Honda U3-X

This is so cool. I'm a big fan of Honda's robotics products. Although this U3-X is not new, I don't know if people actually started using it.

From personal experience I know that Japanese car companies and producers are very strict about ergonomy at factories / production lines. I can almost see people working at factories using this to slide at the same speed with the product they work on, while mounting things and tightening the screws etc.

Oh, I almost forgot! ハッピーニューイヤー to everyone!

Open Natural Interface

I've been working on upper body skeletal tracking with Microsoft Kinect using OpenCV since 5 days now... See the picture. I implemented the algorithm presented in this paper. To let people who are interested in it know, it's not perfect.

It lacks consistency, requires a new computer to be responsive, and can't recognize the arms when they are in front of the body.

Still, hats off to HP people, because what they published is still way better than people who fake skeleton tracking by only doing a simple distance transform and adaptive thresholding, claiming that they do skeleton tracking.

Would you like to know what is perfect?

I just received an email saying that PrimeSense (basically the company that made Microsoft Kinect) already decided to release the alpha version of OpenNI.

I will try it out tomorrow with the Kinect and see how it goes.

I feel defeated and frustrated but very happy at the same time. OpenNI will finally make the interaction work as it should.

Download OpenNI here and PrimeSense Sensor very first version here. See the perfect real full body skeleton tracking with OpenNI here.

iRobot Roomba 550

This robot is doing a great job cleaning the apartment. The place where I'm living is only 700 square feet; 1 bedroom, 1 living room. It's making the cleaning of the apartment way easier.

My roomba is "swiffing" and vacuuming the apartment for me. I think I'll just have to use the wet sweepers manually until I get an iRobot scooba.

There was a lot of electronics and thus cables on the floor in the apartment and the only thing I had to do was, to fix the extension cables to the walls so that the roomba doesn't get tangled. That's it...

Wacom Bamboo Pen on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

I just bought a Wacom Bamboo (Pen only, Model CTL-460) and it's working pretty good on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). I followed 3 simple steps, plugged my tablet in and restarted my computer and that's it.

1. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:doctormo/wacom-plus
2. sudo apt-get update
3. sudo apt-get install wacom-dkms

Special thanks to:

http://frankgroeneveld.nl/2010/04/11/get-wacom-bamboo-fun-pen-working-in-ubuntu-lucid/

I like how it feels like writing on a real paper.

I'm using Xournal to take notes on PDFs and CellWriter for handwriting character recognition, in case you would like to know...

Star Tech DVI to VGA Adapter

Model: DVIVGAFM

Link: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16882203020

Pros: This works exactly as advertised. If the other reviewers would have read a bit about DVI and VGA before they purchased this product then they would not have bought it, and tried to use it for something it was not.
I used this to attach a VGA signal to a DVI-I port on a Polycom Video Conference system because it would NOT accept a Digital signal. If this is the type of application you are looking at then you will be ok.

Cons: This is not a VGA to DVI-D converter. 95-100% of the LCD's out there are DVI-D (D Meaning Digital) so taking a VGA(Analog) Signal and trying to put it into a Digital display will not work. Sorry for the bad news.

Other Thoughts: There are 3 DVI formats. DVI-A(Analog only), DVI-I(Analog & Digital), and DVI-D. You can run a VGA output into a DVI-A device or a DVI-I device as long as it's expecting an analog signal. You cannot run a VGA signal into a Digital display.