Atom motherboard

Here is the board and its case.
The 1 GB CF is a bit too small, I'll get a bigger one soon.
Also, the holes for the 2.5" disk do not match my 44 pin cable length, so I'll create new holes for it.

Robotic Crawler Video

Olivier made a video of his HSP Crawler first run, which I edited and put on dailymotion, so here it is :

Don't know how it will handle the 1kg Atom motherboard on top (we might break the weakest parts...), but looks promising...

Unmanned Vehicle Project

With Philippe we have the project, since a very long time, to build an mobile camera, well, let's say a robot !
There's a lot of robot projects around the net, but one of the main identified problem is their lack of "agility".
That's why, for our first tests, we have prefered to choose a well proven basis instead of an "university project", the HSP Crawler : http://www.hispeedmodel.com/product.asp?bianhao=94880
Here in it's original configuration as i have received it :

JPEG and PNG thumbnailing

In need for a fast and good looking thumbnailing solution for PNG and JPEG bitmaps, I came across this interesting article about Python's PIL and its rivals (Epeg and Imagemagick), so I decided to bench these solutions myself (even more since the various possible resizing methods were not tested).

For my bench, the thumbnail size is 320x200, which is quite a big thumbnail, but why not... (time is in seconds)







I'm no Python fanboy, but it looks like Python Image Library (in Bicubic mode) offers the best ratio speed/quality when you need to create thumbnails from jpeg and png.

Cable goes HD

Now I have access to HD channels (720p)... and still a good connectivity.

[Netlantis] New Server

I've just finished building a new server for Netlantis.

It has the following specs :
1 x Intel e8500 CPU
4 x 2 GB RAM PC6400 CL4
2 x Gigabyte iRAM 4 GB (in RAID 0)
2 x Seagate 250 GB HDD (in RAID 1)
1 x Seagate 250 GB spare HDD

Because of the size of the iRAM (and the bad design of this ASUS P5Q-Premium motherboard) I had to build some custom pieces (which was actually fun) and to use a 13 cm flexible PCI riser (bought on LinITX).

Here's what the server looks like :



If I were to build such a system now (I have my iRAM since 1 year now), I would choose an HyperDrive5 16GB drive... read more here. It has a disk (actually a compact flash) for backups (which is to me a better idea than a battery), has a better architecture, and is less expensive.

[Thoughts] Snow in Paris

Such a nice sunny morning in Paris, with a bit of snow...