Today's list

Looking around a bit more at the AVR community, it seems that WinAVR is the most common choice that many use to write C code for the AVR. However, there's not IDE; instead, it uses makefiles. Ouch. Not a good choice for teaching.

I recently did a voice-over for a simulation Buddy produced which shows the behavior of a fiddle string. I found this behavior complex and fascinating. Buddy's working on a version which will show the string in 3-D; below is a 2-D slice. Using Camtasia made is so easy to quickly record this.

I spend some time yesterday evening creating my new personal home page on the web, since my old home page is years out of date. It's fairly simple, but at least a start.

I felt like a kid in a candy store yesterday while order parts for the Summer Bridge program. I hadn't realized that Pololu (named after a valley in Hawaii) offered some many nice robotics parts. I'm also glad I could finally get the order placed; it took a while, but I think I found most of what I need.

Little did I know, but the first annual National Robotics Week will be held from April 10-18!

Today's plan:

1. I still need to update the Micro libs with the bug fix.
2. Spend a small amount of time on p14p. My plan is to put small but steady amounts of time in, since I can't afford to spend a lot of time on it.
3. E-mail as always. I'm mostly caught up, with just a few items to take care of.
4. Call Dan Stutts to finish our earlier conversation. Though not pressing; I can also do that on Wednesday.
5. Research -- I need to review a paper, revise two papers.
6. Funding. I really need to do this, but with other deadlines looming it's not looking like I'll make much progress. Perhaps I can put together one slide or make some other small quanta of progress.
7. Type in corrected Micro grades.
8. Clean up. My office is a dump. Update: better now.

Camstudio bring-up

From what I can tell, development on Camstudio has died. I'd prefer to use Camtasia Studio, but don't have the money to purchase it (sigh). However, it does work. Here are my setup notes:

1. I prefer the Beta version, which shows corners around the area you record. Download it from the Camstudio blog.
2. Fix the audio settings, which don't work on Vista: per this video, from the Recorder choose Options, Audio Options, Audio Options for Microphone, then use PCM, 22050 Hz, 16 bit, Stereo, 88200 Bytes/sec.
3. I prefer something other than the default Microsoft Video 1 video codec, which does a poor job. The DivX codec I have is compatible with YouTube. The CamStudio lossless codec also works with YouTube.
4. Be careful -- don't record movies longer than 10 minutes, or YouTube won't take them.
   

Using that, here's a tutorial on how to convert a bitmap to a laser-cuttable vector image. I chose an octopus from the web; below are the before and after images.

 

I made a video tutorial of the steps. Then I discovered the my microphone died right before I recorded this. Aargh. I'll re-do it when I'm back in operation...update: it's finally done.

Today's PC task: convert movies on a DVD to YouTube. While Google shows lots of commerical apps, I'd like something both trustworthy and free. So, I downloaded the DivX Author program, which allows me a 30-day trial, and I'm converting. So far, so good. Though somewhat tedious, since I need to break the videos up into 10 minute chunks.