ENAC
Hi Everyone, Its been a long time between blogging but I have an excuse. I have moved from Christchurch New Zealand, to ENAC, Toulouse, France. I have now been here for a month, working with the UAV team here.
The work has been really challenging, and I have settled into my routine, working towards some things I would like to demonstrate before I leave. I have spent a few weeks doing a lot of electronics design, updating the paparazzi autopilot board, the IMU, and the GPS boards. Nothing revolutionary, just some evolutionary improvements over the previous hardware.
- Consolidation of the interfaces between the main board, and the IMU+GPS+Radio+Motors. IMU interface is now SPI only, GPS interface is I2C only / UART only.
- Addition of a 24bit ADC on the main board to directly measure the pressure sensor, no more op-amp+calibrate the offset at startup.
- Physically smaller stackable board design.
A lot of this work has been done with an eye towards moving some of the off-board vision processing I am currently doing onto the flying aircraft. I have been experimenting with the beagleboard, and one of the goals of the hardware refactoring above is to free up an interface to push data between the beagleboard and the flight controller. Probably I2C or UART, I am not sure yet.
Can anyone get hold of a Gumstix Overo for me?
I am hoping to be able to demonstrate some biomimetic control responses from my onboard vision system, using image motion information. I also hope to demonstrate hybrid external position estimation system using an off aircraft 3d vision system aided (kalman estimator) by on-board IMU .
Plenty of work for me ahead.
Ubuntu
I finally managed to upgrade to the Ubuntu Intrepid beta. I was pleased to see that it contained all sorts of productivity improvements;
- I used to waste about an hour a day keeping up with the US election news on Youtube, watching Sarah Palin insult the intelligence of all mammals on the planet with her existence. Intrepid fixed this for me by removing the feature where sound embedded in flash videos was played through the soundcard of my computer. Phew, thats a relief. I guess I will just need to go and watch Fargo instead.
- Keeping in contact with my family via Skype was also a PITA, luckily Intrepid removed the ability for me to do that too, no sound to hear my parents nag me, and no video which would let them see me all hung over and tired.
Im sure everyone reading this is aware of that feeling when you go and use a friends brand new $2000 Windows Vista computer. The way it runs so slowly with 2GHz of processing power at its disposal, crashes all the time and takes 6 minutes to turn on. It is brand new FFS. When I am in that situation it makes me feel like the entire engineering profession has failed me.
I got that feeling with Ubuntu this week.
Conduit
Unfortunately I have not been able to work on Conduit very much over the last month, and it appears that no one else seems to have had the time to either. This upgrade pain has destroyed my motivation, and I only just recovered from the previous month, where approximately 14,000 people reminded me that the Conduit GUI made them vomit in their mouth. Some positive re-inforcement (and some help hacking) would be a welcome change about now.
You did note in your little rant that it’s “Ubuntu Intrepid beta”.
Hmmm, I dunno, I think I might be more envious of the quad-copter.
–Phil.
P.S. And, yay, you can do it!
(Positive reinforcement but alas no help hacking.)
Hmm…what do Flash and Skype have in common? Oh! They’re closed-source programs that do funky things with ALSA. It is fairly well-known that they don’t play nice with PulseAudio. Also, as hads noted, this is a beta, and Ubuntu doesn’t use Google’s definition of “beta”. If you absolutely must have functional closed-source applications, use the stable version or be prepared to reinstall it. As a workaround, you could try disabling PulseAudio.
Installing libflashsupport will fix Flash sound by rerouting it through PulseAudio.
As for Skype, you’ll need to go to the Options –> Sound Devices, and fix the outputs. They’re all set for Default, which sadly is not a reasonably default.
Do…
Sound Out –> Pulse
Ring –> Pulse
For Sound In, you’ll need to choose your actual audio device, not Pulse and not Default. (On my laptop, it’s HDA Intel, for example). There are two entries for every device — a ‘hw’ entry and a ‘plughw’ entry. Don’t know the difference, but HDA Intel (hw) works fine for me.
And for setting the microphone volume, that’s all ALSA’s fault for having the worst volume controls known to man (I’ve got like five different collections of volume controls.) You know the drill, System - Preferences - Volume Control (or Sound - Volume Control). Every device has two Capture sub-devices entries in ALSA: PCM and Monitor Source. Make sure both aren’t muted.
You might need to turn on the Microphone Boost of your ALSA Mixer (main device). I’m not sure why you need it, but it helps.
Once all that is done, Skype will work fine, and even very happily automatically adjust your microphone in-volume (in a way visible to the PulseAudio Input Device panel, even).
Whats to envy? Work gave me 4 Dell 30″ monitors and now synergy shares a single mouse / keyboard with them:
http://www.digitalprognosis.com/pics/my-work-setup.jpg
Nice setup though!
If it helps, I’m happy to state with confidence that Conduit has definitely never - not *once* - made me vomit in my mouth. Not even a little bit.
Hey John,
Funny to see that the replies you got so far where mostly to bash you about being cynical about upgrading to Ubuntu unstable, and not about thanking you for conduit.
I know exactly what you feel about Conduit: you are working in addition to your day work, doing most probably long hours that are not always fun, and people are prompt to tell you what doesn’t suit them, but seldom thank, and even less seldom help. Well let me tell you that: if you have 14 000 people complaining about your software, it means they care about it, even though they won’t admit it.
Synchronization between devices is becoming a major deal as the number of devices people have grow, and as the amount of import information they put on them also grows. All I can say is keep the good work up. You’ll get little thanks although you’ll have gazillions of users. But you probably know yourself why what you are doing is important. And every once in a while you go out with people who understand, and it is really nice.
By the way, if you come by Paris and want to go out for a beer, send me an e-mail, I’ll be happy to shout you one (to use a kiwi expression).
@hads: I usually upgrade Ubuntu versions around the last alpha, first beta. You know, because I am an actual developer of linux software who cares about my users and wants to test if my software works there. Ubuntu has really dropped the ball the last two releases with their integration of PulseAudio. Other distributions seem to have managed to make the transition semi painless, but not Ubuntu. But hey, who am I kidding, you are just another anonymous fanboy with a fake email address, you will never see this reply.
@follower: I have some shiny demos for TVIC when I get back to NZ!
@Alex: For the moment I have disabled PulseAudio and installed esound as per http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?s=2562f9cdf31d4db2dc5cf734e7d37afb&t=885437
@Judson: Thanks for your help. I noticed an increase in Firefox crashes when I last used libflashsupport. Is this still the recommened method with Flash 10? I did play with the settings in Skype a little bit but didnt try the input source you suggested.
@Jeff: You make me jealous
@Adam,Gael: Thanks for the support guys.
Please don’t let you get down about Conduit.
I think the program is great, and the UI does its job very well.
As long as “someone” doesn’t provide a better idea, just leave it as it is
I could certainly be wrong, but I was never aware there was another way to get Flash+PulseAudio to work. I think libflashsupport is your only shot.
For what it’s worth, with Flash 10 I haven’t noticed very much instability, and it’s even been kinda pleasant.
John: Flash 10 should work with Pulse directly, no libflashsupport needed. In fact libflashsupport is likely to make it worse. Just Flash 10 + Pulse is the setup I’m currently using, no libflashsupport. It works.
I apologize and stand corrected. I didn’t realize that Flash 10 was only at prerelease stage; I thought it was the current version.
I’m still running version 9, so Adam I suppose is right about 10 and libflashsupport is no longer needed.
Yesterday I tried conduit for the first time. I wanted to sync my vimrc between my laptop and my desktop. I dragged a file provider thingy and a network thingy and then spent two minutes trying to find a configuration dialog for the network thingy. Then I thought: “No, it wouldn’t be, would it?”. And hesitantly turned on my desktop PC and started conduit. Lo and behold, my laptop automagically appeared in the list of devices and I could sync it to my desktop.
Long story short: You rock. I have fairly refined taste-buds and could find no traces of vomit in my mouth whatsoever.
You might also wish to read this article about the usefulness of user reports: http://arvindn.livejournal.com/96382.html
I know this might sound annoying, but, you have submitted bug reports, right? I mean, that’s the point of running a beta release of any software product.
> @follower: I have some shiny demos for TVIC when I get back to NZ!
w00t, look forward to it.
–Phil.
@Flimm: The two bugs I described, roughly Flash+PulseAudio sucks, and Skype+PulseAudio sucks are very well reported in Ubuntu allready!
Hi,
Noticed that you are doing project which involves adding IMU data to GPS data. I am doing something very similar (but the device is to be worn on pedestrian - not UAV). Can you please point me in the right direction — given a starting location (long, lat), how can I add imu data (change in meters), in order to get a new (long, lat)? Thank you in advance for any response.
Dude, I actually LIKE the Conduit interface. I mean, really, hooking wires up to my stuff? Makes sense to me…(being completely serious.)
And yea, don’t get discouraged. In my darkest hours when I’m seriously tempted to suffer through Vista’s downsides to get over some of Linux’s humps, Conduit reminds me of why I stay.
If it helps balance things out: what Conduit does, and how it works, makes me cum in my pants. Metaphorically, of course.
Weird that Intrepid Ibex fixed my problems with Flash and PulseAudio (maybe it’s better since getting to release candidate). I take your point about the transition to PulseAudio generally being a friggin’ abortion though.
Mate, just use Debian. Lenny is really stable, and pulse is not installed by default. I migrated from Ubuntu, which introduced me to pulse. They say that pulseaudio is a step forward, so I kept it after installing Debian. For about four weeks. Skype without pulse on my Toshiba laptop is brilliant, almost as good as my wife’s macbook. I tried to get pulseaudio working well, but in some discussions from upstream I learned that the next release will be the “no-stutter” release, which lead me to some conclusions about the current release.
Without pulse, everything just works. Perfectly. No stutters, no crashes. Sorry, this is a rant too, but the hours I lost … Of course, you should be able to remove pulse from Ubuntu. On its own, this is not enough reason to go to Debian.
The learning curve for Debian is higher than Ubuntu, but it pays back because it just works. Ubuntu is Debian with pretty config files, which is great, but unfortunately for your money you also get a manic rush to package Debian unstable + experimental, and breakage of Debian’s modularity (try adding the Intrepid kernel package to Hardy. Now try adding Debian’s unstable kernel package to lenny. With Ubuntu, upgrading is basically all or nothing).
And only mad dogs and Englishmen would use Ubuntu beta on a machine that you need to rely on. My experience of Ubuntu is that even long term support releases are beta-ish, so when Ubuntu calls something a beta, I’m thinking it’s something you should run only in a virtual machine.
Good luck.
The be-all and end-all of sound fixes for Intrepid maybe, at least that’s what I’m hoping.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=843012
Hi, good post. I have been wondering about this issue,so thanks for posting. I’ll definitely be coming back to your site.
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