DUBwise UI over time

Today I got some amazing images for DUBwise for UAVTalk from a really cool and professional guy called grass man which enabled me to make DUBwise for UAVTalk look really sweet:

I am working on the mother project DUBwise since 2007 and this is the first time I like the appearance of it. I always had the problem that I cannot simply take free images of the web as DUBwise has this crude (but important for me ) non-military creative-commons licence-construct. Anyway seeing my baby in such a glance today inspired me to look back a bit. Starting with a small step back in time:

The above screen was the state after I came back from my trip around the world I tested all these shiny new UI Patterns like the popular pagers / dashboard / actionbar - was not feeling bad but needed attention from GFX-Pro's e.g. the connection indicator was just a drawColor ( green or red ) - the rest are images that "fit" which i took with my IXUS 80 - and my IXUS is much more like flying and taking pictures like these :-)
But it gets even worse. In Android beginning I did most stuff with ListViews and icons from android.R.drawable:

Now with big steps deep into the dark J2ME area. There I did nearly everything via an LCD+4way-input style interface but with light and dark theming - voice output and a lot of nifty useful things:

and finally this is the very beginning - just plain text writing values from the UAS ( MK at this time ) and the insight that the RC and the Mobile belong together:

DUBwise for UAVTalk

There is now a new Version of DUBwise - this Blog-Post intends to give some background and insight about this new thingy.

Why UAVtalk?

UAVTalk is an open protocol designed for communicating with UAVs. It is originated by the great OpenPilot-Project but can also be used in other projects. It is very efficient and flexible by using xml for the protocol description but raw binary values for transfer.

Why a new version?

To be honest, I tried to make the recent DUBwise speak UAVtalk but I failed badly. This has two main reasons: #1 DUBwise is grown wild over about 2 years and especially with its roots in J2ME and the MikroKopter Protocol. I have to confess that it has grown to a big and fragile beast. #2 When I really started the project I was on a backpacking trip to the other side of the world which consumed and is consuming a lot of my time and abilities.

I realised that way to late after wasting a lot of precious time walking in the wrong direction. But better now than never I started DUBwise for UAVTalk as a new project when I had the van all for myself for three weeks. What does that mean for the user:

- no J2ME support ( as this was the biggest problem with the DUBwise code base - perhaps I will do a minimal J2ME version when I have a week in a dark cellar, but just because my UAVTalk protocol code had J2ME still in mind and to justify the pain and uglyness of that )

- very limited functionality on the start ( The initial version in the market has only a UAVObject Browser and Audio Voice output - but even that little bit could help on the field so I am releasing it now as it is)

That is bad for the user on one side, but on the other it is better in the long-run because I also gain more flexibility and am not bound to old ideas. For the example of the Audio Voice Output ( StatusVoice ) this means that the user can not only switch on and off stuff that is spoken statically - he can also define text blocks which can contain UAVObjects that are spoken. That is a very flexible approach and so much closer to the flexible OpenPilot way of thinking.

Release steps:

I uploaded the version to the market and commited the rest of the protocol stuff to the OpenPilot repository. I released the protocol stuff ( juavtalk and juavobjects ) in their svn repo with "OpenPilot Team" as author and unter the GPL but I will stick with my non military cc license for the DUBwise code. I will publish the DUBwise code as usual on my github account - but I need to do a cleanup first and I am going to a 5day-ish backcountry hiking trip now, so there could be a delay with that and the reply from me - but are now probably used to that fact since as a backpacker now I am not on my PC 24/7 anymore at this moment ( will change ) ..

Forecast:

As I said for approx. 5 days I will be in the bush without equipment the next time, but after that I will try to reply to the feedback. After that I will build a screen to show an artificcial horizon and values. I will use the same mechanism I produced for the StatusVoice to pick UAVObjects to display. These are the two things which are used most in the MK-DUBwise Version so I will polish them first ( like adding conditions to the StatusVoice blocks ) before adding more features. It is getting colder and colder here in New Zealand so I think I will find more time for coding now.

My Android Market Stats

DUBwise with QMK Communicator

DUBwise can now ( V0.77 ) handle the Protocol wrapper from KeyOz for the QMK Communicator:

DUBwise 4 Android Screenshots

with special thanx to Stefano Sanna & Emanuele Di Saverio for the android bluetooth lib that makes it possible to use DUBwise with Android Phones < 2.0

6km DUBwise Connection

Holger showed up with a nice improvement of the Range-Extender which gives the possibility to have more than 6km distance between the MK and the Mobile-Phone. The related Forum Post is in german, but perhaps you can see on the Pictures what it its all about ( Hint: big antenna ).

DUBwise J2ME Installer

With J2ME there is always the trouble with lots of JAR and JAD Files to handle device differences. It's theoretically possible to write a one-fits-all application in J2ME - but only with a lot of drawbacks. One big problem ist the usage of special APIs or profiles. The other big thing is that you have to include different ressources for the same thing to (really) 'work' on the device. Handling these problems on the device leads to very big and slow applications. Keep in mind that some people still pay a lot of $$$ for mobile bandwith and/or have slow devices. Thats why one-fits-all jar's are very rare and DUBwise isn't one of it. But it leads to problems in finding the right jar/jad for a lot of people. And until now this problem was solved by a human (me) by answering questions from users. But I like the idea of letting computers or machines do the monotone work ..-)

The most common solution to this problem out there are device lists - but these lists are never complete and need a lot of maintenance (there are a lot of devices emerging every month). The solution for DUBwise is the "DUBwise Installer" which is a small (<10kb) one-fits-hopefully-all application which assembles information about the device, selects the right jar/jad combination and gives the possibility to install it.
This is an easy way for users, but the coders side had some stepping stones. Now i had to build all possible combinations - and this was more of a problem than it sounds because there are 3456 combinations possible actually:
6 - sound packs
*6 - image packs
*3 - firmware packs
*2 - bluetooth usage
*2 - cldc1.1 or cldc1.0 usage
*2 - jsr179 usage
*2 - FileConnection API usage
*2 - deviceControl usage
----
=3456 Jars

This is more than one Gigabyte of jar and jad files and took ~6 houres to build on my Core Duo. Reducing the diversity was not an option for me - so i had to work on Filesize ( i didn't want to crash the svn server on the host project) and on compiling speed.
First tests with my standard packers bzip/bzip2 where very disappointing because they did not siginificantly decrease the size - the very minimum i got where ~800MB - and i had a lot less in my mind because i thought that the entropy is not very high and i can compress this content very good (i could explain why verbally but im not able to write it down ..). Then i searched the net a bit to find a better packer - i stumbled over 7zip - but the tests on the site i found only showed a small difference (which is anyway good for the content they tested - but not the jump i searched for). So i gave it a try and the results where amazing - I got a 17MB File with the default settings and compressing/decompressing are rather fast.
The next problem was the build time - until now i had no problem with it because it was less than 10s/build which is ok for building an app - but not ok for building an app 3456-times ..
The most time consuming part were the jumps to ANT where the sources are preprocessed, compiled and stuff. Now i do this only when the code is changed and just bring the right ressources into the jar otherwise.

Links:
- jar and jad of the Installer
- Source Code of the Installer

DUBwise Graph Speedup

The Sensor-Graph in DUBwise ( actual trunk ) is now much faster and the speed is adjustable:


DUBwise Graph speedup from ligi on Vimeo.

DUBwise ScreenCast Test

I am trying to make a screencast of DUBwise - this is a first result ( sorry for the poor audio ):

DUBwise screencast test from ligi on Vimeo.

DUBwise RC-Mount

Since i build the DUBwise Range extender - there are some new usecases in which i use dubwise while the MultiKopter is in the air. For that i needed a mount that i have my hands free for flying. This is the mount i build from parts i found in my Hobby-Room ( price of parts <5$ ):









weight of 87g with sun-protection - which is very ok for mounting on the RC:

DUBwise Range Extender

Finally i had some time for a Project which was in my mind a long time - the DUBwise Range extender.




The Bluetooth Modules in Mobile Phones are very limited in Range ( for reasons of power consumption and size) - which is OK for normal usage of Mobile Phones but was a problem for some use-cases of DUBwise.
The range extender is a little box for the jacket which contains one Zigbee-Pro module ; a Bluetooth Module and power supply. Zigbee and BT are crossed ( rx=>tx ; tx=>rx ).






Now I connect to the BT module in my jacket with the Mobile Phone ( which is <10m in range normaly ) and the (long) distance to the MikroKopter is Made by a ZigBee Pro connection. ( specifyed range ideally by 1mile / 1.6 km )

Beside the range there is one more advantage. I can leave ZigBee on the MK permanently - I dont have to switch between Bluetooth for DUBwise usage and ZigBee for Riddim ...

DUBwise for Android SDK 0.9-r1

I stopped working on DUBwise for Android while they kept the actual SDK secret under NDA's. Yesterday Google finally released Android SDK 0.9-r1. So i checked if the old DUBwise version could be installed on the new SDK and it didnt work - nothing else was to expect ;-) Compiling with the new SDK was blocked by 31 Errors resulting in API-Changes ( e.g. Bitmap.width() => Bitmap.getWith() ) - I fixed those Errors and then I ran into singing-issues - which could be fixxed by creating a new build.xml via activityCreator.py.
So finally DUBwise is running with the new SDK:

DUBwise v0.45

This Weekend i had some time for DUBwise. There was an bug open with DUBwise and FC V0.69. This one is Fixed with DUBwise 0.45 in the SVN

DUBwise on HackedGadgets

DUBwise appeared on HackedGadgets ( filed under Complex Hacks ,-):

link
I've read this site for over one year now - it always inspired me - so now I'm proud to be mentioned there.

DUBwise Orientation Display & Speech Voltage Output @ Android Version

DUBwise Cockpit & Voice Output on the Android Plattform from ligi on Vimeo.

DUBwise Discussion

and i don't understand anything - but there are many funny chars and my project:

LINK

If anyone can translate this - or can give just a hint what they are talking about it would be very cool if you drop me a line ..-)

Video: DUBwise on Android MotorTest

better quality http://www.vimeo.com/905980

Android DUBwise Screenshots

I've put some ScreenShots of DUBwise for Android here. A Screencast will follow but i have problems making the video - i'm just a coder - no artist or speaker ;-)

Android Developer Challenge Submission

I submitted the Android Port of DUBwise to the Android Developer Challenge:



I wonder how "some time" is defined - I want to kow how they react ;-)
There are some mistakes in the PDF and in the app I submitted but i had to submit before deadline to be save - i had no deadline time info since the nice Timeout-Display on anddev.org broke with the site ( I get Forbidden Err) but i hope the Concept counts

new DUBwise banner

Im not an expert in GFX - but i have played with Gimp a bit to get an better DUBwise Banner:




btw. there are now over 4000 Downloads for DUBwise on GetJar !-)