Raspberry Pi has arrived!

Hi! I just want to share with all of you what I just got in the mail yesterday! :D

(Click the photo for better resolution in Picasa Photostream)

The world famous Raspberry Pi (model B) has arrived! :) I thought that I would have to wait 1 or 2 months from the order date to get one but happily it only took 2 or 3 days! RS was extremely fast shipping it :)

For the few of you who still haven't heard about the Raspberry Pi, it is a full computer with the size of a credit card (85.60mm x 53.98mm x 17mm)! It's just one of those incredible things that will change the world as we know it :).

Now you may be thinking "Wow, that must cost a lot of money!..." but the size of the board isn't the only small thing about it! It only cost me 40€ with shipping included (from UK to Portugal) :) . Here are the full specs:

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Overlaying a logo in multiple images at once

Hi! Have you ever had the need of placing a logo in multiple images and feared that you could have to do it one by one? Well, fear no more because you don't! You can do it easily using a program called "convert" which is bundled in the Imagemagick software package. You can even resize both, images and logo, by tweaking the parameters.

(Click the photo for better resolution in Picasa Photostream)

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Fixing Digital Calipers

Hi there! In this post I'm going to show you how to fix a digital caliper in a very easy way. In fact, it's so easy that I had serious doubts about it until I tried and saw the results with my own eyes. :P

(Click the photo for better resolution in Picasa Photostream)

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New Publication: Minimalistic Vision-based Cognitive SLAM

Hi! There is a new paper in the Publications section entitled "Minimalistic Vision-based Cognitive SLAM" which was presented today at ICAART 2012 - 4th Int. Conf. on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, in the Special Session on Intelligent Robotics. You can download it in the Publications section or just click here.

Below you can see the presentation that was used. Hope you like it :)

Minimalistic Vision-based Cognitive SLAM on Prezi

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Using Piklab with Tiny PIC Bootloader

Following my previous post on How to Setup a PIC Microcontroller Development Environment in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot With Piklab + SDCC, now I'll show you how to use the Tiny PIC Bootloader with Piklab.

Piklab already has programming interfaces for various programmers, including the Tiny Bootloader. To configure it you must go to "Settings > Configure Programmers... > Tiny Bootloader" and then set your serial port and it's specific settings. In my case, since I use a USB <->Serial TTL Cable (see my previous post on how to make a Low Cost (1,85€) USB to RS232 LVTTL Serial Cable), I configure it with the following data:

• Port Selection: /dev/ttyUSB0
• Specific > Port Speed: 19200
• Specific > Timeout: 300
• Specific > No of Retries: 5

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

After inserting all the correct configurations for your serial connection, Click "Apply" and you're ready to go. To program you just have to go to "Programmer > Program". Do not forget to click the Reset button of your development board to reset the PIC and initiate bootloader when you want to program it.

Easy, right? Yes, but it doesn't always work. :( I had it working when I used Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal and some version of Piklab that I can't remember now but since I upgraded to Oneiric Ocelot and a new version of Piklab, the Tiny Bootloader programming interface stopped working. However, there is another easy way to use Tiny Bootloader with Piklab.

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