Tiddlywiki - A scalable knoledge management tool

When developing new projects I often found my self in the very same situation: I have read through tons of pages of manuals, wikis and books, and would like to create my own notes on the subject. Be it for a college subject, a new electronics project, or a complex subject I'm enjoying. 

In any case, I need a way to add notes, attach files (e.g. PDFs, videos, source code, etc.) and insert images. Also, it's of upmost importance to be able to create hierarchical dependencies between my notes (i.e. subsections or similar) and be able to navigate through the data in an intuitive way that does not require tons of mouse-scrolling. And most importantly, the data must be easy to export and available offline, as I don't want to get stuck with any commercial services. 

If you are in a similar situation, then read on.

Improved ls command to list your linux files.

If you use Linux on a daily basis, then you probably run the 'ls' commands several times a day to list files. This is one of the most used commands on Linux (aside from 'cd') and still, it is sometimes a mess. With the following script, you can "wrap" the normal 'ls' command to:

1. Highlight folders with colors, to better distinguish them from files.
2. Sort folders before regular files
3. Sort hidden folders and hidden files last
4. Print information in a human-readable format

Arch Linux Update Helper

Keeping your Arch Linux system up to date is a good habit, and something you should definitively be doing. It can however become time consuming (specially if you do it on a weekly basis), reason enough to postpone it for too long.

This script will guide you intuitively through the update process, tidy after it, and also optimize your pacman package manager.

Great tutorial for the Microchip PIC24 family

 

This is a quick heads-up. I found a really well-written and in-depth guide for Microchip's PIC24 microcontroller family. It covers everything, from I²C and timers, to the WDT and power-modes, shining light on the huge potential of these tiny 16-bit chips.

The original page with the original posts (Engscope) has gone. Luckily, you can still read the whole the archived version of the full guides. So, have fun, and don't hesitate to share your favorite guides in the comments.

Fancy bash prompt with colors

I got bored of the normal bash promt a long time ago, which lead me to configure my .bashrc to betther highlight terminal inputs. Still, I used to see some terminal on the net with a very fancy looking bash promt that I found really appealing. After some googling I decided to give it a go and try to generate my own. All it takes is a fancy triangle character to create the colored overlaps, shown in the above figure, and some tweaking. All in all, the end result speaks for itself.

Check out my implementation after the break, and leave a comment if you like it or want to make some suggestions to further improve it!

Update: a new and easy to install version can be found here.

Report from the European Conference on Mobile Robotics 2017

[Manuel Lopez-Antequera] and I just returned from the 8th edition of ECMR held in Paris. It was a great experience with most contributed works centered on solution for UAVs. In this regard, my personal favorite key-session was that of [Scaramuzza]. It was not only very inspiring, but also introduced us to event based cameras, which have a extremely high refresh rate when compared with standard cameras.

All in all, it was a very great experience. The organization was excellent and we were very well received. Also, I liked that the conference was single track, meaning that we didn't miss a single contribution. As for [Manuel] and me, we presented the following works respectively:

• Andres Gongora, Javier Monroy and Javier Gonzalez-Jimenez, "Gas Source Localization Strategies for Teleoperated Mobile Robots. An Experimental Analysis", European Conference of Mobile Robotics, Paris, 2017.
• Manuel Lopez-Antequera, Nicolai Petkov and Javier Gonzalez-Jimenez, "City-scale continuous visual localization", European Conference of Mobile Robotics, Paris, 2017.

Enhanced commercial multicopter for research in autonomous navigation

I just wanted to share with you a fully autonomous drone I built some time back for my degree in electornic engineering. It was a time when there were no fully autonomous drones, as the needed hardware was still too heavy to be flown piggyback all around your backyard. Still, I managed to pack everything I needed on top of a commercial RTF-Y6 hexacopter, including an RGD-D camera and an ARM computer.

If you feel like, take a look at the corresponding paper published during the 23th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation, 2015. Also, don't miss the video after the break.