I recently received an email from a guy about his search for an old article about a cheap version of the Computer-On-A-Stick. Unfortunately, it was lost when the old GeekBlog was replaced by this new GeekBlog. It has been more than two years ago, since I wrote the article. Nowadays, there are more enhanced ways to make such a computer-on-a-stick, so I decided to write about this subject again. Here it is: how to build a computer-on-a-stick for under $25.
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Ever since I made my curriculum vitae available on my other domain (http://electronical.nl) I've received an invitation for a job interview every once in a while. But since a few months, the number of invitations is skyrocketing. I even got a phone call from a company, which wanted to hire me, when I was on my way to an interview at another company last week. Apparently, software developers (especially C, C++ and scripting languages like PHP etcetera) are not easily found anymore.
Most job interviews resulted in a disappointed recruiter and a disappointed me. It's not that they didn't want to hire me, but they were mostly disappointed by the fact that I wanted to continue studying and thus lacking more than ten or sixteen hours available for the job. So I'm still no corporate code monkey yet. Nevertheless, I learned some important things from these interviews.
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Do you remember playing Mario on the NES? Well, I do. This summer I just wanted to play that game again, but because of the lack of a NES (or any other good console for that matter) I couldn't. I decided to buy Nintendo's newest handheld console, the Nintendo DS Lite, and the newest Mario game. So I am the proud owner of a great piece of Japanese hardware and software since a few days. After playing for a few hours I could already remember my adventures from way back.
Homebrew
One of the nice advantages of the Nintendo DS is that there's a great homebrew community, developing hundreds of nice applications and games. I've never programmed any games (except Conway's Game of Life, like every other geek) before, so I decided to give it a try.
Gorillas
But which game? During the hours of playing Mario I also remembered a game called Gorillas, which I played very often when I was just a little geek. Do you remember it? Two gorillas throwing bananas trying to hit each other. It is a turn-based artillery game in which the players needed to define the velocity and angle for every throw. This looked like the perfect game to develop for the NDS.
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During the last few months I couldn't spend much time at my multi-touch project. But I'm finally able to show the world some sort of result. Axon, the test application I developed, processes input from the webcam and detects the blobs with the earlier proposed algorithm.
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After considering several methods for finding the center of a blob in the entry "Blob detection", I found another method: edge tracing.
By tracing the edges of the blobs, you can find the extreme values in the x and y direction and thus the center of the blob.
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