Chickenfoot, an Android controlled car anyone can make

Hi everyone,

just a little post to introduce Chickenfoot, an Android controlled car anyone can make! Chickenfoot engine is written in Python, thanks to Nanpy (https://github.com/nanpy) and composed by a RaspberryPI, an Arduino, and the basic stuff that you can find on any RC car. I've also added some cool electronic stuff, such as a temperature sensor, and I'm working to integrate video streaming using a RaspberryPI Camera. You can find the repository for the Android app here

and going to https://github.com/chickenfootcar/chickenfoot you can find the engine that run on a Chickenfoot car.

This is a video I took days ago that shows Chickenfoot running attached to my mac.

True story: karaoke machine with Raspberry Pi

Suppose you're preparing the party for 31st December and one of your friends came up with a new idea to have fun during the party (31/12/2012, 13.00 p.m. -.-) "Hey hey hey what about doing some karaoke tonight?" ... Really cool my friend, I have a bunch of karaoke files but unfortunately, at the moment, I haven't any sort of device to connect to your TV.. no, wait a moment, I have a Raspberry Pi :) This was my final result:

Let's see how to build a karaoke machine in 5 simple steps.

1. Prepare your Raspberry Pi: download the last image of Raspbian from http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads, unzip the archive and flash it on a sdcard with dd

dd bs=1M if=/path/to/2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/sdX

2. Put your sdcard in your Raspberry Pi, connect it to your TV and your LAN, then boot it. You need to use a graphical interface, so run:

startx

3. Open your terminal and install PyKaraoke, running:

sudo apt-get install pykaraoke

4. Prepare your karaoke machine: copy all your karaoke files in a new folder into Raspberry Pi, e.g. ~/karaoke, and import this folder in PyKaraoke. Open PyKaraoke and click on Add Songs, this window will pop up:

Press Add Folder, add your folder containing your files (~/karaoke for me), Scan Now then Save All.

5. Test your machine: try searching for your songs using PyKaraoke, with a double click on one of them should pop up lyrics on your TV.

Well done, now you're ready to rock :)

Thank you Raspberry Pi!

Nanpy - Use your Arduino board with Python

I bought my first Arduino three months ago and now I can sell my Wii and
Nintendo DS cause I've finally found my best toy ever :) I started
hacking with guys of my LUG (PtLUG), preparing some talks for the incoming LinuxDay to
show what Arduino is able to do (!) and also I started working on a project called Nanpy, a
library that allows you writing Arduino programs using Python, my
favorite language, and that's the thing I would like to speak about in
this post :) .. I know, I know, there's a lot of projects doing the
same thing, but Nanpy can do more.. Lemme show you :)

Nanpy (https://github.com/Octan/nanpy) was born to help developers
writing their Arduino programs using Python, communicating via serial
port without sending hard-to-remember codes or limiting you to use
only one object: with Nanpy when you create an object in Python it
will be automatically created into your Arduino at runtime.. For
example if you write something like:

ds = DallasTemperature(5)

or

tone = Tone(13)

Nanpy creates the object for you into Arduino.. Also, you haven't to
take care of deallocation, Nanpy deallocates objects into Arduino as
soon as the correspondent Python objects get deleted. Look at the
examples to see how simple it is..
(https://github.com/Octan/nanpy/tree/master/examples) :)

I tried running Nanpy on a Raspberry board and it works great!!
(that's the result
https://twitter.com/andreagrandi/status/251702684380434434 :) ). Also
you may use it in other devices supporting Python and serial
communication, in a web service or simply for creating prototypes
faster, because you use Python and you don't have to flash the
firmware every time. Last but not least, firmware part of Nanpy is
Python-indipendent, so you can write another implementation of Nanpy
in any other language, for example Java, and see an Arduino controlled
via Android (ok, in this case you should use Android USB Host API and
USART, writing your own driver, because Android doesn't provide
anything to access device files.. we just did that for a robotic
project https://github.com/Octan/chickenfoot).

Nanpy started a month ago but it's just a useful library: it actually
supports the main parts of OneWire, Lcd, DallasTemperature, Stepper,
Servo and basic Arduino's function (digital and analog write, tone
etc..).

If you find Nanpy interesting please spread the project, there's a lot
of work to do, many things to rewrite better and we need developers :)

Pypi? Oh Ye4H!! http://pypi.python.org/pypi/nanpy/

Wah! Do you want to make a donation to this project? Click the donation button and buy me a coffee...!! I'd like to buy new Arduino boards to work on compatibility with Nanpy.. Thanks :)

Cya next post!

=.4.S.=

Wikipedia Mobile

Hi all,

as you can see from Android market this month a new important app has come among us: it's Wikipedia Mobile by Wikimedia Team, the official app to easily bring the knowledge on your mobile devices! This app is more than a simple web view showing Wikipedia contents, is full of features, like the possibility to save pages, a dedicated history to track all pages you look at, full languages support and more.. but the cool thing I discovered is that it's free and relased under GPL 2! That's awesome!! Finally I can start giving my contribute to Wikipedia as developer! I'm so excited about that, I love Wikipedia and its finalities, it's not only the best classmate I ever had during my studies, it's an important resource for humans, an untouchable heritage. As expected guys working behind this project are awesome, very willing to help you and very good in programming, they wrote a good and easy guide to modify code! The app is developed using Phonegap so this makes it portable on other platforms like iOS and Windows Phone... Well, what else? I invite you to join the Wikimedia Team and become part of something of cool and important for everyone! Just fork the project and ask everything you need at #wikimedia-mobile on Freenode(IRC) or alternatively contribute opening bugs..!!

Waiting for you ^^

=.4.S.=

SomaFM App

Hi everybody,

I'm back to write here to show my last work for SomaFM radio, the Android official application, derived from my previous project Somadroid.. has been an hard work, Android SDK is a bit more complex than I thought and media player needed a lot of workaround to get working.. bad surprises :( :( anyway now all goes well and we are waiting for tester's feedback ... here I'll show you some screenshot taken from the emulator and explain some feature of this app:

These four screen shots represent the easier part of this application ^^ the last shows we have also a landscape layout shown on phone's rotation..

Channels tab: in this tab you can see all the channels available on SomaFM and you can order them by genre, favourites and number of listeners.

Bookmarks tab: in this tab you can see all your favourites song played on SomaFM. You can send your entire bookmarks list by email or access to a menu ( with share I mean share through your apps, like Twitter, Facebook, G+, Messaging etc ) as shown right here:

News tab: just a tab showing the news, with a personal engine to catch links ( no success with standard tools :\ )

Support tab: just a list of links that redirect you on SomaFM store for supporting the radio..

Here we are in the painful part, the Playing tab ^^ This tab is shown every time a channel is clicked on the Channel tab and start play the channel ( we have also a notification icon, obviously :P )... here you can favourite a song, share it, search it around Google or Amazon store, favourite the channel, see its info and share it...

Finally I developed the widget to fetch and play stations directly from your home screen..



You can stay updated about this app here or on SomaFM twitter page. You can also ask SomaFM for a trial version by writing to dj(at)somafm(dot)com and report all bugs to me directly.. The app will be sell on the Android Market soon but I don't know anything at the moment about its cost..

Emesene 2 plugins need you!

Hi all,

I'm going to be back on emesene development tomorrow after two months of inactivity... I followed all improvements done and I saw an huge progress of the emesene's core ... What really/heavily/unforgivably/(add any adjective u want) miss are plugins... Just opened this post to call people contributing in emesene to cover this lack: is not so really important to be a python guru! just try to improve yourself having a look to what other ones have done and remember that people working around this project can help you for every thing trough github, google group and mailing lists.. you just need to know git basis and a little bit of English or Spanish...

A first work area where wannabe plugins developers could start from is making a port of all emesene 1 supported plugins on this new version..

Have a good work!

=.4.S.=

Emesene sync tool is ready :)

Hi everybody,

I have been away from this blog for a long time because now I'm working on Emesene 2 as an official member, studying android development (no one can escape :D ) and working on other important projects of mine :) I'll report my post, where I explain my work on sync tool for Emesene 2 ( http://bit.ly/gKGjlr ).

Finally I can announce you that the synchronizer between emesene 1 and
2 is quite ready and safety :) At the moment this tool only import all
conversations and your personal avatars from emesene1 (one time only,
supposing that you'll use emesene 2 after its installation ;) )...
The remaining features to implement are:

1. Import all avatars of other contacts

2. Import all emoticons saved in emesene1

We're also still working to make it faster even with huge databases...

If you want to contribute, please have a look to files in e3/synch and
the SyncTool in gui/gtkui that uses an EmeseneSync object...

::See you next post::