Personal projects that I am either working on or thinking of working on.
My command of the PInvoke functionality that I need is largely complete. I’m looking at stepping up my WPF skills to build out some more usable UI front-ends to these tools.
Add in some MongoDB back ends for persistence and I expect to be in a much better position to manage my data archives.
I’ll be pushing updates to my github account as I build test projects and useful tools.
I built a few more beacons to play with last night. I’ve got some CR2023 battery holders that are smaller than the AA cell battery clips and have integrate power switches that I’m using for these. The red and blue LEDs work as expected (though they look dimmer to my eye than the white one on the first version we built).
I put together an IR LED based beacon as well (though without the diffuser as I’m not sure the diffuser plastic is transparent at 970 nm). I’ve demonstrated that the cameras I’ve got can see the IR LEDs on a remote control, even with their IR filters intact. I could see that the IR LED was on, but its brightness was much less than the brightness of the visible light LEDs so no real advantage to going with IR.
I also finished updating my RPi machines to the ‘scratch’ OS image and am close to having all of them built for OpenCV libraries. Once I get the last machine loaded up, I expect to switch back to one of the Ubuntu NUC machines and write some code to read from cameras and process the result.
Attaching LED information for easy later location…
Played with some commercial motion capture software last Friday, more here.
I’ve upgraded most of my RPi machines to scratch and I believe I have the process of building OpenCV 4.0.1 on them to the point where it is reliable.
I have realized that I can’t push the full, unprocessed output of these webcams over the ethernet links. I’ll have to pre-process the data to reduce total size in order to make things work. Not sure whether the ARM CPUs have the necessary performance or not. I’ll have to look at this and see what I can see.
This time I pasted all of the pieces into a single shell script (instead of running it piecemeal) and things went smoothly. Still took a while, even on the Core-i5 system with an SSD and 32 GB of physical memory. I specifically pulled 4.0.1 from git rather than the default choice from the source of the instructions that built ‘master’.
Tonight I’ll have to write a bit of code to use the library and see if I can get streams of images programmatically from one or more of the webcams I’m working with.
At some point I may bump up the swap space on another of my RPi systems to see if the same script works there as well.
Well…almost got OpenCV building on my main Ubuntu machine at home. I was copying fragments from the directions on the OpenCV site into an SSH session and clearly missed something along the way. I’ll have to build a single, large shell script up front next time and then run that. Unfortunately it seems as if (I may learn better later on) once CMake has done its magic, lots of things get baked into the files that drive the build in ways that really, really want a rebuild if things don’t go quite right.
I was working from the instructions here. (Other instructions here).
I was surprised to see that the github repo and contrib did not have a branch tag for release 4. It looks as if there’s a stable release out there, but 3.4 and master seemed like the available choices.
The main site clearly indicates that version 4 has been released with pre-built windows and ios downloads and documentation. I’m not sure currently how to pull that stable release code from git though.
I expect to take another run at the 4.0 build on Ubuntu tonight. Other than script grabbing issues, the build went smoothly…32 GB of memory and a Core-i5 CPU work better than an low-end ARM and 1 GB swapping on a micro-SD card.
Hmm…more github presence for version 4 here and here. Looks like OpenCV 4.0.1 is the latest. Ah…tags not branches here…need to look at pulling the appropriate tag for the build. Easy enough…just list the tags, find the 4.0.1 tag and check that out.
Building C++ supporting libraries on my small dev machine. Looking at another pass of C++/CLI work and some more thinking about motion capture options.
I’ve built zlib and bzlib2 yesterday. To get these building with VS 2017 I built them with their standard build procedures (which appeared to build 32 bit libraries) and then created visual studio 2017 projects to build the same pieces using fresh settings.
I’ve got boost, openssl, opencv and the mongodb c and c++ libraries on my list for today. The mongodb libraries are my primary target here though all of the above are of interest. This is also what is driving my CMake reading as several of these libraries use CMake for their builds.
I’m pretty interested in C++/CLI as a way to get access to C and C++ functionality from C#. Given the productivity that C# provides, access to C and C++ APIs and libraries from that environment would help quite a bit. My primary driver was access to the Win32 file ID API for some file management work, but Win32 APIs keep coming up now and again. I do need to take a look as some newer C# libraries that Malcolm suggested that may provide pre-packaged access here.
In the past, I’ve run into build issues when combining C# and C++/CLI in the same project. I expect this was setup issues so I’m now looking to take a more serious look at this.
The motion capture work will start out with OpenCV and getting my web cams running with code behind them to process the images. I’m thinking that pre-recording things and then post processing might be a good idea…using a light strobe to synchronize things could simplify time sync as well. Much to consider…
I’ve got boost, zlib and libbz2 built on boojum now. Next step will be to test the installs with a small program or two. Hoping that all went well and I have usable, native, win64 libraries available.
Once those have been checked out I’ll take another run at building the MongoDB drivers…this time on boojum rather than chaos. Boojum has a shorter history and is distinctly less cluttered than chaos so I’m hoping that this just works. Expecting less than that though…I’ll probably need to dig deeper into he CMake configs to get where I want to go. I’ll update as I move forward…now off to lunch though.
We tried doing some motion capture with a kinect 2 today. Results were mixed though less than ideal.
I am thinking of using OpenCV to acquire images and use them to register locations in three-space. I currently have two high quality cameras and a lower quality one to play with…I expect that if things go well I’ll likely pick up a third higher quality camera to work with along with some hard-mounts for them in the basement. Ideally I’d love to be able to code up some decent motion capture functionality using cameras and reference marks on limbs.
A bit of experimentation will be required in order to get there though.
I am wondering whether a faster, lower resolution webcam might do better for this. There are some $20.00 a piece cameras with USB-2 interface out there (Microsoft Lifecam-3000 or Logitech C270) instead of the higher-end, USB-3 autofocus Logitech C930e. Both wondering whether the lower resolution and USB-2 may provide a higher frame rate and whether fixed focus will stay consistent without periodic refocus hits.
I’ve been looking at using MongoDB from C++ and trying to build the MongoDB C and C++ driver code. So far, the build files that CMake has generated on my main development box (targeting Visual Studio 2017) have pulled in cygwin header files and generated various other problems. I don’t really understand why the tool would be getting confused like this, but I want a better understanding of how CMake decides where to look for build files and configuration and how to control that.
I’m sure that having cygwin and visual studio on the same machine should be a workable configuration so I expect there are ways to keep CMake from pulling in the wrong files.
Hoping to get to the point where I can cleanly build these drivers and get them working in some 64 bit visual C++ code.
I’ve tried building this thing using CMake and Visual Studio and CMake seems to keep picking up cygwin headers for Visual Studio builds and I can’t seem to make things better. For now not worth the pain. I’m probably going back to C# with C++/CLI to get this working with C APIs and C# for MongoDB access.
I’m certain that I could get this building with enough effort. The code looks reasonable and I can put together the projects myself. I’m not all that inclined to go there though as I’d have to re-do this every time through. I’m not familiar enough with CMake to try modifying that part of the process.
Ok…not quite giving up. I did find that CMake appears to be adding a cygwin header folder to the projects. If I manually remove this from them the build goes further. The default build configuration appears to be 32 bit which is also an issue for me. Perhaps I’ll do a little more before I completely give up.
Looking at getting a bit of C++ file processing code done for some home sandbox tooling reasons. Grabbed the source code.
Source code asks for boost as a polyfill for C++ 2017 (optional and something else) with MSVC 2017. Grabbed boost. Got to build boost, really would like to build the full kit if I’m going to build it at all. Grabber zlib and libbz2. Now looking at any other dependencies needed to build a reasonably complete boost build locally.
Heading off to see the Captain Marvel movie and will continue with this (along with some presentation prep I need to do this weekend and some overflow work items I need to look into). Should be an interesting if busy weekend…
This is once again reminding me why C# and Java are so much more productive than C++ for many things. In C# I’d nuget the mongodb drivers. Up to date versions of any supporting libraries would be pulled in as needed and I’d be writing code in short order. I love C++ for its power and flexibility, but as a tool to get higher level logic in place it is not holding up well…
Add in building bjam to build boost with and then grabbing CMake to build the mongodb drivers with…making sure that the build processes find the right compiler (I’ve had at least one run where my build grabbed the g++ compiler out of the path even though the visual studio tools were there as well.