NAPALMCORE

USBasp & Noise Troubles

2011-04-22T16:31:00.062+01:00

USBasp is a small circuit to flash atmel processors which uses the USB port, but since the USB communication isn't a feature available in the processor by default, it must use the V-USB firmware/drivers to deal with it.

Never ever do this for the USB data lines !

After assembling the circuit i had a few problems trying to understand why it did work on a older machine and didn't work on my recent laptops, using dmesg on the newer laptops i got these messages :

[ 7486.876197] usb 3-2: device descriptor read/64, error -71
[ 7487.105059] usb 3-2: device descriptor read/64, error -71
[ 7487.320153] usb 3-2: new low speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 4
[ 7487.441052] usb 3-2: device descriptor read/64, error -71
[ 7487.664184] usb 3-2: device descriptor read/64, error -71

And with the older machine using the lsusb command :
Bus 003 Device 016: ID 16c0:05dc VOTI shared ID for use with libus

It seems the usb controler was unable to read the device description, but after an week and some google searches i found that the electromagnetic interference affects a lot with the circuit. To reduce this problem i rewired the circuit and replace the usb port with a short usb male cable instead of the female port and the problem was fixed. (And the circuit also works fine with an usb extension cable)

Rewired version

Back wiring

It appears that the Intel USB controller is more exigent with the quality of the signal than the SiS controller !

Ubuntu/Linux Commands

2011-04-22T15:28:00.017+01:00

A list of useful commands which i keep forgetting :

Misc
sudo su // Change user to root

Installers
sudo apt-get install build-essential // C++ support
sudo apt-get install freeglut3-dev // FreeGLUT and OpenGL support
sudo apt-get install avrdude // AVR firmware upload tool
sudo apt-get install gcc-avr // AVR atmel processors compiler
sudo apt-get install avr-libc // C lib for AVR atmel processors

Tools
top // Real-time list of processes
ps // Show running processes
chmod a+rwx fileorfolder -R // Change permissions of all files to read/write recursively
dmesg // Get drivers messages
dmesg | grep tty // Get serial ports drivers messages
lsusb // Get usb devices
tail -f /var/log/messages // Similar to dmesg | tail
otool -hv library.a // Get compiled objects architecture
du -k filename // Get file size
ldd filename // Get shared libraries dependencies

Network
nslookup address // Get the IP address of a domain name
dig address // DNS servers interrogator
traceroute / tracert address // Show the path of a packet to a certain address
ping address // Check if address is reachable

Last update 1:47 23/12/2011

AutoBFont

2011-02-26T19:40:00.000Z

AutoBFont is small tool for text rendering on OpenGL(and can be easily ported to DX) with bitmap fonts, providing a way to draw perfectly aligned text with bitmap sheets created in Fireworks/Photoshop/Gimp and Inkscape. The tool is composed by two parts : an generator and a loader class.

The monospace font with and without a drop shadow(effect created in Inkscape) rendered with the help of autobfont

The generator computes each character limits from the character sheet bitmap, which should be a RGBA TGA image with no compression. It should have 16 columns by 16 rows to fill with characters and the size of the image should be power of 2 (1024x1024 for example). If only the first 8 rows are used, the remaining rows can be used to fit a "bold" version of the font.

The generator program requires 3 mandatory arguments :

-i CHARACTER_CONVERSION_MAP.TXT

-m CHARACTER_BITMAP_SHEET.TGA

-o OUTPUT_MAP.TXT

Optional arguments :

-b Compute the Bold characters in the last 8 rows.

-h VALUE Set all characters line height (the default value is 3*CELL_SIZE/4).

-t VALUE Set alpha threshold value, improves character boundaries detection (default value is 50, max is 255).

The conversion map is a text file with the ASCII character for each cell in the bitmap sheet, although it's limited to Latin characters, the generator and loader can be changed to use wchar_t structure instead of char for other languages such as japanese. All the characters in the bitmap font should by white (if you want to use color blending in OGL, but isn't mandatory) with a background transparent (below the alpha threshold value).

The loader class is available in the demo.cpp class, which loads the generated output map and the renders the characters with OpenGL.

To convert the SVG to TGA use gimp with no RLE compression and bottom left origin.

The typical commands to compile and run the generator and demo on linux:

>make

>./generator -i ct_PT.txt -m font_ubuntu.tga -o font_ubuntu_map.txt

>./demo font_ubuntu_map.txt font_ubuntu.tga

DOWNLOAD

Logotype

2011-02-08T00:04:00.122Z

Ok, a little explanation about the logo i finished recently.

For me the demoscene "thing" started around the year 1992 before i even understood what the heck "demoscene" meant or had any skills to do anything with computers beyond playing games. Back then my sister had received her first computer, a 486DX with 4MB of RAM. After some months she got some games from her friends and some of them included some cracktro apps, which back then where a confusing concept for me, since they had no propose beyond showing the artwork and moving letters plus some audio.

NapalmCore logo created with Blender 2.56

The first cracktro i saw was the TEKNO SKULL by TDT / TRSi, which impressed me since i was a little kid and had a particular fear of skeletons. In the course of the time, with the influence of the cyberpunk culture in animes and movies from the 80's & 90's, the fear was lost and this goreish characteristic remained as a symbol from those years and the culture it self.

The logotype creation started back then at the Euskal 2008 for the 3d competition, at the time it only featured the skull. Recently i decided to recycle the model, remaking the skull with better detail and adding the extra details, such as the mechanical stuff and the sun glasses. I also was inspired by latest razor 1911 prods which have an unique new-old-school style, mimicking the 90's hardware with the latest graphics effects, for example, the grid pattern effect can be seen on the "StarCraft 2 cracktro" or the "Pirates of the 777 seas". The sunglasses are due to the influences of Motoko Kusanagi from the ghost in the shell :)

With this, i can finally conclude by saying that the name of this blog/website/demoscene group reflects the unique cyberpunk culture from the last years of the 20 century, plus the cracking culture which evolved to the demoscene which we have currently.

DIY Pseudo "iMac"

2011-01-15T18:44:00.002Z

This was the situation : I have an laptop (HP-DV5000) with 5 years which still works pretty well apart from the broken LCD, which was due it had already been at Breakpoint, Inercia, Euskal and almost all the college period in my backpack. So the LCD started to show some weird vertical coloured lines which would require a new LCD, which is almost the price of a new laptop...

After i started my current job, which is purely macintosh based, i noticed the iMac where actually an interesting concept to keep all the cables inside the computer. So i though maybe i can do something similar to my old laptop !

The basic idea was to mount the laptop behind an LCD monitor, my monitor (Sony SDM-S93) had a sliding plate behind which helped to mount the metal holder bars. After that I only needed some sort of electronic connection to power up the laptop, since the power button would be hidden under the lid.

The electronic circuit consists in a relay which is activated when we press the front power/iddle button in the monitor, the relay acts as the power switch of the laptop. I could have connected directly the two switches, but that wouldn't be very safe and healthy for both the devices. The circuit steals 12V from the monitor PSU, which is always available whatever the current state(idle or on). On idle state the available current is very low, because the PSU switching circuit is working at a very small duty cycle to use less mains power, so the laptop switching circuit must be power efficient.


Monitor PSU and control circuit plus my circuit in the breadboard	The compact version of the laptop switching circuit

After building the circuit I only needed to add some cables to the laptop which would intercept the power button signal, using my trusty Dremel i drilled a path through the plastic and used the hole of one screw to pass the cables. The cables end with a male conector to help mount and unmount the laptop from the suport, or even still use the laptop .. as a laptop :)


Drilled path to pass the cables

The end result isn't a iMac, but still, I managed to recycle old hardware to create a new "computer" which manages to accomplish all my current needs (Blender, development, office and minecraft :P). It was still has some issues due to idle/on/off state of monitor, when it's on iddle mode and we press the power button, it powers up the laptop and powers down the monitor (iddle->off), but pressing it again it powers up the monitor without powering down the laptop. I could easily fix this by intercepting also the monitor power switch and with some extra logic, but for now it's enough !


Back view	Front view

Blender Armatures and Exporting

2010-12-26T23:04:00.007Z

One of the things i have spent many time trying to understand is the Blender animation data for the armatures. Since the quaternions and translation vectors have their own special space, which depends on the bone orientation and roll vector as shown in how armatures work, it isn't always easy to translate the animations to other formats like collada, fbx, bvh or to export the data for real-time applications.

The first thing to take in consideration is the matrix theoretical layout used to describe armature chain, like OpenGL, Blender uses the translation vector in a column, which may create some confusion. One typical example of this issue is the OpenGL (2) and DirectX (1) shaders, at machine level, they are done in the same way (see the gluProject source from Mesa), but from the programmers high level, the syntax is quite the opposite for the following cases :

out.pos = mul(float4(in.vertex,1.0), WorldViewProj ) (1)

gl_Position = WorldViewProj * vec4(vertex, 1.0) (2)

Keeping this in mind we rewrite the blender armature expression the way i like (3).
b.matrix = IK(b) * Constrains(b) * actions(b) * bonemat(b) * head(b) * tail(b-1) * b.parent.matrix (3)

Ignoring the IK and Constrains we have something similar to what i use for my armatures (4), but still, the action data (quaternions and translations) are affected by the bonemat matrix, which disables the direct use of the animation data from blender.
bone.matrix = Scale(bone.scale) * Rotate(bone.quaternion) * Translate(bone.head+bone.translation) *Translate(bone.parent.tail-bone.parent.head)*bone.parent.matrix (4)

To fix this issue, i found this expression to be the solution to export Blender animation data for my applications and the bXporter API (5).

matArmatureSpace = b.matrix['ARMATURESPACE']

matInvArmatureSpace = Matrix(matArmatureSpace).invert()

rotFixed = (matInvArmatureSpace.rotationPart()* graphQuaternion.toMatrix()*

matArmatureSpace.rotationPart()).toQuat()

posFixed = (matInvArmatureSpace*
TranslationMatrix(graphPosition)*
matArmatureSpace.rotationPart()).translationPart() (5)

This peculiar transformation applies the transformation of the bone rest pose in armature space to the current action data, this way we get the bone animated in armature space, then by applying the inverse bone rest pose matrix, we get the the rotation and translation relative to bone space and independent of the bonemat matrix, enabling the use of the expression (4).

Currently i have even fixed the issue with the animation beziers with another solution which doesn't use Cardano solver like in Blender or ILM ones, which consists in recalculate the bezier coefficients, but that will be another blogpost :)

Event Report - FIBDA 2010

2010-11-11T21:01:00.015Z

This year event was dedicated to the 100th birthday of the portuguese republic, with many works related to the satire of portuguese people and the events during the implantation of the republic. It also exhibited some comics with almost 100 years, pretty well conserved !

This year there wasn't an official cosplay event, because there weren't enough conditions to support the event, but still some contestants still appeared. It had some awesome installations with comics and sculptures of some artists but in general it was a bit weaker in relation to last year. The japanese section was a bit short for my taste, but had a huge scroll exposed over the walls with a colab work of many artists. It also featured a video installation with an animation of ancient japanese drawings.

The courageous ones who still came to the event

1/2 of the wall scroll

I also bought the full collection of the GUNMM manga which i wasn't expecting to find and it was well worth the price, it's an specular cyberpunk story from the 90's, although it's a bit gore'ish :P

GUNMM Mangas Collection, 18 books

XNA 4.0 - Binary Model Loader

2010-10-13T11:55:00.003+01:00

So i was trying to avoid the standard xna pipeline classes to start porting some features of my "graphic engine" to XNA. The first thing i wanted was to render a model with my custom file format, the C# and the XNA API stood well to the task, allowing me to read a buffers of bytes from filestream and copying it to vertex and index buffer. But i still need an XBOX to test this :P

 public class CustomModel  
 {  
      int m_Vertices;  
      int m_Triangles;  
   
      byte[] m_VerticeData;  
      byte[] m_TrianglesData;  
   
      GraphicsDevice m_GraphicsDevice;  
      VertexBuffer m_VertexBuffer;  
      IndexBuffer m_IndexBuffer;  
   
      public CustomModel()  
      {  
           m_Vertices = 0;  
           m_Triangles = 0;  
      }  
   
      public void Render()  
      {  
           m_GraphicsDevice.SetVertexBuffer(m_VertexBuffer);  
           m_GraphicsDevice.Indices = m_IndexBuffer;  
           m_GraphicsDevice.DrawIndexedPrimitives(PrimitiveType.TriangleList, 0, 0, m_Vertices, 0, m_Triangles);  
   
           m_GraphicsDevice.SetVertexBuffer(null);  
           m_GraphicsDevice.Indices = null;  
      }  
   
      public void Load(GraphicsDevice graphics, ContentManager manager, string filename)  
      {  
           m_GraphicsDevice = graphics;  
   
           String StageIndexPath = manager.RootDirectory + "\\" + filename;  
   
           StreamReader st = new StreamReader(StageIndexPath);  
           BinaryReader bin = new BinaryReader(st.BaseStream);  
   
           m_Vertices = bin.ReadInt32();  
           m_Triangles = bin.ReadInt32();  
   
           m_VerticeData = new byte[m_Vertices * 32];  
           m_TrianglesData = new byte[m_Triangles * 12];  
   
           bin.Read(m_VerticeData, 0, m_Vertices * 32);  
           bin.Read(m_TrianglesData, 0, m_Triangles * 12);  
   
           bin.Close();  
           st.Close();  
   
           VertexDeclaration vdx = new VertexDeclaration(  
                new VertexElement(0, VertexElementFormat.Vector3, VertexElementUsage.Position, 0),  
                new VertexElement(12, VertexElementFormat.Vector3, VertexElementUsage.Normal, 0),  
                new VertexElement(24, VertexElementFormat.Vector2, VertexElementUsage.TextureCoordinate, 0)  
           );  
   
           m_VertexBuffer = new VertexBuffer(m_GraphicsDevice, vdx, m_Vertices, BufferUsage.None);  
           m_IndexBuffer = new IndexBuffer(m_GraphicsDevice, IndexElementSize.ThirtyTwoBits, 3 * m_Triangles, BufferUsage.None);  
   
           m_VertexBuffer.SetData<byte>(m_VerticeData);  
           m_IndexBuffer.SetData<byte>(m_TrianglesData);  
      }  
 }

Event Report - Euskal 2010

2010-10-10T15:15:00.010+01:00

Awesome place to sleep, if you still like concrete floor.

Yet again after one year of abstention the portuguese crew was back to Bilbao and Euskal, as usual our driver was Evil and is mighty mitsubishi, but this time we used a GPS to get there, although the roads in the frontier messed the GPS a bit :) , we arrived at 23pm local hours after leaving Porto at 10:30am.

As usual the place was full gamers and scene spirit kept being replaced by stupid videos on youtube at the big screen, which was the biggest mistake, if i wanted to see video on youtube i could stayed in home and didn't needed to waste 300€ on trips and food :(

This year we learned how to waste less money on food, we bought microwave food on the local supermarket and we heated it at the local party microwaves, 2.5€ per meal, a great deal!

The sleeping space was ... the same, the showers were ... the same. But the big issue was the first night, i tried to slept under the hall lights and it didn't work very well since i didn't even had a tent.

During the party i bought an external hard drive with esata port with a good price tag, but the first impressions weren't the best, since the hard drive blew up in my face, which was interesting :), but the guys at the shop gave me a new kit and everything was fine. It's a 1-Tera Byte HD were i store my projects that i need a faster access, since the USB drives are awfully slow.

The demoparty was meh, no demoshow during the event, the competitions didn't went well to evil and me, only xernobyl managed win something and still he had to share the price with someone, because in Euskal it's pretty common the entry's classification being tied(like the ASD and XPSV demos, seriously wtf ?)

My 3D art entry didn't got any prize, i admit it still needed some improvements, but i didn't agree with the second and third place, oh well ...

The party is becoming less and less interesting for sceners, although the prizes are interesting, it can't be the unique reason to attend to the party, for me it's was the final Euskal, if the opportunity appears in the near future, i will go to Main DemoParty.

At least it was good to see the spanish sceners, Ham, Stage7 and the guys markan and pope with their awesome laser demo, props for putting napalmcore in the greetings :)

In the last day me and jae went out to take photos in Bilbau, the city is amazing place, saldy we didn't had time to visit the Guggenheim.

Event Report - Portugal Tecnológico 2009

2010-10-10T15:01:00.003+01:00

In 15 October of 2009, i participated in the national technology event with my driving simulator, which was the fourth time in public events. It's always good to see how the people react to the game and it's a good chance to find new bugs and get more feedback. The only problem was the driving wheel, which didn't resist the fair.

The fair was also a excellent opportunity to see top tech from public and private companies, awesome fair indeed.

Event Report - FIBDA 2009

2010-10-10T14:58:00.011+01:00

In 7 of November 2009, i went to FIBDA (Festival Internacional de Banda desenhada da Amadora) event to see what was new in the comics panorama, national and international (especially the european ones). The shops hadn't a wide selection mangas, just standard shounen stuff, i also saw some Masamune Shirow (Rare!) posters, but i decided it was to much half-nacked girls to put on a wall :P. There was also the public release of the EVA 1.0 movie in DVD, there was some artwork and a huge Voice-Only Monolith.

That gun from EVA 1.01 movie

EVA 00

And for last i watched the cosplay competition, it keeps improving year by year !

Chun-Li

Event Report - Inercia 2010

2010-10-09T18:42:00.004+01:00

Awesome place to sleep, because you sleep in the hotel.

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Event Report - Euskal 2008

2010-10-09T18:40:00.007+01:00

Awesome place to sleep, if you like concrete floor.

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Mais um relato da viagem até ao mundo da demonscene estrangeira, desta vez até a cena espanhola a euskal. Essencialmente a Euskal é uma party de gamers e sacanço (mad uplink speed jesus), sendo os demosceners um ínfimo da população, mas com grande qualidade !

A viagem foi feita até Bilbau de carro, no Mitsubishi do Evil, com a participação de : xernobyl, breakneck, coxosclassic, zeroshift(je) e o Evil, com a paragem obrigatória no restaurante português em Chaves, antes de ir para Espanha(comida excelente diga-se de passagem).

Partindo as ~13h de Portugal, nas longas horas de carro, nunca ouve tempos mortos, sempre na conversa e a ouvir musica da scene e similares. Só chegamos lá pelas 10~11 (hora espanhola) e o local onde decorre a party é gigante, dava para enfiar a FIL dentro dela, é difícil explicar por palavras mais vale verem as imagens.

(Isto era o lado direito, o esquerdo é igual)

Em termos de condições, é muito melhor que a Breakpoint, existe um pavilhão adicional só para o pessoal dormir, um bar e telepizza para servir o pessoal.

Na scene estrangeira podemos contar com o Navis(ASD), o Iq(RGBA), Ham(Software Failure), Optimus, alguma malta dos XPLSV etc.

O local contava com varias bancas de venda de hardware para pc, por isso podia-se até construir um pc novo e levar para casa, eu comprei um candeiro de leds USB para as minhas noitadas de partycoding, havia tambem uma mostra de consolas old-school, e outras para jogar.

A nivel de compos, eu participei nas de 3d e Demo, o Evil atacou as de Musica e Demos 4k, o coxos atacou a Wild contudo acabou desqualificado devido a musica de uma banda que já nem existe, mas merece o maior premio, porque apesar de o pc dele ter dado o berro e ter se visto grego para o formatar, conseguio no ultimo dia fazer uma animação espectacular no Maya PLE.

Mas o seu esforço não foi em vão e num jogo que participou na secção old-school, acabou por ganhar um joystick de arcada XPTO!

(RULEZ)

A minha compo 3d, não valeu de grande coisa, visto que foi praticamente feita na party e nem usava texturas, mas era HARDCORE(gostava de ter sotaque japona para gritar isto), se bem que fui ultrapassado por umas varandas e umas casas de outros gajos, ainda não me cabe na cabeça o que uma varanda tem espirito de demoscene... se tive-se uns efeitos a LSD em cima ainda se entendia, mas prontos, não é por isso que o gato vai as filhoses.

A criação da demo foi muito estafante, apareceram muitos bugs nos shaders que me tramaram a vida e encravou algumas das minhas ideias, mas no geral tem umas ideias bacanas, uma musica do caraças, só precisa é de ser melhorada, mesmo assim rendeu-nos ~1200€ o que deu para pagar a viagem e voltar a breakpoint para o proximo ano.

Dormir algo épico na historia da demoscene.

Posso ainda referir que durante as horas de comer era costume encontrar o iq e o navis e meter conversa, ficamos a saber que eles são gajos normais, bacanos, mas fazem as melhores demos do mundo.

A única coisa que tenho a criticar é que os banhos era uma bosta, tinham agua por o lado, tudo ensopado, que era tramado mudar de roupa, além da agua fria.

A viagem de volta ainda foi melhor que a ida, foi tanta a conversa que nem parecia que tínhamos viajado quase até França e voltado.

------
Curiosidades :

O navis trabalha numa empresa de visualização gráfica medica (agora faz sentido de onde veio o modelo do coração da Lifeforce), o Optimus(figura épica da pouet) é um gajo bacano, fomos beber umas cervejas após ver as demos, pena o barulho, não deu para falar como deve ser.

No domínio do sacanço, a internet lá era um estoiro, por isso dava para sacar tudo o que se quizesse, um dos gajos que estava na fila da frente sacou durante 3 dias seguidos porno(e passava o resto do tempo a conferir a qualidade do dito cujo), mas o gajo que estava mesmo a minha frente sacava anime e eu acabei por ir sacar o mesmo anime que ele e rendeu bem, Soul Eater Rulez!

A party também contava com uma grande dose de Otakus e pessoal do cosplay, mas não vi nada porque passei a party inteira a programar :D

E foi isto !

Event Report - Inercia 2008

2010-10-09T18:38:00.004+01:00

An awfull place to sleep.

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Event Report - Breakpoint 2008

2010-10-09T18:37:00.007+01:00

An awfull place place to sleep, but you end up sleeping from how exhausted you are.
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Attending PT-Sceners : me, xernobyl, ps.

Party Report - Breeze 2007

2010-10-09T18:36:00.013+01:00

Reasonable place to sleep, but crappy bunk-beds.

This was the first demoscene party i attended, in lisbon, at the IPJ of Parque das Nações (old expo 98), the place is pretty easy to access from car, foot from Gare do Oriente or for those who came from Airplane, the entrance price was arround 5€.

The orgas were Jeenio, K0smiKhaoz and xernobyl.

The food was great, there was canteen with decent prices open at lunch and dinner time, plus a small bar.

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Attending Sceners : me, xernobyl, gr9yfox, ps, jeenio, dextrose, evil, Coder, K0smiKhaoz, RCAg, biovf, Breakneck, Garfield, Lord Anshar, kammutierspule, Filami and a guy who didn't pay the entry ticket.

Slengpung Photos