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 7 April 2014 @ 23:46  allegrem in LogbookI will try one last time
Are you listening to me?
I will fight, the last fight
I am not your enemy.
Hello World!
The last few days have been intense. We spent a lot of time arguing about many topics and we still disagree on some points of the architecture or even the goal of our project. Even if these discussions are absolutely necessary for the project, we have written almost no code in 5 days (and the end is near!). However I hope we will be able to finish fighting clarifying everything tomorrow and start coding again!
So my work during these days mostly consisted in thinking about the design of our project. I have a lot of drawings and schematics in my bag now! When everything will be set, I will start a series of posts explaining the architecture of the different parts of our project. For example, I have prepared four pictures explaining the new architecture of the Message service, and I hope I will be able to publish them soon. In the meanwhile, here is a first glimpse of the authentication system. I worked on this today and I will publish a translated and vectorized version as soon as possible.
   
And finally we spent a lot of time this week end preparing our presentation for this morning. Unfortunately, it was postponed until Friday, so stay tuned! But I can already disclose the logos of our three apps: Cairn, Cache and KTA (we are not yet sure about the KTA’s one!!).
  
May the force be with you!
25 March 2014 @ 12:28 allegrem in LogbookThere is still a light that shines on me
Shine on until tomorrow, led it be
Hello World!
Last week end, I kept on… guess what… working on the nRF51822! In my last post, I explained how difficult it was to test my program since I didn’t trust that much the Android BLE stack. So I first tried to install the Nordic Master Control Panel on Windows, and well… how can I say that in a polite way… Windows definitely s*cks!!
So I was quite desperate and I decided to refocus myself on one simple task at a time. First I grabbed the final version of the tutorial I was working on on the Nordic’s Github in order to have reliable foundations for later. This mean I dropped all the work I had done before, however this helped me a lot to deeply understand how the BLE stack works on the nRF. I managed to flash the program and I tried to test it with a Bluetooth dongle plugged in a Linux computer. However the tools for testing Bluetooth on Linux are not user-friendly and on Sunday I was not yet able to test the program.
In the meanwhile, I started a huge refactoring task. The Nordic’s program is great, but all the code is split in only three files! So I decided to break all that in several files, and it’s a quite long work. I finished yesterday and I removed all the warnings, but the code doesn’t work yet (there is a runtime error I have to fix today).
Also yesterday, I finally understood how to use gatttool (the Bluetooth swiss-knife for Linux), and especially how to get notifications from the other device (in the end, I begin to believe that BLE can actually work). So I was able to test the example program (before refactoring) and everything works like a dream (the led shined on until tomorrow, led it be)!
We also had a team meeting yesterday morning in order to celebrate the return of Adele and explain to each other what we had done the week before. Globally we did a great job: the PCB is almost finished (thanks Adele!), the Android app for scanning drop has made huge progress (thanks Lauriane!) and I start to really understand the BLE stack on nRF (and how to test BLE app). However we are a bit late on our PSSC, so we have to keep motivated!
Finally, I could let express all my creativity yesterday when Sam complained about our Android app which had no logo. Now it’s fixed:
 Drop Scanner (soon available on Google Play) May the force be with you!
15 March 2014 @ 19:39 allegrem in LogbookI can’t program my board today…
Hello World!
It’s been a long time you didn’t hear some news from me, so I have a lot to tell you today! What’s happened since Wednesday? I finally finished my lab, I blew a fuse (not literally) during the challenge and I recovered the Force today with some BLE. Now, details!
I spent my whole Wednesday and Thursday trying to finish the lab. On Wednesday I finished to make the serial over USB driver work. Actually I had chosen the wrong example, that’s why I was not working the day before. Then I activated the debug options of ChibiOS and realized that my buzzer was not buzzing any more. A few fixes later, I began the last but not the least part of the lab: get a web page using HTTP (and therefore TCP/IP). It was hard and tough, but on Thursday 8:22PM, I was able to download the home page of the Télécom ParisTech website (this tremendous achievement was immediately added to my resume). It was now time to leave for the party rest before the Friday challenge.
So I woke up in the mornin’ feelin’ like P-Diddy, and I discovered the first part of the challenge: retrieve the rest of the instructions on a web page. The good news was that I already had a working code able to do that. The bad news was that I decided (and don’t ask me why, I honestly have no idea) to plug the brand new JLink probe we just received on my board. Disaster ensues… It took me one hour to get my old good JTAG probe working. Then I could retrieve the instructions explaining that our next mission (and we had to accept it) would be to download a sound using HTTP (easy) and play it on earphones (sounds easy, it was not). I started to investigate the ChibiOS and the board documentations, and a few hours later, I had understood that: we needed to use I2S, ChibiOS already had a I2S driver, this driver was not working on our board, we had to write our own driver. So I did. In the end, my configuration was ok, but I stupidly had forgotten to edit my Makefile so that it used my new board configuration (I hated myself so much at that time !!). I also spent around one hour to fix an incomprehensible bug (I don’t want to talk about it, it still affects me a lot). Then I was able to play a 440Hz sine wave (it was 6:04PM). The next step was to play the downloaded sound (or more precisely: to stream it). Unfortunately I had to leave for a web meetup I was co-organizing. I came back after it but I was not brave enough to dive again in my code, so I helped Adele to finish the challenge.
Today, I finally had time to sleep, so I did! Then I fixed a few mistakes in the Git presentation (you know, the one with Jedi inside!). I don’t know yet if I can publish it here, but if it’s possible, I’ll do it! Here it is: Git for Jedi
I also continued to work on the nRF51822 (my new best friend since I officially broke up with my STM32). My job was to run an example program on the board, which would advertise and do other fun things. The program was already written, but the tough part was to actually run it on the board. About this, I strongly recommend this GitHub which was extremely helpful. Tomorrow, I will try to write my own example program. And I will conclude with an amazing video I made proving the unlimited power of the dark side of the BLE:
May the force be with you!
2 March 2014 @ 22:28 MarcO in LogbookHello readers!
Today was a long day! The whole Plume group (Benjamin, Guénolé, Olivier, Virgile and I) met to prepare for tomorrow’s presentation. We spent a lot of time looking for the slightest mistakes we could have missed in our slideshow in order to correct them, so I hope you won’t find any!
Today, I also designed Plume’s logo, we are all very happy with it and we are proud to present it to you here!
See you soon for more news,
Marc-O
 The new logo of the Plume project
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