March 25, 2005
Links: Wikis and Color Quantization
I recently installed PmWiki for the course on phenomenology I am assisting with next quarter. I am also toying with the idea of switching research notes over to this format. Installation is easy: you only need a webserver with PHP 4.1+; all content is stored in a flat file so no database system is required.
For d.tools, I managed to write a small C# app that loads .BMP files from harddrive and transfers them to the ezLCD01 display. Since the ezLCD firmware only supports 256 colors (3bit red, 3bit green, 2bit blue), I need a good color reduction algorithm. Some inital links on that topic:
http://homepages.borland.com/efg2lab/Library/Delphi/Graphics/Color.htm
http://www.efg2.com/Lab/Library/Color/AndComputers.htm
March 22, 2005
Audio field recording links
Information on microphones, recorders, and other gear for field recording:
http://www.phonography.org/gear.htm
http://www.vermontfolklifecenter.org/res_audioequip.htm
http://www.bl.uk/collections/sound-archive/wiltrain.html
Some products to look at:
Korg ToneWorks Pandora PX4R (musiciansfriend.com)
Audio Technica AT822 microphone (audiotechnica.com)
Sony ECM-MS957 (froogle)
B&H seems to have a good selection.
March 21, 2005
Mounting an ISO as a drive in WinXP
Two tools that allow you to mount a CD-ROM ISO image as a drive under Windows:
Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel (free, published by Microsoft?)
Daemon Tools (free for private use)
March 20, 2005
COM Port Programming under Windows
I received an ezLCD01 2.7" color display in the mail last week and am now trying to figure out how to control it. The controller board has an Atmel ATMega128L that drives the display through high-level commands (e.g., line, text, put_bitmap) received on a serial (RS232) or USB port. My current setup connects to it via a 115200b serial connection.
Several options exist for serial port communication in C#. There are a number of commercial libraries which I did not try out. On the freebie side, a tutorial at devhood.com cover the basics of using a COM object from Visual Studio 6.0.
Another tutorial for C# mentions the System.IO.Ports package for .NET 2.0. This package will be available for Visual Studio .NET 2005 but is NOT part of the current 2003 version.
Finally, there is a Sourceforge project called SerialPortNet which provides the .NET 2.0 functionality for .NET 1.1. (The project also makes use of the NUnit unit-testing framework which I installed.) Compiling from the CVS sources was a snap and I was able to put together a simple test app that sends strings to COM1 in no time.
In Java, the javax.comm package supports serial I/O.
A third option would be to open /dev/ttyS0 using a gcc/Cygwin setup, at the cose of nice development environments.
To troubleshoot my connections I am using a trial version of Aggsoft's Adanced Serial Port Monitor which has a snooping mode.
March 10, 2005
More on LCD displays
HSC has very cheap 3.5" color LCDs for sale.
SCU has a page on connecting the display to an ARM microprocessor board. (I wonder if Pascal Stang is involved with this project).