New Job

I recently acquired a job at a local ROBOTICS company! I am doing light assembly work for now, but it will get more involved the more experience I gain. Wow, I haven't posted for a while.

I haven't been able to get much work done and my projects, been really busy with other projects (more important ones)...

It has been a long time...

Yesterday I got my robot's wheels turning. Now I am working my way through the programming of the driver software and the ultrasonic range finder. After I do a little more mounting my robot will be complete (Took me long enough :) )...

I might post some images later...

In other news I have recently created a SourceForge project. It's called Getix (dx-voice-conf). Getix uses Direct X extensions for voice conferencing. The goal of this project is to create a program (for Windows) that will allow lobbiable multi-user voice conferencing over LAN or the Internet.

You can check it out at https://sourceforge.net/projects/dx-voice-conf/ and the project HomePage at http://dx-voice-conf.sourceforge.net/

PBasic, C++, and Oodles of fun!

Recently I have been programming a converter tool from MicroChip's MPLab's C++ "stuff" to PBasic, so that we (my FIRST team, wwww.usfirst.org) can program the old-style IFI Controllers (IFIROBOTICS.com) in C++, instead of using their PBasic language. It's pretty complicated, and I know I won't be able to get all of C++'s features, but it'll do for some simple programming.

Some Good news, Some Bad...

Well, I haven’t updated in a while, so I figure I will fill y’all in…

Today I received a letter from a school district in California telling me that I have officially passed the NASA Ames robotics course I took this summer. That was some good news! I have finished the control system for my robot, but was having some problems with it, so I broke it down and am working from the ground up, trying to find what is wrong. Unfortunately I do not have an oscilloscope to read the waveforms. I am going to try to get that working, and then I’ll be in good shape!

More Control...

Well, I finally finished the conrtol board for my robot, I am getting ready to plug it all in and test it. I have some pictures, but they are really blurry...



Here is another picture:

The Rise of BriOS, Mr. Gates, be very afraid!

I am sure all of you are wondering why I have not posted in a while. Well, I have been playing around with Operating System Development. It is very fun stuff!

Right now I am doing a pure Assembly OS. I have my OS based off of the EasyOS structure. I have been able to accomplish some basic command line instructions. Right now I am developing a simple GUI structure to operate on…

This is what I have so far with the control systems for my robot:

The IC socket is for my PIC 16c57
The IC on the board is my dual half driver chip from TI
I also have a 20mhz resonator and a 5vdc regulator

This is only the beginning, I still have a lot of items/wiring to do...

 

B3D

As many of you don't know I am an aspiring 3D artist. To showcase some of my projects, I have created another blog. Here's the link. I will also be adding a link to it under my "Links". I will be updating that periodically ,so check it out every now and then.

Going in Deeper...

If any of you were wondering why I wasn't updating, it was because I was on vacation. But now I am back, so on with the updates.

Recently I have decided do go deeper with my voice recognition journey. Instead of using the Microsoft speech SDK, I am going to be developing my own Speech Recognition engine. My reason for doing this is although the MS Speech SDK is nice, it doesn't provide the accuracy that I am looking for.

I know, this seems as if it would be impossible, but I have worked it down to a science. The way I will attempt to do this is I will have my Microphone input stream inputting to an array of numbers, then I will compare that array to another array for specific commands.


If you are asking how this will be more accurate, then I shall explain. The original arrays that I will be comparing against is the specific words, spoken by me, so the input and the comparing arrays for specific words will be extremely close already, also I won't have millions of other words that the engine is trying to match the input against. Only the ones that I setup.


Right now I am leaning towards using the DirectX Voice input libraries as my voice command input stream. By if I can find something more efficient, then I go for that.

C++ Voice Command Tutorial...

Well, yesterday night I decided that I would make a tutorial covering what I did with the Voice Command Software. I have the tutorial created and compiled to a ZIP file. IF you would like to look at it, Here is a link: Voice-tutorial.zip.

This tutorial uses C++, Microsoft Speech SDK 5.1, and Windows, Sorry Linux and Mac Gurus, Microsoft doesn't supply a Speech SDK for those OS's.

You should be able to attain all the needed files in the ZIP file, or the tutorial...

If you are having a problem with the link, send me an email (briansaccount@gmail.com) and I'll send you the tutorial.
(it isn't big, like < 15kb)