Stuff that I have been up to
Posted by Sayamindu 2 months, 2 weeks ago
December turned out to be a pretty busy month for me – here are some of the stuff I have been involved in/working on:
- FOSS.in: As always FOSS.in ‘09 turned out to be an amazing affair. Being someone who works remotely, this event is probably one of the best opportunities for me to have “real” interactions. It’s a place where I can simply sit down, have long face to face conversations, come up with new ideas, be inspired, and most importantly, have fun. My heartfelt thanks goes out to the people behind the event for making this possible. I have some photos in this Flickr photoset.
- Book reader: This month’s priority has been stabilizing the Sugarlabs/OLPC book-reader code, and a large number of important bugfixes landed during the last few weeks. More in this status report.
- Arduino: At FOSS.IN, thanks to the efforts of the ever enthusiastic Kushal Das, I managed to get hold of an Arduino clone board (it is terribly difficult to get hold of one in Kolkata). I had heard of Arduino before and wanted to get one, and the session on it at FOSS.in by Russell Nelson finally served as the “kick” which made Kushal and me call up the local distributor and get a couple of boards for ourselves. I have been playing around with sensors support in Sugar for sometime (I helped make the Measure activity work on XO 1.5 hardware), and realized that this would be yet another interesting way to connect Sugar with the “real” world. So after a couple of weekends worth of work, I got Arduino support in Turtle Art.
- XO keyboards: There may be a new AZERTY keyboard for the XO laptops very soon. See this wikipage for details.
- Pootle: The Pootle developers have released version 2.0, which is a vastly improved edition compared to the previous releases. I have been testing it out with plans to upgrade the Sugarlabs/OLPC translation server soon. While testing, I added a quick (and ugly) hack to implement msgfmt –check style syntax checking in Pootle. This would definitely make the process of integrating the translations with the upstream code much less painful – and here’s a screenshot (click on it for a larger version):
Hi,
Regarding Arduino and Turtle Art – it is needed to use Your branch on gitorius, right? Any chances to get this incorporated into main line of Turtle Art activity?
I was not aware of Sugar before and I see I need to check this, since it very interesting project and is in line with my plans for next few months…
@Witold: I need to add a few more stuff (for example, localization support for the Arduino blocks are not there yet), and I’ll ask for a merge as soon as the missing bits have landed.
Congratulations on the very productive month!
Please base your AZERTY layout on the fr(oss) xorg layout, the layout on the OLPC wiki seems derived from a very old very buggy xorg layout with a lot of very user-annoying mistakes
Congratulations! This looks really interesting. I work at Plan Ceibal (OLPC project in Uruguay) and would be very interested in trying this. We are currently experimenting with Arduino and XOs and ways to use them in learning environments.
Where can I get the turtle art activity including this functionality? Does it use Firmata to handle communication with the Arduino hardware?
I would really appreciate if you could contact me.
Thanks!!
Hi, I’m impresioned with photograh plugin you are already using in your blog… where can I find this plugin?… I’m novice using Wordpress
Really Thanks