Recently, I've been looking into robotics and I've become interested in trying to make a robot of my own. It woulde be a simple one but I want it to be capable of face and speech recognition at least.
I've found a set called EZ-Robots that comes with face/speech recognition libraries already, but thought that .NET gadgeteer would be better (more simple, scalable...). So far, I haven't tried any programming yet, I still need to decide which set to buy (which way to go).
I am an experienced programmer, but absolute beginner in harware stuff.
My vision is that I focus mostly on software and build only basic, simple hardware. I want to interact with robot so he must recognize me (or at least tell human from other objects). I would like to speak to it, give it command etc. I live in Czech Repubic and there isn't much software available for voice recognition in my language. If I could record a command and he would recognize it, that's enough.
It is more of a hobby matter :).
For any advice, I would be grateful.
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My company is planning to build a simulation tool for processing (beverage) and we're currently looking at a half-baked system written in Xojo. I had personally never heard of this language and would appreciate it if anyone could give a quick assessment.
We have no in-house Xojo competence at all and are of course reluctant to bring in a system that would require a big investment in know-how for just one system.
So, we're now looking at our options: Port it to a language we're good at (C# or Java) or continue development in Xojo while building internal skills for the language.
So, what are the big pro's and con's with Xojo?
Cheers
Xojo has been around since the late 1990s, then named RealBasic. Its strength lies in its ability to make native looking and behaving apps for many platforms, mainly OS X but also Win and even Linux. The dev community is fairly small, though. But the company managed to stay in business all this time and isn't looking to end it any time soon.
The language is fairly simple and easy to learn, using long known concepts (its design was based on Visual Basic).
Knowing Java, it should be easy to grasp the language. The bigger hurdle is probably getting familiar with its libary. Many things are much simpler to accomplish in Xojo vs Java, though.
Call me lazy, but that's what I like about Xojo. I also program ObjC in Xcode, but for those little tools that just need to work quickly, Xojo is superior for whipping out a program quickly that that has a decent UI and works on many platforms with little to no tweaks.
If you need x-platform support, give it a try, for sure. If you only need the app to run on a single platform, and if you have skills with other dev systems, I'd advise against starting out with Xojo, to avoid the risks you get when going with such a small company that's offering closed-source software.
In your particular case where you have already a half-working solution, I suggest you take a few days to familiarize yourself to get a feeling for it (you can use Xojo for free as long as you don't build standalone apps with it). It's overall fairly stable and I'm still using a 3-year old version most of the time to develop and build my apps. So, even if Xojo should go out of business suddenly, I'd not be too worried. As long as you stick with the simple functionality (e.g. not use unique features such as XojoScript), you can still convert the app to another language later, but there's also a fair chance you never have to.
If you are looking for someone to take a look at your Xojo project I'd recommend posting on the Xojo Find A Developer page at http://www.xojo.com/support/consultants.php where all Pro developers get it. The consultants that want to talk to you about it will then contact you. (Full disclosure: we, BKeeney Software, are on the list and would be happy to help you figure it all out).
I am currently doing my Honours in Computer Science and taking Artificial Intelligence as a subject. As part of completing the subject I have to develop my own basic intelligent agent.
I have yet to rap my head around what I actually have to do for this project. I am not the most technically gifted programmer and I have no idea of what to do or where to start
Could someone please point me in the right direction as to where to start learning how to develop an Intelligent Agent as well as any possible idea's of what to actually do for a project?
Any VB.net references would be appreciated as well.(I know it's not the best language to develop an IA with, but due to my time constraints this is the programming language I 'feel' most comfortable with)
Thanx in advance
Well, it depends on how you define an agents. For instance a multi-agent simulation (e.g., real time systems with parallel individuals) is inherently different from agent-based modeling (usually a simulation following the discrete time, discrete event paradigms).
From your comments, I think the latter is what you are searching for. In computer science, we have quite a lot of things written already, see the list of available ABM simulation platforms/environments yourself.
I would recommend using Repast (one of the most popular environments, its previous versions also supported VisualBasic what you were searching for), or either NetLogo or Fables (they are both domain-specific languages to do ABM).
To get an overview about ABM, here is a tutorial I wrote about a widely known toy model.
Anyone knows of a tool like GameSalad for PC in which you don't have to write scripts or anything but just use the existing behaviors and events to create custom game logic?
Thanks
If you are looking for a cross platform game constructor you might want to try Flowlab, which runs in a web browser.
Construct from Scirra is a free, open-source, drag and drop, game engine. There is however talk of them making a paid version of Construct in the future.
I've only used Construct once, so I don't know that much about it, but i do know a lot about GameMaker.
As long as your not trying to do something complicated like a 3D or MMO game, (both of which GameMaker supports, but with major limitarions) I would recommend you use it, especially if your just starting out. GameMaker is one of the easiest if not the easiest programming language to learn. It also teaches good programming skills. As I mentioned before GameMaker uses drag and drop so you can easily transition from the D&D to the progeamming aspect of GameMaker.
As mentioned in the above posts RPG Maker is another popular tool , but it's limited to RPG games, and doesn't allow you to easily transition to an actual programming language. It's also very restrictive in what you can do.
When you feel like getting into some more advanced gaming engines, Blender is a great tool to use for creating 3D games. It can also be used to create 3D modules and has the ability to create animated movies.
I've never used PyGames before, but Python is a easy language to learn, and would probably be the best way to transition from a D&D program to a programming language.
*GameMaker can be extended in functionality with DLLs and Blender can be extended with Python.
So to summarize, GameMaker is a great tool for creating Games. RPG Maker and Construct are other possibilities, but from my view there not as good as GameMaker. when your ready to get out of Drag&Drop gaming engines Blender, PyGames, and GML(Game Maker Language - the advanced part of the GameMaker product) are all great resources.
PlayBits has an interface similar to GameSalad and makes games for Windows Phone 7, using your PC. Here's the link: http://www.playbits.com/?page_id=171
RPG maker here you can find it is a light weight game engine but if you are clever you can make really good apps
In terms of game development for iOS and Mobile development using the Windows platforms you might want to have a look at these two:
http://www.giderosmobile.com
and
http://www.stencyl.com/
Although I haven't, yet, used the Gideros solution, it's targeted specifically for Mobile platform development and has what looks to be a tidy UI with code folding and syntax coloring if you're comfortable with a traditional coding approach.
Stencyl is an interesting product, it sits beyond the capabilities of Gamesalad and uses a blocks metaphor for programming which works well.
Personally, I wouldn't use any tool that has a single platform for output, which is why I stopped using Gamemaker (I'm aware it now has a Macintosh client, but the quality of the application has been terrible and their player isn't much good either.)
If you're looking for GameSalad for Windows you might want to check out our HTML5 game engine Construct 2 which functions in a similar way.
It's also got an event based system with no programming required, and there's an extensive free edition available for you to try out as well.
You can use Yoyo Game's GameMaker:Studio also.
GameMaker is one such tool.
There is also The 3d Gamemaker, by the same people who make other rapid-game-development tools like DarkBasic.
What are the most valuable parts of Computer Science studies for Cocoa developers?
Another way I might word this question is:
If I’m not going to go to school for Computer Science but want to be a developer working primarily with Cocoa, what are the things I should make sure I learn that I otherwise might miss by being self-taught, and be worse off for it.
Update: Replaced the term "professional Cocoa developer" with "developer primarily working with Cocoa", in hopes that the intent of my question is somehow clearer.
To be clear, I've been working with Cocoa for two years and am comfortable with Objective-C and the Cocoa frameworks, as well as Cocoa design patterns and the developer toolset, and thus am for the most part fluent with the Mac and iPhone platforms. But I have wondered whether I'm missing important CS or SE elements due to being self taught/no formal training, and not coming from other languages or platforms.
This question is for Cocoa developers.
There are many, but things that come to mind imediatly
-Design Patterns (the Cocoa framework relies on many Design Patterns, if you follow them it will make your life very easy, most obvious example is MVC)
-Algorithms and Data structures(this applies to any framework really)
-Memory Management (No garbage collection on the iphone!)
I would question whether there's really such a thing as a "professional Cocoa developer" (from a philosophical standpoint), or if you would want to be one. There's "professional developer", who may work with Cocoa primarily. A professional developer is language-agnostic and as such has a solid career ahead of him/her. A language- or platform-specific hacker has very limited usefulness.
The question to ask is do you want to be a developer or not? If there aren't any good Cocoa jobs available at the moment, or Cocoa is replaced by something newer and better and very different, a professional developer changes gears and follows. Are you OK with that?
If so, a computer science degree definitely cannot hurt. If not, you should probably not put all your eggs in the Cocoa basket and pursue a non-CS degree.
In addition to what's been pointed out already, I highly recommend reading "The Pragmatic Programmer". It contains a wealth of information on how to write software, how to manage projects, and how to develop your career, advice that goes well beyond the documentation you look at every day in Xcode. Some of the topics they cover are ones that you might have been exposed to during a standard computer science degree.
"Professional" is a relative term.. but anyways, this is what i had to go through so that i could easily learn a new language anytime i want and also master it:
started by learning a simple console language (pascal or c++, but i consider pascal being simpler than c/c++), then learned another language just to see if i can do it (c++)
i learned a lot of algorithms and data structures, until i was able to recreate them and even create my own
i moved to a visual approach on programming with Visual Basic 6 (another simple one to start with), and tried to copy lots of apps just to see if i can do it
i learned about Object-Oriented Programming and finished by mastering it
from this step on, learning a new language was like a hobby, like playing!
then i wanted to learn some different topics, like design patterns, multithreading, and so on..
moved from windows to mac, and started learning objective-c: because i already knew lots of languages, it took me 5 days to learn objective-c, and yes, i took breaks like any human being :P
after i learned obj-c, i now had to learn cocoa... this one took me a lot of time to learn, and i still don't know it all.. but i do know most of it :D
What are the most valuable parts of Computer Science studies for Cocoa developers?
Learn that it's important to understand the differences between languages, not learning a particular language.
Are you writing numerical method solvers with a Cocoa frontend? You'll want to take numerical methods. Writing a 3-D plugin with a Cocoa UI? Better learn about Catmull-Rom splines.
A good understanding of computer graphics is required if you want to make some good looking animations :)
I'm a software developer. I've been programming in high level languages for a few years.
I would like to know, how to take my first step into programming hardware. Not something crazy complicated, but maybe some ordinary CE device? Assuming I don't need to put the PCB together with varies components, but just to program the tiny cpu?
How low-level do I have to go? ASM? C? manipulating registers? or are the dev kit quite high level now? Is Java even in the picture? OO coding in hardware, is that even a dream or a reality? Need a reality check.
I also tend to learn better with books or sites that are written in a tutorial format. Something that guides the way for me from something simple to something more complex. Any recommendations? Maybe something that will introduce me to the popular hardware (microprocessor/micro-controller) available today?
Much appreciated, thank you everyone.
The actual programming isn't a big deal. The frustrating, annoying part is getting your development environment setup and getting the tools working. Once you've done that, you're half done.
I'd suggest buying a development kit ('dev kit') that has USB built in and works with your chosen OS. Get that working, and you're halfway done.
If you're missing the knowledge, it's also important to know the basics of how a processor works. You'll be programming at a much lower level than any other programming, so the fundamentals are a bit more important.
If you know C then it's only a matter of learnig the tool chain steps to download the code.
Easy place to start (cheap hardware/software) http://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/HomePage
I have been coding in C both as a hobby and professionally for about 16 years now, but always for userland code (i.e., programs, not kernel or drivers). Most of my jobs involved high level languages (I have done a lot of Perl and Ruby programming, with the occasional Java, Python and shell scripting in between). I did develop a lot for MS-DOS (which was probably as close to bare-metal programming as you would get on a x86 machine), but my last job involved 5 years of Perl and Ruby on Rails web development.
That being said, I am now a senior engineer for embedded Linux development, developing drivers (including an emulator for a legacy simple microprocessor inside a kernel module) for uClinux on the Blackfin platform. There are times when my inexperience with hardware related issues (i.e., floating signal levels due to lack of a pull-up/pull-down on a pin) did get in the way, but it has been mostly a highly enjoyable and thrilling experience. As stated by others, understanding your tools is essential -- for uClinux, that meant the GNU Toolchain, which fortunately I was already familiar with due to my background on FOSS technologies.
The Blackfin is hardly an entry-level microprocessor (in particular, it does not have a MMU, which has some relevant effects on Linux development), but as already stated, you can buy a Beagleboard for around US$200 with all required accessories and start messing around with it in just a few days. If you want something simpler, there are many Arduino options out there, though if you have some real development experience under your belt I believe you will find their development environment a little limiting (I know I did).
After you get comfortable with your tools you might want to spend some money on an in-circuit emulator (or ICE). These are usually highly platform specific (both in terms of target architecture and development environment), but are highly recommended for anything beyond the usual blink-LEDs-after-button-press examples I am sure you will quickly outgrow.
In few months you will find yourself building custom images for hackable customer devices using Buildroot and having a lot of fun. All I can say is, go for it, it's highly addictive and not particularly expensive to do nowadays.
Also something to look into is the Microsoft Robotics Studio. They support quite a lot of hardware boards (including CE), and with it is is fairly easy to get a small robot up and running. And what's more cool a project to learn embedded programming?
It all integrates nicely in Visual Studio (express) and their devkit also comes with a free express edition.
Get a beagleboard. Cheap, lots of users (community support will be key), many OS options. http://beagleboard.org/
Well, if you want to know what you're doing, you need to understand the assembly language of the processor and the processor's architecture.
You will need to learn C to be competent in microcontrollers. There is no way around that.
There are some VM-level languages on embedded systems. I see the Java out-of-memory exception from time to time on my cell phone(which also helps to give me a strong opinion on VM-level embedded languages).
The ARM has some support for hardware-level Java bytecodes.
Your best bet is to pick up something like the PIC or the Atmel chips and begin hacking with them.
If you want to do it with your existing hardware, get a hypervisor for your PC and begin writing a basic kernel.