Microcontroller Programming

Refer to my article which I failed to compile the GNU ARM toolchain on Ubuntu. Now the problem was resolved by one of our member in the forums (please see the full post here). He created an automatic script called GNU ARM Installer (download gnu-arm-installer.tar.gz here). You can build the cross compiler for ARM with simple steps:

tar xzf gnu-arm-installer.tar.gz
cd gnu-arm-installer
./gnu-arm-installer.sh

If it is done you will get the toolchain in gnu-arm-installer/install. It is simple but power script.

I just set up CMU Sphinx II on Ubuntu. I just want to test how this Linux Speech Recognition work. I installed the following packages: libsphinx2g0, libsphinx2-dev, sphinx2-bin and sphinx2-hmm-6k. The resource file will be in /usr/share/sphinx2/model/ which contains hmm (Hidden Markov model based-file) and model (Language Model related files). I just type

sphinx2-demo

to test it. It works but not perfectly accuracy output. I think it is needed to be trained. However, It’s a nice Speech Recognition system for Linux.

If you are MS$ fan, you are lucky obtained the MS native Text to Speech and Speech Recognition system. Fortunately, for a Unix-like user, Festival provides such a system. I am using the Ubuntu Linux. To enable Speech to Text, I installed these packages: festival and festivox-kallpc16k. Then, I tested by putting these command:

echo "It's such a beautiful day! Why are you in front of the computer?" \\
 | festival --tts

Wow! It is such a cool noise. For more tutorial on Festival, please refer to this page:

http://www.xenocafe.com/tutorials/php/festival_text_to_speech/index.php

Avimator is open-source animation avatar editor for Second Life. This is very interesting because it may can be integrated with AI tool. However, it fails compiling in Ubuntu due to the name file case sensitive (.h or .H) of FLTK. After I fixed this problem, it work fine. You can download my fixed version for Ubuntu here.

Starting learning X3D with H3D API is a nice stage in my opinion.

H3D API is an open-source, cross-platform, scene-graph API . H3D is written entirely in C++ and uses OpenGL for graphics rendering and HAPI for haptics rendering. HAPI is an open-source haptic API developed by the team behind H3D API. For more information about HAPI see the HAPI manual. H3D API is available under the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

To install HAPI on Windows follow these steps:

1. Download Windows installation file from www.h3d.org.
2. Install HAPI using this file.
3. Run examples through start menu.

For information on how to build HAPI on Windows see the pdf-manual.

If you are writing a code that links to wxWidgets library, you can use these command to compile the code

g++ `wx-config --cxxflags` `wx-config --libs` myapp.cpp

I’ve succeeded compiling wxWidgets (2.8.7) for Windows (Vista) with the simple things below.

Download:
wxMSW - installer for Windows
then extract it to anywhere i.e., C:\wxWidgets

Run:

C:\Program files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9\Common7\Tools\vsvars32.bat

to get the environment variables set

Change directory to build\msw. Type:

nmake -f makefile.vc

If it succeeds, you will get

lib\vc_lib

AI seems to fictitious story. When I think about what project should we do with AI, we sometime have no idea. Recently, there is a development of AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) which is applicable to chatbot. I have tested chatting with a chatbot like A.L.I.C.E. I’m amazed, it work very well (as we never have it before). I think that AIML is a frontier AI technology that can be applied to a real-life application. If you don’t know where to start with AI, start with learning AIML. So am I.

Programming AI using standard programming languages, e.g., C/C++ or Java is not a good idea. It’s too general purpose language. I’m considering to select between (Common) Lisp and Prolog which are particularly designed for AI. Finally, I choose Lips as my main AI programming language. I have no reason why Lisp but I know that I like it concept and syntax. Lisp stand for List Processor. There are many Lisp implementation nowadays. I select CLISP because it’s free and open-source under GPL and it work on both *nix and Windows. I installed CLIPS on Windows through Cygwin. I run its setup file then browse Devel. Finally, we will found clips and install it. We can call clips shell with command clisp in cygwin command prompt. Now everything is set up. Next, learn Common Lisp language. I recommend a online free book:

Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation by David S. Touretzky

I’m using Fedora Core 5. I don’t like window manager both KDE and GNOME. It consumes too much resource. I removed gnome and kde by using add/remove programe (Pirut) and also gdm.
Then I go to http://www.xfce.org and download xfce 4.4 beta 1 graphical installer. After finishing installation, I create .xsession file in /home/mydir/ directory and add this line

exec /usr/bin/startxfce4

where this is the path to your startxfce4. Every time I login by x desktop manager, it will automatically start xfce by default. I think xfce4 desktop manager is compact than gnome or kde.
For more detail, see
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=451197