Simple NURBS renderer [w/ code]
Don’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.
So I have this incredibly old and stupidly cheap AIPTEK tablet (like a Wacom, only Chinese and cheap) that is so outdated it practically has almost no existence online.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.
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”).

Phew. 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.
For 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
So 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…
Trying out a new theme
Hi Guys,
After a while we are trying to “lighten” things up. Let us know what you think
Roy & Arnon
I haven’t found a CMake module to find FFMPEG libraries, so I wrote one (a while back) and I thought to share it.
It will look very hard in order to find it on *nix and Win all the same, and I found it useful.
Get the gist: https://gist.github.com/royshil/6318407