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code Music programming qt Recommended Software

Touch up your sound with SoundTouch [w/code]

Screen Shot 2014-10-13 at 11.55.42 AM
So I needed to speed up / slow down an audio stream I had (speech generated with Flite TTS) and naively I thought it would suffice to simply sample it at the right intervals and interpolate.
I quickly discovered that just re-sampling won’t do because changing frequency also changes pitch proportionally. And then I discovered the world of Time Scaling in audio and it’s many algorithms and approaches to change the tempo without changing pitch.
To my surprise there were a number of ready made free libraries that do it, but the first one I tried – RubberBand – did not work out, it had too many dependencies I simply couldn’t be bothered compiling it for the Mac. But SoundTouch, well it had a Homebrew formula so it won by default.
I wrote a little simple wrapper around it, that interfaces nicely with Qt.
Let’s see what’s going on there

Categories
code electronics work

Simple ATTiny85 USB board

IMG_20140623_121908_fixI needed to create a small, cheap USB-enabled circuit to serve as a key logger, and I’ve found some nice projects online that explain how to do this.
I found out you could use an ATTiny85 to run the V-USB software USB stack, and I only needed the one input pin to gather data (it’s going to be a USB “That was easy” button).
Since this was done so many times before, I will be brief, and try to point out problems I had instead of a regular tutorial.

Categories
code programming python school tips

GDoc/LaTeX compilation GUI with Tkinter/Python [w/ code]

¡Hola mis amigos!
I’m learning spanish, but I’m also annoyed with collaborating on LaTeX papers. That’s why I’ve created the GDoc-LaTeXifier so the syntax will be clear when I collaborate on a paper with a remote friend.
But now we both want to compile a PDF on our machines. So I’ve created the tiny shell script that downloads the paper and runs PDFLaTeX.
The problem is that this opens a new terminal window and runs the script. I’ve been able to sort it out so that it closes the terminal window when it’s done, by on my friend’s mac it doesn’t, so he ends up with a ton of open windows.
Enter – the GDoc/LaTeX compiler GUI.

Categories
code graphics opencv programming

Simple NURBS renderer [w/ code]

Screen Shot 2013-12-18 at 11.01.23 AMDon’t you just love scouring the web for a piece of simple code, come up short and then just write it yourself? Well that was the case with NURBS for me. These simple curvy lines, why doesn’t anyone just dish out a straightforward implementation of them? Well, now you have it. I wrote a simple renderer that reads a DXF file with NURBS (from Rhino3D) using DXFLIB, although the DXF file format is super easy to parse, and renders them to an image with OpenCV.

Categories
code programming

Simple HID driver to save an old AIPTEK HyperPen tablet trashing

rect3948So I have this incredibly old and stupidly cheap AIPTEK tablet (like a Wacom, only Chinese and cheap) that is so outdated it practically has almost no existence online. Why did I bring this item across the atlantic? I have no answer, but it’s here anyways and I can’t seem to bring myself to trash it. Of course no drivers are available for it so I wrote a tiny simple driver using the great libHID library from Brandon Fosdick. It was painless, and my old tablet was saved.

Categories
code tips

LaTeX colorization in Google Docs with AppScript [w/code]

Screen Shot 2013-12-03 at 7.38.53 PMThere’s a fantastic way to collaborate when writing an academic paper in LaTeX – using Google Docs. LaTeX is all text anyway, so collaborating over GDocs is straightforward, but alas there is no colorization to make it like a good LaTeX editor… Fortunately there’s AppScript to help us!

Categories
code

Creating a searchable PDF with opensource tools ghostscript, hocr2pdf and tesseract-ocr

I bet creating searchable PDFs has been done many times over, even so I’d like to share the way I did it recently with strictly open source tools. The pipeline is simple: GS to separate the PDF to pages, tesseract OCR to extract text, hocr2pdf to create a merged PDF and GS again to bundle everything back to unified PDF. If you’re creating a PDF from scanned books, this project may also be of help: unpaper
Edit 5/21/2014: I’ve had good experience using Scantailor, which is available on homebrew for the Mac. And also, I’ve submitted hocr2pdf to homebrew as part of the exact-image library (the name of the formula is “exact-image”).

Categories
3d code graphics opengl programming

Vertex array objects with shaders on OpenGL 2.1 & GLSL 1.2 [w/code]

rect3826Phew. Finally this is working!
I’ve been confined to OpenGL 2.1 and GLSL 1.2 on the Mac since the Qt OpenGL context will not pick up the core OpenGL profile (a big problem on it’s own) and get an OpenGL 3.x and GLSL 1.5… So it’s back to old school GL’ing, but anyway some things are working, albeit they have their quirks.
So for all of you battling the OpenGL 2.1 war, here’s how I made VAOs work with a very simple shader.

Categories
3d code graphics gui opencv programming qt vision

Moving to Qt on the SfM-Toy-Library project

Qt GUI for SfMToyLibFor those of you still interested, I’ve made the move to using Qt and QGLViewer in the SfM-Toy-Lib project. Getting rid of PCL dependency (I think it’s a bloated library), and burying FLTK long in the past, I feel much better about it now.
Get it on github: https://github.com/royshil/SfM-Toy-Library

Categories
code programming qt

CMake build for QExtSerialPort for all those lonely cross-platform Qt4 projects

rect6492So QSerialPort only became part of Qt core on Qt5.1, but what should all those Qt4 projects do for an easy serial port access?
There is the excellent QExtSerialPort project, but it only has a QMake build system, and I like CMake!
Not to worry, a CMake build is easy to set up…