Beta

Beta

Release: Serial IO, v20080326

Release Type: Beta
Version: 20080326
Release Notes

This is a fairly polished serial io patch (both smokris and I have been hacking on it mercilessly for the past day or two for an upcoming project)

Input and Output has been varified with an Arduino Diecimila at a few different baud rates (9600, 38400) with success. Binary output works (was added several betas ago, didn't get personally tested by me till today ;).

However, as is the case with all things kineme, we've hit upon a pretty nasty driver bug with ftdi (not surprised). I'm working with one of their techs to resolve this issue, hopefully that'll be fruitful.

The problem is basically this: Opening the serial port but never reading from it eventually causes some buffer overflows in the kernel. This causes some annoying side effects if you don't catch it soon enough. So if you have a Serial Output patch in the composition, you should add a matching Serial Input patch (with a specified break string!), and send its output to some red patch (a zero-count iterator is a cheap data sink). This will cause it to read out the buffer, averting the potential overflow (which shouldn't happen anyway).

This is close to a production release; please hammer on it, and find any weird corner cases where it doesn't work as expected (breakstring-less input will stop at 1 million bytes, then it'll probably trigger the overflow as noted above. This is the only known misfeature presently).

Release: GL Tools, v20080325

Release Type: Beta
Version: 20080325
Release Notes

This update to GLTools adds a few small new features.

First, the Spline patch now allows you to render points at each subdivision (not just each control point).

Second, the Polygon Mode patch now allows you to enable/disable point and line smoothing, as well as line stipple control.

Unsurprisingly, another Intel GL bug was uncovered: Enabling point-smoothing in polygon-mode mode results in no output. Yay lame intel drivers...

[ yanomano should have some really cool pictures to show for these requests... ;) ]

Release: Serial IO, v20080319

Release Type: Beta
Version: 20080319
Release Notes

This update to the SerialIO patch addresses a bunch of bugs with the serial input patch. Break String stuff now works.

It has been tested with our arduino board for simple reception, and appears to handle it well. It's likely for issues to still exist, but now we're in a position to test a bit, so development on this can proceed with more ease than earlier this year.

Release: WiiMote Control, v20080301

Release Type: Beta
Version: 20080301
Release Notes

This beta includes a couple tweaks and fixes. Nothing major.

Checkerboard bug was fixed.

IR output no longer outputs -100 when it looses tracking; instead it retains its last value. You can use the IR structure values to detect tracking loss (since it returns nan's when it loses tracking).

No stability/reliability changes took place.

Release: GL Tools, v20080226

Release Type: Beta
Version: 20080226
Release Notes

This beta's pretty rad. It adds a few new features, and a couple powerful patches.

The glOrtho patch now allows you to disable ortho mode (so you can switch from ortho to perspective mode without duplicating all the rendering in your composition).

But the coolest part of all is the GL Point Structure and GL Line Structure Patches. These patches allow you to render collections of points, line segments, or a continuous line strip without the overhead of an iterator.

Demonstration screenshot showing several points and line segments

Both patches take the same structure format: a substructure for each point, with an X, Y, and Z value. If the substructures are keyed, the keys "X", "Y", and "Z" are used, otherwise the 0th, 1st, and 2nd structure members are used to derive the coordinate. I'll probably upload some sample compositions to better demonstrate tomorrow morning.

Using JS to drive it is still slower than molasses, but it's an improvement none the less ;)

Before things get too crazy with structures, I'd like to have a plan in place to duplicate the functionality of vvvv's spreads (these are how this sort of stuff should be solved, not by more structure hacks....)