The idea was to have a site that contains news items written by the people for the people primarily living and working in Brighton and Hove area.

Key areas of development:

• Plugin Development
• Events
• Social Networking (Twitter/Facebook Connect integration)
• SEO

The GabFire NewsPro theme was used as the basis for style – with considerable modification to allow for required functionality. The BHFP logo was provided by a designer – I was responsible for styling the rest of the site to fit with the logo colour scheme.

Visit the site: http://www.brightonandhovefreepress.co.uk

After waiting for what seemed like an eternity my servos finally arrived in the post!! This has enabled me to put my Quad back together and start working on the gait programming. Here is a quick video to show what I’ve done so far.

Creep Gait

So in the video you can see the robot creeping forward. This type of gait is pretty much the same as what your cat does when it’s creeping up on something … slowly moving one leg at a time while making a stable tripod with the other three legs. I found Oricom Technologies NICO project a really useful resource whilst researching suitable walking patterns for my quad. There is a ton of really useful stuff but most of all the timing diagrams came in really handy. In order to implement the timing I wrote some code to produce trapezoidal curves over the course of a set period of ticks to produce the ‘y’ value for leg lift and ‘z’ value for travel:

        while (tick < period) {
            if (tick >= this.a && tick < this.b) {
                double AX = this.b - this.a;
                double BX = this.amplitude;
                double AB = Math.sqrt((AX * AX) + (BX * BX));
                double angle = Math.asin(BX / AB);
                y = Math.tan(angle) * (tick - a);
            } else if (tick >= this.b && tick < this.c) {
                y = this.amplitude;
            } else if (tick >= this.c && tick < this.d) {
                double CX = this.amplitude;
                double DX = this.c - this.d;
                double CD = Math.sqrt((CX * CX) + (DX * DX));
                double angle = Math.asin( CX / CD);
                y = Math.tan(angle) * (d - tick);
            } else {
                y = 0;
            }
            yield(y);
            tick++;
        }

... where 'a' is the start of the rise, 'b' is the maximum, 'c' is the fall of the rise and 'd' is the end of the rise.

I then used Inverse Kinematics to position the feet where they fall on the timing diagram. I based the IK on the algorithm described on the Learn About Robots website - but had to modify it so it would work in 3D. My next task will be to incorporate the body physics into the IK routine which will allow for tilt and twist (as per the original Phoenix hexapod code). This will be essential as I plan to invest in a gyro/accelerometer for balance compensation at some stage in the future.

Light & Sound

I'm using a small piezo speaker controlled by my arduino for the amazing sound effects! So far there is a few beeps when the robot finishes the setup routine and a repeated beep when it encounters an obstacle. I was also sent a free RGB LED from the good folk at oomlout.co.uk which is responsible for making the robots colourful expressions.

Sensors

The only sensor I have at the moment is a Sharp Infra Red detector. This generates a voltage representing the proximity to an obstacle within a range of about 10-30 cm. I'm not doing anything exciting when an obstacle is encountered at the moment aside from stopping the robot in his tracks and flashing the LED purple. I could perhaps sweep the sensor left to right and decide which way to turn to avoid the object - but I think I plan to use sonar for general obstacle avoidance instead. The IR sensor could then be used to detect any sudden drops in front of me or if the robot has somehow left the floor (ie - stairs or picking it up).

Now I’m “in-between” jobs … I’ve had a few days to put some effort into iPhone development again … and here’s a video of where things stand.

As you can see things have progressed somewhat from the previous installment and it is starting to really look like a playable game. The major new code includes a SkyBox for rendering the backdrop, enemy cubes to shoot at, collision detection to register a hit and also MP3 playback and SFX.

SkyBox

The SkyBox routine is basically as simple as rendering a large cube around the whole scene and applying a texture on the inside. This gives the effect of a nice backdrop whichever way you turn. For the time-being, I’ve used a jpg that I found on t’interwebs that was pre-prepared for use as a SkyBox in CounterStrike.

Collision Detection

There are a total of 10 enemy cubes rendered at any one time. Enemies are randomly scattered in front of you and gradually make there way toward you. If you shoot them, a SFX is played, your score increases by 10 and an explosion routine ensues. Once the explosion is over, the enemy re-spawns randomly somewhere in front of you and again makes it’s way toward you. The explosion routine is basically 10 small cubes which get assigned a random direction vector from the point of impact. These ‘explode’ away for about 100 frames. Well, I think it’s pretty sweet effect! If the enemy gets too close to you a red flash appears on the screen, your score is lowered by 100 and the enemy re-spawns.

The collision detection routine is a basic Bounding Sphere as described here: http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1234.asp. As the bullets move pretty fast, I used the advanced version to pick up collisions if say a bullet passes ‘through’ the bounding sphere over two frames.

Sound

For MP3 playback, I used the audio queue service in the Apple AudioKit framework. At the moment, I start my favourite Rob Hubbard C64 ‘Lightforce’ MP3 playing in the game initialization method. The SFX comprise and explosion and a gunshot wavefile I downloaded from www.freesound.org. These are played using the SoundEffect class found in the BubbleLevel SDK example.

Next time …

My next installment should see a variety of enemies with different routines such as weeving about and firing back, a shield to deflect enemy fire, a level system and possibly some kind of terrain (I’m working on a simple heightmap terrain routine but didn’t get it looking satisfactory for this update).

Anyway -- sorry about the hectic sound if you listened to the video on headphones … oh and I gave the game a work-in-progress title of … “Last Stand”  but it seems there’s already an iPod touch game called that … anyone have any other ideas feel free to leave a comment?

• Video Gallery (YouTube API)
• Google news auto-blogging (Google API)
• RSS feeds
• SEO (Wordpress plugin)

The Swift theme was used as the basis for style – with only slight adjustment needed for colour and branding.

Overall I was amazed how quickly a media-rich site can be built up using CMS/blogging frameworks such as Wordpress. The plethora of community contributed plugins and themes add to the value of such technology – however, for production there will always be the need for adjustments to the majority of free code that is available.

Visit the site: http://www.practicalboating.com

While waiting to save up for my new servos, I decided to put together this “BRAT” biped with parts from my Quad. Here is a video of his first steps …

You can probably see that I had to once again revert to using my trusty meccano for several parts -- namely the feet and the torso. I used two HITEC HS-645MG and one Tower Pro MG995 servos for each of his legs. The SSC32 was used as the controller which is tethered to my laptop to receive servo commands.

There probably won’t be much of a future for this little bot as I’ve just dismantled him so I can recover the bits for my Quad. However, if I ever come across any spare brackets and servos I think I’ll try using my Arduino to send a sequence of moves to the SSC32 instead of using the raw SSC32 sequencer to control him. After that would naturally come the sensors, AI and automation

For now, I hope you enjoy the funky video and the pictures in the gallery below …

The small body footprint of the initial design was causing me problems -- namely the coxa joints were too close together limiting servo movement. I’ve decided to use a piece of trusty meccano to serve as a new body until I can afford to get a custom aluminium body cut for me.

With a larger body I now have room to mount the electronics more effectively and there is also spare room for adding funky stuff such as sensors, head etc in the future.

There is also enough room to mount the battery pack beneath the body using a thick cable tie. This allows me to shift the battery pack forward and back allowing fine adjustment to the center of gravity.

I’ve managed to hack an old fat XBOX controller to use as my new control mechanism. This is a temporary solution until I can afford a blue-tooth receiver. I’ve done this by re-wiring the controller -- using the six wires in the default cable -- one for each of the analog pot data lines (LS horz/vert, RS horz/vert) the other two for power and ground.

Unfortunately, 2 of the 12 cheap Tower-Pro servos have burnt out -- limiting what I can do in terms of development of the gait and body movement. I’ve decided to invest in the superior quality Hi-Tec HS 645MG heavy duty metal gear servos. However, these come at a price so will probably purchase 4 at a time over the next year.

• Dates: January, 2009 – December, 2009
• Technology: Java EE 5, EJB 3.0, JPA, JSF, JQuery, UDDI and Web Services
• Responsibility: Architecting and building the infrastructure

Overview

The Redsquid framework was a Java Enterprise framework that bound together a number of web applications and modules. The core Redsquid application was responsible for rendering the front page content, static wiki content, user management, sitemap and the myAds utilities. Several Redsquid modules were also developed to provide functionality for other sections of the website including Archsearch, Archives and the CMS 2.0. These modules were all built from a JSF/JSP template reference application.

JSPWiki

The JSPWiki engine was used to provide wiki-based management of the static content of the webiste. The two classes providing the core support for use within Redsquid were as follows:

• WikiController – an Application scope bean that contains the JSPWiki engine. Responsible for parsing, saving, deleting, attaching wiki content.
• WikiPageBean – a backing-bean to hold information relating to current page (section, subsection, page, title, content, author)

Apcahe SOLR

Apache SOLR was used to provide faceted classification indexing for various elements used within Redsquid including Site Search, Archsearch and Archives.

Open Blue Dragon

The Open Blue Dragon engine was embedded to provide the rendering ability for ADS ColdFusion based Special Collection interfaces.

Redsquid EJBs

• UserManagerEJB – responsible for maintaining user sessions, creating/updating user details and logging user events.
• FrameworkEJB – responsible for rendering top / tail elements of a Redsquid webapp and managing the Redsquid Sitemap.

Redsquid Components

JSF/JSP taglib to communicate with EJB’s from within modules. The current set of tags are as follows:

• Banner
• Footer
• Menu
• Submenu

Utility tags:

• RSS

Redsquid Filters

• SSOFilter – binds a web application to the Redsquid system as follows:

1. 1. Query the UserManagerEJB and determine the current logged in user based on SSOSESSIONID cookie information.
   2. If not logged in create an anonymous user.
   3. Query the FrameworkEJB and determine the security constraints assigned to the current page request if any.
   4. If User has access permission for page request continue, else redirect to Redsquid login-in page.
   5. Inject user into request to be available for use by web application.

Redsquid session management was handled by creating a cookie called SSOSESSIONID with a path of “/”. The UserManagerEJB then assigns the SSOSESSIONID to a UserBean object that is then persisted to a database.

Visit the BETA version of the site: http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk

• Dates: September 2007 to September 2009
• Technology: Java EE 5, Apache SOLR
• Responsibility: Ontology/Thesauri and data preparation, interface development, integration with Redsquid architecture.

The first aim was to index the ADS database of over one million metadata records describing sites and monuments in the UK, according to three criteria: When, What and Where. The project used the techniques of faceted classification, derived from information science and demonstrated in the Archaeobrowser project, to allow users to easily and intuitively navigate the ‘three-dimensional space’ created by the classification scheme. A map-based interface was developed to allow the spatial dimension to be best explored.

Secondly the project employed natural language processing (NLP) that allowed automated tools to search within documents for terms which are part of known classification schemes, adding them to the faceted index, and providing much deeper and richer access to unpublished archaeological literature.

Thirdly, these tools were also employed to investigate whether it was also possible to identify and harvest index terms within older antiquarian literature as represented by back runs of archaeological journals currently being digitised and being made available online. Natural language processing allowed the recognition and harvesting of place names which were then supplied to existing services (GeoCrossWalk) which could look up the names in an online gazetteer of names and return precise grid coordinates which were added to the index.

Visit the project website: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/archaeotools

This is a quick video to show progress on my Quadruped Q-P1. My SES chassis arrived today Spent a few hours figuring out the best configuration and went ahead and built it up. Just added the servos and electronics to the chassis and this video demostrates the first power on test with some up and down movement and a drunken walk …

As you can see there’s still lots to do -- but I’m happy that it’s most definitely a robot now!

To do:

• Calibrate software with measurements and angles.
• Develop a better control system.
• Implement the rest of the body movement routines -- pitch, roll etc.
• Tidy up robot -- wires, electronics etc.
• Try to figure out a smooth walking gate -- a slow creep would be nice.
• Add some sensors
• Go autonomous!!!

I will post more when I accomplish some of the things on the list -- together with more comprehensive notes and hopefully some sourcecode to share. Not sure when I’m going to find the time over the next few weeks to do much of this as I’m wrapping up ready for a big move down south. But any comments are most welcome -- just use the contact link and drop me a line …

Still not really what you might call a ‘game’ but it’s starting to take shape … I think!

I’ve spent the last few weeks busying myself for the move to Brighton in December so not really had a great deal of time to dedicate to iPhone development. What I have done though is to tidy up my source code quite a bit.

Objective-C is quite a bit different to what I’m used to, so I’ve split the code in two. Basically, all interaction with the iPhone is handled by Objective-C which passes off the update/rendering work to the C++/OpenGL game code: The current state of inputs such as accelerometer and touch is sent to the C++ gameUpdate method which updates the game state. The gameDraw routine just handles OpenGL rendering as you would expect.

Hopefully I can get some more work done as soon as possible … For the third installment, I’m planning to get some kind of enemy to shoot at -- which will involve basic collision detection. Part four will probably be taking stock and sketching out a game concept etc.