As I said previously, 8 was a write off thanks to a different paper. A lot of Week 9 has also been spent on that paper because at the end of week 10 we have a presentation to do for said paper. It's ridiculous.
However, Anneke has been playing with php in her spare time and I started to write the security application in C++. The idea was that we'd have a web interface that communicated with the system. A few different methods have been looked at, and now I'm settling on writing the system in Processing because it's higher level and getting that to communicate with a mySQL database. The web interface will also communicate with that database.
Right now I'm trying to get Processing to talk to the database and it's saying access denied. Fun.
Saturday, 17 September 2011
Tuesday, 13 September 2011
Weeks 5-7
Oops.
We stumbled a bit during this time and in some ways there wasn't much to write about. We were both mildly annoyed at lack of liaison with tutors, despite Anneke's best efforts and I was getting quite grumpy with a different paper that wants a disproportionate amount of my time.
We struggled with conceptual statement writing. We had an idea of what we wanted to do but putting it into a coherent statement seemed a little bit elusive.
Oh we both started one each though. Reflecting on it, I think wanting to do conceptual research before doing any physical building is all well and good, but doing the real thing might also help one think about the conceptual implications. I feel like we were led down some garden path with the conceptual side. It was over-emphasised. Yep, sure, it's a good basis for a project but on it's own it's worthless. I don't want a degree when I get to be all conceptual about something but can't actually make anything. No employer does either.
We did eventually tie in our research with a question that is both conceptual and practical. Our question is: Can we improve security with Social Networking?
Our system is a social security system!
I could break this down further and if I'd maintained this blog properly I'd likely have done just that. But instead I'm going to push on so I can write about current stuff. And more often. It doesn't feel like we accomplished all that much anyway except a lot of theorising. This leaves us with bugger all time to produce a product.
We also got pretty annoyed because at the end of week 6 we started our third paper and that took up the entire following week and much of the week after. Like a wall it completely blocked all studio work. I haven't encountered one student who hasn't been pissed off about this.
So week 7-8 are write offs.
What I did do in that time though was score a free laptop from a friend moving overseas. It's an old Dell Inspiron 1501 with some missing keys but it starts up. I'd looked into little micro controllers but they are all a bit pricey. I've been following the development of a cheap $25 computer project, and recently it has started to get legs. But it won't be available before this project is due. So the idea now is to pull the laptop apart, make it into a small-as form factor as possible and strip it of most parts. Make it boot of a SD card or something.
Another issue I had been concerned about was how on earth to build a camera/PIR sensor that was wireless. Cheaply. It seems that it cannot be done and conflicted with our goals of making a cheap system. Plus it's technically hard. For us. In the time limits we have. So for the prototype, its USB web cameras rewired to broadcast over Ethernet. Preliminary research suggests that this is doable and not too hard.
That's really about it....
We stumbled a bit during this time and in some ways there wasn't much to write about. We were both mildly annoyed at lack of liaison with tutors, despite Anneke's best efforts and I was getting quite grumpy with a different paper that wants a disproportionate amount of my time.
We struggled with conceptual statement writing. We had an idea of what we wanted to do but putting it into a coherent statement seemed a little bit elusive.
Oh we both started one each though. Reflecting on it, I think wanting to do conceptual research before doing any physical building is all well and good, but doing the real thing might also help one think about the conceptual implications. I feel like we were led down some garden path with the conceptual side. It was over-emphasised. Yep, sure, it's a good basis for a project but on it's own it's worthless. I don't want a degree when I get to be all conceptual about something but can't actually make anything. No employer does either.
We did eventually tie in our research with a question that is both conceptual and practical. Our question is: Can we improve security with Social Networking?
Our system is a social security system!
I could break this down further and if I'd maintained this blog properly I'd likely have done just that. But instead I'm going to push on so I can write about current stuff. And more often. It doesn't feel like we accomplished all that much anyway except a lot of theorising. This leaves us with bugger all time to produce a product.
We also got pretty annoyed because at the end of week 6 we started our third paper and that took up the entire following week and much of the week after. Like a wall it completely blocked all studio work. I haven't encountered one student who hasn't been pissed off about this.
So week 7-8 are write offs.
What I did do in that time though was score a free laptop from a friend moving overseas. It's an old Dell Inspiron 1501 with some missing keys but it starts up. I'd looked into little micro controllers but they are all a bit pricey. I've been following the development of a cheap $25 computer project, and recently it has started to get legs. But it won't be available before this project is due. So the idea now is to pull the laptop apart, make it into a small-as form factor as possible and strip it of most parts. Make it boot of a SD card or something.
Another issue I had been concerned about was how on earth to build a camera/PIR sensor that was wireless. Cheaply. It seems that it cannot be done and conflicted with our goals of making a cheap system. Plus it's technically hard. For us. In the time limits we have. So for the prototype, its USB web cameras rewired to broadcast over Ethernet. Preliminary research suggests that this is doable and not too hard.
That's really about it....
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