Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 2 years ago.
Improve this question
I need to read the user's fingerprint from my application.
What I really want is a simple SDK that works with a lot of inexpensive fingerprint readers but I can deal with something that works only with one specific model if that model is cheap and available worldwide.
And it has to be royalty-free, I can pay for a development license but if I have to pay for each installation I just can't use it.
What I'm doing has no relation to login or encryption, so the software included with the reader will probably be useless to me.
There is no standard API for reading fingerprint data as far as I'm aware since it is a fairly new field and there's no standard way of doing it. Each manufacturer will provide their own API for reading the hardware. The API could just be IO specification to the hardware and there's no library whatsoever, which makes things a bit trickier. This is down to two factors. The first is that finger print readers are used in many applications - custom hardware, embedded systems through to PC authentication and beyond. Providing software for all those different systems would not be viable from the manufacturers point of view. Secondly, each manufacturer uses a different approach to reading and processing the captured images which would make a common API problematic.
It's an old question, but I bumped into it while researching the topic.
I did find a free library for Linux - libfprint
Digitalpersona has a free SDKs both for windows and linux.
http://www.digitalpersona.com/products/developer.php
I dont know if there are costs for deploying with their SDKs.
(Actually it appears they don't charge per machine/user licensing.)
Did you take a look at the BioAPI consortium site? There's a library for linux over at Google code.
There's also libchipcard, but it doesn't mention fingerprint readers, only smart cards.
Hope that helps.
Symbol has an api for their MC75 handheld devices:
http://support.symbol.com/support/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=12364&sliceId=&dialogID=104336066&stateId=1%200%20104330426
Of course, it only works for their Windows Mobile 6 MC75 devices.
See Windows Biometric Framework.
Related
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 4 years ago.
Improve this question
There is WNS for Windows 8, Urban AirShip for Android and iOS devices but I can't seem to find an API for push notifications on Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7.
Is there an API for these OS's?
If not, why isn't there? Is there a reason or is it just that no one want to invest in "hacky" technology for "old" operating systems?
I've never seen any natively supported push APIs for these operating systems, no. As Robert Harvey said there in a comment, the benefit likely simply does not outweigh the cost. People using those operating systems probably aren't overly invested in the next wave of technology, so nobody bothers putting in push notifications, which weren't really relevant on most desktop machines until Windows 8 was already released anyway. As for why they won't retroactively add it as an update, that's easy: money. If people want the new and exciting technologies of tomorrow, with push notifications and all, they have to buy Windows 8. Microsoft gains nothing by adding features like that into old operating systems.
But since I imagine you're asking this for a reason, I'm sure you could write a Windows Service with--ha--"relative ease" that would accept notifications (even, if you're feeling techy, through SignalR) and relay them out through the notification bar on those operating systems.
That could actually be a pretty cool piece of open source software to put out there: something that lets you set up push channels easily on those operating systems that will almost definitely never receive support from Microsoft for such behaviors.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
I have an app and would like to know if there is any kind of API for a service similar to Shazam where I can hold my phone up to a music source and be told of the song guess? It could work well with my app, but I can't find anything about Shazam API and I don't know any other service that does what I want (but am open to anything)
The free and open source alternative is Echo Nest / Echo Print. They claim to have a database of 30 million songs and 1.5 million artists, and they provide free access for both commercial and non-commercial use. Probably worth checking out!
Update: here's the Echo Nest iOS library
ACRCloud supports Music/Audio search engine and SDK for iOS/Android/Linux, which could be downloaded after registration (http://console.acrcloud.com/signup).
There are three tiers:
Free tier, for demo/prototyping
Accelerating tier, for startups
Commercial tier
Audio recognition services are provided by a number of companies, many of which license these services for a fee. None are cheap, requiring significant repositories of signatures / music catalogs and computational capacity. Check out the folks who own the technology used by Shazam - Landmark Digital Services, the makers of Soundhound - Midomi, or Gracenote's MusicID. There are others, but these are probably three of the biggest players currently.
UPDATE (11/8/12): To note, Shazam apparently has reacquired the rights to the recognition technology and Landmark Digital is now defunct. Also, as noted in another answer, Echonest now provides a recognition technology, Echoprint, that for some uses appears to be free.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 6 years ago.
Improve this question
I want to develop some HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layers) to use in PIC32 and some ARM.
Basically I want to make some code that's usually available on a OS, like generic pin access, communication libraries, device I/O, etc.
Could you advise me with good books/websites?
I'll start with one that I've found a few weeks ago: http://www.kalinskyassociates.com/OnLineLearning.html
Thanks
Have you tried looking at some implementations?
eCos has a HAL, which has some documentation to go along with it.
eLua also has a HAL that has grown around it to support the platforms it runs on (ARM, AVR32, etc..), check the architecture information and the "Platform Interface" and "Generic Modules" menus. If you strip out the Lua, eLua is essentially a HAL.
There are likely other examples as well, but I'd recommend looking at living examples of cross-platform and non-cross-platform hardware APIs. Also, if/when you go and start putting together interfaces, make sure to examine individual platform peripheral implementations before nailing down the API. You will find that certain interaction models are commonly supported across many platforms, and others are very platform specific. If your API assumes functionality will always be available, it will be difficult to port to platforms that either have lacking or non-existent support for the functionality you want. Sometimes you may be able to work around this in software with simple solutions, other times you may find it is either impossible or horribly complicated to make behavior consistent across platforms.
You can try also looking at the OSEK interface documents. The standard does a good job of abstracting accesses to most commonly used peripherals. However, bear in mind that this is only a spec and you'd have to work out all implementation details.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
How did they implement text to speech (TTS)? Is there an open, free API for TTS synthesis? I know about Google Translate, but the license is not clear to me (another issue is that they block a request if it contains a referrer). Any idea?
Majdron,
I'm a lead developer at Quizlet. We're using a combination of our own technology and licensing/purchasing TTS software from several different companies.
There are some open source TTS engines/voices:
http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/
http://www.babelfish.org/tts-free.htm
http://espeak.sourceforge.net/
http://freetts.sourceforge.net/docs/index.php
http://mary.dfki.de/
Good luck!
The voices sound exactly the same as http://www.neospeech.com. Also, their list of languages match exactly.
It's not free, you have to license it.
Google has just introduced browser-based access to its speech engine through HTML5.
http://slides.html5rocks.com/#speech-input
To get this page to work, I launched the Chromium browser as follows in Ubuntu:
$ chromium-browser --enable-speech-input
I'm not sure if this works in other operating systems.
Another interesting project is WAMI from MIT:
http://wami.csail.mit.edu
I don't know which specific engine Quizlet are using, but assuming they are using a free service then it might be TTS-API (http://tts-api.com/) which was recently featured on Hacker News.
From what I know is the only "free-to-use" TTS web-API out there. Please comment below if I'm wrong - I'd love to find similar free services. There are a lot of pay only services out there but very very few truly free ones.
Since finding out about TTS-API on HN I've successfully used it in a recent app project. Since the TTS is only a HTTP fetch away I was able to quickly integrate it in both the iOS and Android versions of my app. The service appears to be very quick, so no complaints so far :-)
Nobody gave the right answer. They have their own TTS engine that is connected to a single file located at http://quizlet.com/tts/en.mp3 the file takes arguments with it so the url http://quizlet.com/tts/en.mp3?v=14&b=QXJlYSBvZiBwYXJhbGxlbG9ncmFt&s=m5dx52Q. says "Area of parallelogram" thanks the first base64 string labeled b. I have not discovered what v or s are used for but I know they are essential for making the file speak. I will do more research and get back to this answer.
jj b is correct. The core engine of Quizlet's speech features is Neospeech, and uses Neospeech's VTML (VoiceText [TM] Markup Language) exactly, as far as I can tell.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 5 years ago.
Improve this question
This weekend I installed Windows 7 (brilliant!) and there I found this genious tool called Problem Steps Recorder. Apparently a tool that came with the beta bug reporting tool thingy.
I am currently trying to document some application usages for other developers. (In this exact case, how to get Showplan XML Statistics in SQL Profiler and some basic usage of Database Engine Tuning Advisor). And I was thinking that a tool like that Problem Steps Recorder with be perfect for this! Only problem is that it is only in windows 7 (?) and the output is an mht file which also contains some general bug issue text etc...
Anyways, does anyone know if this tool is available in a more general version? Or if there are some free and smooth alternatives which does kind of the same thing for Vista (and other windows versions if possible)?
Maybe Wink is your answer.
I'm looking for a better capture tool for both user documentation and reporting bugs. The best "steps recorder" that I've seen is bundled with Testuff. Their Test Runner app lets you select a region to record (video). It captures every mouse click and logs every key press along side the video playback. Of course, it's designed only for reporting bugs to a development team.
I'm still using SnagIt (cheap, not free) for capturing screens and adding annotations. I also have Camtasia, but that's definitely not "free" as you requested :)
I just stumbled upon 'Imago recorder', available via various software / download sites. It's not pretty but it does the trick and it's free.
It's currentyl available here
Additional option you should definitely pay attention to is StepsToReproduce. There are several options for recording (screen/window/region) and nice powerful annotation tools. And it's also free!