Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Spooky Wireless Sensor Lab, TCD, CCG

TCD's Wireless Sensors lab is located in Dunlop Oriel House in Dublin, which used to be old prison/torture center for IRA, few ppl were even hanged here.





A friend of mine was working late at office, he had to deploy few wireless sensors nodes all over the building in corridors and stairs, to verify some of the results. He got late at work and our lab is kind of spooky. Keeping all this in mind read below.






Rxxxxx is online.

W: you still in office? go home man! :)

R: yes man
W: O crap! dont kill yourself
R: i have to do the experiments for tomorrow no killing
W: are you sure, is it complete
R: i think so
W: kool! okay
I will be there tomorrow, if you need any help

R: ok I might, I will do some now
W: seiously man! go home, working at 12 at the night, I feel like shit :)
you know the building gets haunted at this time
lolz

Sent at 11:38 PM on Tuesday
R
: jajaj fucker
i'll be here until latre
man i'm scared now
fucker

W: ha ha ha! yess
R: i'm going to the toilet
if i dont come back do something

W: dont look down on your way back
lolz, okay, ping me when you are back

Sent at 11:39 PM on Tuesday
R:
man I'm back again
I shited my pants

W: ha ha! okay
ha h ah aha!
maan you are one scared pussy
nothing happens man, I was just joking

R: man i think i am not tying the sensors now in the whole building
fucker why did u say sth
come here now prickeeeeeeeeeee

W: or it can be like that movie, in which death follows ppl and they die one by one
what was its name,
yeah that final destination
:)
Sent at 11:53 PM on Tuesday
R:
final fucker
I am going to kill u 2mw
now i have to live

W: ha ha! it makes sense, taking away only the postgrads
R: true man
come here
please

W: ha ha ha ha!
R: i'm a pusy
W: maan this is funny

TinyOS 2.0 Installation Problems

Following this link (http://www.tinyos.net/tinyos-2.x/doc/html/install-tinyos.html) and setting up TinyOS 2.0 on cygwin took more than 3 hours for me, mainly because of these three problems, well finally I am able set it up properly and write programs to Micaz and Mica2.

My life would have been a lot easier had I known these three issues before hand. So here we go as a public service message. Leave comments if you run into problems I will try to answer them.


Error #1 : /bin/sh is needed by msp430tools-base-0.1-20050607
Solution: rpm --ignoreos --nodeps -ivh *.rpm

***My Environment variables***
TOSROOT: /opt/tinyos-2.x
TOSDIR: /opt/tinyos-2.x/tos
CLASSPATH: C:\tinyos2.0\cygwin\opt\tinyos-2.x\support\sdk\java\tinyos.jar
MAKERULES: /opt/tinyos-2.x/support/make/Makerules
PATH: /opt/msp430/bin:$PATH

Error #2
--> WARNING: CLASSPATH may not include '.' (that is, the symbol for the current
working directory). Please add '.' to your CLASSPATH or you may experience conf
iguration problems.
--> WARNING: No java in current path.
--> WARNING: No dot in current path.
--> WARNING: tos-check-env could not find the 'dot' executable which is part of
the AT&T Graphviz package. Please install version 1.1.0 of Graphviz if you'd lik
e to use the nescdoc documentation generator. If Graphviz is already installed,
then dot may not be in your PATH.

**Path Environment variable
./opt/msp430/bin:$PATH;"C:\Program Files\Graphviz2.16\Bin";C:\Java\jdk1.6.0\bin;
C:\cygwin\opt\tinyos-2.x\support\sdk\java\tinyos.jar

--> WARNING: CLASSPATH may not include '.' (that is, the symbol for the current
working directory). Please add '.' to your CLASSPATH or you may experience conf
iguration problems.

to solve this we are changing
CLASSPATH: c:\cygwin\opt\tinyos-2.x\support\sdk\java\tinyos.jar

to CLASSPATH: .$TOSROOT/support/sdk/java/tinyos.jar

------------------------
ERROR: when we compile the first program like, Blink a lot of error messages appear
***********fixing this problem `->' token
/opt/tinyos-2.x/tos/lib/tossim/tossim_wrap.cxx:3238: error: ISO C++ forbids
Declaration of `Py_INCREF' with no type

*************
SOLUTION:
1- Go to Cygwin, with TinyOS stuff install, write "Python" to check the version, something like below will appear
$ python
Python 2.3.4 (#1, Jun 13 2004, 11:21:03)
[GCC 3.3.1 (cygming special)] on cygwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

2- Note down the version of Python mine is 2.3.4

3- Search for a file "sim.extra" in cygwin/tossim directory, use windows search if you like. its usually in
C:\cygwin\opt\tinyos-2.x\support\make

4- Open it in notepad, and find the link PYTHON_VERSION=2.5 and change it to PYTHON_VERSION=2.3 (depending on the version you checked before,
if its 2.3.4 change it to 2.3 if its 2.4.5 change it to 2.4 etc.)

5- Save the file, restart cygwin and compile again.

6- VoilĂ  *** Successfully built micaz TOSSIM library.
---------------------------

Sunday, March 23, 2008

My first DSLR! :)

My New Pentax camera: check out some of the shots I took the first day, just went out for a walk.
http://picasaweb.google.com/wahmed/IrelandStPatrickSDay

I was thinking to buy Canon XTi but it doesn't have image stabilization and had a small viewfinder actually it felt a little cheap plasticky plasticky when I hold it. I Really loved Nikon D80 but it was too expensive with stabilization lens. I did a lot of research before buying it. I actually first bought Sony Alpha A300, used it for 3 days, it was kool and all, but felt like a Casio Piano playing in auto mode, then I returned it and bought a proper Pentax SLR. Anyways, Pentax is a good balance with a lot of available cheap lenses. Its very complex to use though. I probably have to go through a lot of photography concepts to have some serious results out of it. Hopefully I will be savvy before summers :)