Update On Phidgets and Other Stuff

For some reason I cannot sleep… I got a great chest workout in the other day and last night I got a little too crazy at Kung Fu and did a bunch of pushups. So now my chest hurts like crazy and I’m fully awake for reasons unknown. That said…. I have been messing around with the Phidget servos I received and I must say that going from a realm where the coolest thing I ever do is retrieve a few million rows really fast. Or, make a grid look REALLY cool and apply a filter… or do a pretty picture graph…

Writing stuff that has impact in the physical realm is really cool. The most recent problem I am tackling is my inability to read… My servos turn only 180* and I need 360, fine print, regular print… No match for an excited nerds eyes when he wants to spend money on cool electronic gadgets. So what I’ve done is played with some gearing to turn the 180 to 360. I will post a few pictures once I have things all tidied up and working.

The other thing that I’ve done is I have build a little enclosure for my control board. Now the only task is attaching that to the contraption I am building and maybe looking into hooking up bluetooth communication. Although this is just a prototype so I don’t know how useful that will be.

So between that, this whole Directshow .NET thing I’ve been diving into, and work I’ve been pretty busy. I need to find our Microsoft rep tomorrow and ask him about the direction of Directshow because there seem to be a lot of under-served people out there all trying to code against Directshow for one reason or another. However, the documentation is … meh .. at best and the one book on Directshow is hundreds of dollars and out of print. So if I figure out how to freeze time and read through the Directshow book, I may do a little “follow along with me through my misery series and hopefully we’ll both have a better understanding.” Maybe the Flux Capacitor would help with that time thing? Or… Continuum Transfunctionor?

I know Media Foundation (MF) is supposed to replace Directshow, but it’s missed it’s deadline and feature set from what I’ve been reading so it looks like if you want to write a decent multimedia application then Directshow is still your friend. It would also be really nice if Microsoft provided a library for writing this stuff in C#. It can still be against all the COM components and fast. I’m willing to do some thinking when I write code…

That’s all for now… just randomly ranting.

Adrian.BrainStream.Close();