Software

Autonomous Naval Robotic Vehicle
The MS0x00 is our first autonomous boat. Currently very limited in its engine power, it serves us as testing and benchmarking platform for hardware and software. We're happy to hear about your ideas, encouragements, source code, experiments or hardware.

Apart from testing the already included components, we will use the MS0x00 as technology carrier and support platform for future projects like the SY0x2A, which will be our first autonomous sailboat.

The highly modular system as sensor platform will not only serve experiments, but also generate public data in the form of e.g. water surveys. We are thinking about high resolution depth charts, chemical or physical property maps, etc. depending on the sensors available.

The ship's central brain is a Pandaboard, which controls a smaller microcontroller system. The rudder and 4 HP main engine are controlled by this microcontroller via a i2c databus.

If you're interested in the project or want to be informed and discuss about recent developments, subscribe to our mailing list.

This project wants to run Ubuntu and Android simultaneously on the PandaBoard ES. I'm exploring ways to do it and I'm looking for coders who wants to join the project. I'm moderately experienced.

Attempting to build a municipal wireless mesh for a WISP in Northern Utah utilising the PandaBoard ES for each gateway and node with the included WLAN chip connected to a 2.4GHz microwave omnidirectional antenna and the new Broadcom 802.11ac chip attached to the board and a 5GHz microwave omnidirectional antenna.

Each node with antennas and second WLAN chip should cost less than $600 and all software will be open source with Ubuntu Server and WING for Linux.

We are currently developing the proof of concept Gateway on our first PandaBoard.

For more information, contact the main developer at bryan@cachetelecom.com

Plan9 is a distributed operating system.(http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/)
To support plan9 on pandaboard and hopefully to work on opengl support for plan9.

how do i get chrome os onto an sd card so that I can boot that on my panda board? I need help asap! Thanks!!!

Porting of Minix3 OS to PandaBoard

MINIX 3 is a project to create a small, highly reliable and functional Unix-like operating system.
This OS is extremely small, with the part that runs in kernel mode under 6000 lines of executable code.
(http://www.minix3.org/)

Project Goal:The goal here is to port Minix3 to pandaboard and developing all necessary drivers and make all the peripherals working.
Minix3 is microkernel Operating system and currently supports the i386 architecture.But some work is still going on to support ARM architecture(Various drivers have been ported but still need a lot of things to develop to get the fully working Minix3 on ARM).

Reflex is a suite of compiler and runtime support for applications to leverage the M3 (ducati) cores on OMAP4.

Low-power processors that are encompassed in an extremely asymmetric architecture promise very high energy-efficiency to frequent, simple computational tasks, most notably sensing. However, programming such an architecture is difficult, especially to numerous third-party developers.

Reflex reliefs developers from dealing with the extremely asymmetric architecture. It not only manages deployment and execution of an application that is distributed over the main and the low-power processors, but also creates a software Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) acorss the distributed code. Essentially, Reflex provides a certain degree of programming transparency.

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~xl6/reflex/

“The FAT file system is a widely used file system for mobile phones and other embedded devices for Multi-media applications such as MP3, video images and recording. This is because of FAT is Desktop PC compatible. But, the FAT file system is susceptible to power-failure causing corruption of file system Meta data and user data. In embedded environment corruption of data is undesirable. This paper implements a mechanism to log all file system operation and then committing to the FAT table and directory entries. This paper modifies the FAT file system pattern on storage device without affecting Windows compatibility. The expected audience for this proposal are Engineers working on storage driver and file systems.The Design of making power-fail safe FAT file system without breaking the compatibility is depicted.”
-Keshava Munegowda (Texas Instruments)

The aim of this project is to implement the Power Fail Safe FAT File Systems for the free and open source linux OS, as suggested by Mr.Keshava Munegowda of Texas Instruments in his Paper titled “Power Fail Safe FAT File Systems”, presented at the Embedded Linux Conference, San Francisco, CA.
The need for failsafe FAT file system:
FAT File system is not power fail safe. This means during file or directory update if there is uncontrolled power loss, then it can cause incorrect file system update.
Files are data of the directories; Typically the File/directory information such as file/directory name, extension, attribute, size, and starting data cluster number are stored in the form of 32 Byte Directory Entries.
Meta Data of the file/directory means – FAT entries specify the cluster chain of the file/directory – 32 Byte Directory Entry
Incorrect Update of File system Meta data corrupts the organization of files/directories and hence creates garbage data.
File system format is typical solution to re use the storage device; but it is not recovery.
In FAT, the update of FAT entries and directory entries should be logged or should be atomic operation.

References:
http://free-electrons.com/pub/video/2011/elc/elc-2011-munegowda-power-fa...
http://elinux.org/images/5/54/Elc2011_munegowda.pdf
http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/embedded-linux-conference/muneg...

Project by:
Team from PES School Of Engineering, Bangalore

Gesture Recognition In Android

Introduction
Gestures are a powerful means of communication among humans. In fact, gesturing is so deeply rooted in our communication that people often continue gesturing when speaking on the telephone. Hand gestures provide a separate complementary modality to speech for expressing ones idea. Information associated with hand gestures in a conversation is degree, discourse structure, spatial and temporal structure. So, a natural interaction between humans and computing devices can be achieved by using hand gestures for communication between them.
The purpose of this project is to provide a highly sophisticated Human Machine Interface.
The camera of the computing device is opened simultaneously with a photo viewer application. Appropriate gestures are made. These gestures are captured by the camera and the type of the gestures and determined by certain algorithms and these gestures are converted into computer understandable commands. These commands are mapped to an application where the intended actions are performed.
This new gesture based approach allows the users to interact with computers through hand postures, being the system adaptable to different light conditions and background. Its efficiency makes it suitable for real-time applications.
Gesturing can be used by developers as a tool for development of a wide range of applications and by typical users who use smart phones and tablets that run Android. People who are physically handicapped will also find this system very useful.
 
System Analysis

The application user performs gestures using hand. A gesture recognition system uses a video camera to capture images of the hand movement. It captures the live stream and extracts that into frames. The gesture-recognition software tracks the moving hand features, it identifies the motion and sends it to the android application. The android application then issues commands to the currently running application.
Operating environment
Hardware requirements
 An evaluation kit with OMAP 4430 processor (PandaBoard).
 A motion sensing camera.
 Ram: 120MB or more.
 Hard disk: Minimum 200MB.

Software requirements
 Android SDK 2.0 or more.
 Android NDK.
 Eclipse IDE.
 JAVA and XML.

Functional requirements
The system is required to perform the following functions.
 Switch on the camera and open an application simultaneously.
 The camera should be on in the video capturing mode and should run in the background as the intended application should remain in display.
 Capture the gestures made by the user of the device by the motion sensing camera present.
 Perform corresponding actions for the appropriate gestures made by the users
Non-functional requirements
 Dalvik virtual machine optimized for android devices.
 Rich development environment including device emulators, tools for debugging, memory and performance profiling, and a plug –in for the Eclipse IDE.
 The system is expected to run on low memory devices also.
 The response time should be very less. i.e., a response action should be performed as and when the gestures are made.
 The system should neglect the inappropriate gestures made by the user.
 Availability of the system depends on availability of the device and its service.
 Documentation provided by the application is simple and easily can be understood.
 Platform compatibility is limited to android devices.
 The product build is scalable.
 Usability by the target user community is given utmost importance.

BY PES School of Engineering,
Bangalore India.

Need to know if anyone could support mobile 7 or win 8 drivers for sensor functions?