Hacking

[da]

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.

Comments

[kraig.livejournal.com]

VS 2005 was the first IDE I've used since Borland Pascal 7. Tab completion on function names was a bit unsettling, but it's downright *weird* on variable names. It's nice though, even aside from that (and I've left it turned on while I learn myself some C#.)

[sulle-stelle.livejournal.com]

Fun!

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

VS isn't a bad IDE. Compared to everything I've used to edit Java code, the VS interface walks all over them. And unlike Excel or Outlook, their keyboard shortcuts are actually consistent with how most Windows programs work, which is a pleasant surprise from a Microsoft product.