Hacking
This week started off slowly at work, but wow, it picked up nicely. I've been working on the most interesting project I've had in many months: a c++ program to process data from a large IR emitter and sensor array, which reports 3-d positions (within 1/10 a millimeter) for a set of markers within a 3m x 3m x 4m cube space.
I was asked to learn how this machine talks with the computer over the serial line, and figure out if it can report raw 3-d position data for each of 4 sensors, instead of reporting the aggregate position and orientation of the sensors. There's a sample C++ project which fully demoed the program's capabilities, which I've been hacking on. There's no tricky math- and their code is quite well documented. And a friendly support engineer helped me determine that I had the right approach to get the data using their API. I also found a bug in their code, which we're fortunately able to work around.
So I've gone from zero to almost-but-not-quite-there in the last 48 hours. This involved: learning Visual Studio, learning the API, and figuring out enough of this C++ program to be useful. This is what I wish I'd been working on for the last year. I'll be done with this project on Tuesday... (at least I hope I will, because I'm leaving with melted_snowball for Florence on Wednesday, not back until the following Thursday!)
Visual Studio is the best Microsoft product I've ever worked with; I got up to speed quite quickly and the only thing holding me back was, um, a bit of fuzziness on C++ datatypes. Also, I wish I could get the debugger to use the breakpoints I set; I'm having to do more debugging-via-print-statements than I'd prefer.
I was asked to learn how this machine talks with the computer over the serial line, and figure out if it can report raw 3-d position data for each of 4 sensors, instead of reporting the aggregate position and orientation of the sensors. There's a sample C++ project which fully demoed the program's capabilities, which I've been hacking on. There's no tricky math- and their code is quite well documented. And a friendly support engineer helped me determine that I had the right approach to get the data using their API. I also found a bug in their code, which we're fortunately able to work around.
So I've gone from zero to almost-but-not-quite-there in the last 48 hours. This involved: learning Visual Studio, learning the API, and figuring out enough of this C++ program to be useful. This is what I wish I'd been working on for the last year. I'll be done with this project on Tuesday... (at least I hope I will, because I'm leaving with melted_snowball for Florence on Wednesday, not back until the following Thursday!)
Visual Studio is the best Microsoft product I've ever worked with; I got up to speed quite quickly and the only thing holding me back was, um, a bit of fuzziness on C++ datatypes. Also, I wish I could get the debugger to use the breakpoints I set; I'm having to do more debugging-via-print-statements than I'd prefer.