
About half a year ago, I showed my interest as a developer to make applications using their device. As of yesterday, I have received the device, which you can see in the video below.
I want to develop great applications, but I have very few ideas. What kind of applications would you like to see using this technology? Please tell me your ideas in the comment field below.
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:
Here are some pictures and a video from the result:
So I started learning some Box2D to improve my 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 GPU graphics, 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, I’m not using a graphics engine, only Box2D and basic UIKit elements (UIView). The next step would be to do a similar example using a graphics engine like Cocos2D.
Source code: https://github.com/dimme/Box2DTest
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.
I have been waiting in the queue for months to purchase a Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer with very powerful (for its specs) graphics. It costs only $35, and of course, I got one!
So here comes a small video that I made while unboxing it.
For the past 2 weeks, I have been making an iPhone application for Greece’s team in the UEFA EURO 2012 championship. Right after the 1-1 against Poland, Apple has now released my application to the public.
I was hoping for them to be a little faster but better late than never. This is version 1.0, and if you are interested in Greece or want a live score application for Euro 2012 in greek, you can download it from here for free:
Here are some screenshots of the first version. Version 1.1 will be submitted shortly and will contain more live information about the games and teams.
