spench.net

The aviation tracking system ("Modez") and an SBS-1 (thanks to Matt Robert) with its Base Station software were run side-by-side to undertake a rough performance comparison. For various technical notes on the SBS-1, including sampling the baseband output with an LFRX daughterboard, please see the page on my wiki. If you're interested in the photos of the major outdoor test where the SBS-1 was pitted against Modez, visit the album on my gallery.

The USRP is an Software Defined Radio created by Ettus Research. I have one with a WBX daughterboard.

For various notes and experimental results concerning the USRP, please have a look at the dedicated page on my wiki.

My Software Defined Radio experiments featured in GQ Australia (April/May) 2012!

SDR-powered Aviation Mapper is now LIVE! Click here to use it.

The Aviation Mapper launch video

Have a look at my Hi-Def intro video on using SDR on HF that was featured on Slashdot:
(The 'cheap SDR' they refer to can be found on my wiki for GNU Radio/Linux and Windows.)

The Software Defined Radio (SDR) I currently use is the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) 1 made by Ettus Research (in a custom housing!):

I've used it for several of my projects, including an aviation tracking system with a live streaming 3D Google Earth front-end:

Demonstration of BorIP network streaming between HDSDR and GNU Radio using USRP 1:

Example of HDSDR using USRP:

Two streams of data are of interest: trace information from the mobile and position information from a GPS receiver.

To acquire position information, I used a commercial Navman device, which was modified to boot into WinCE and transmit NMEA data over a TCP connection (via Bluetooth Dial-Up Networking and GPS2Blue) to a virtual serial port on my laptop, which in turn was connected to gpsd. Full details can be found here.

I was disappointed to find that the improved Linux Kernel Orinoco drivers do not report power levels via the standardised iwconfig 'monitor mode'. When the iwpriv 'monitor' mode was available, Prism II packets were sent from the driver to userland. These packets contained extra information reported by the hardware, such as per-packet signal & noise levels. I think having SNR measurements is one of the most useful features of Kismet, as it allows to you roughly determine the direction to a network based on signal power. Therefore I took the old-style monitor mode code and transplanted it into the modern driver (in kernel version 2.6.23.9). Now both monitor modes are accessible. Kismet picks the older one (Prism II packets) first, before trying the standardised mode.

Without too much fuss, the Kismet SNR meter is back - for example:

TokyoCabinet (TC) is a wonderful open-source key-value pair database library by Mikio Hirabayashi, part of his TokyoProducts suite. TokyoTyrant (TT) is the networked portion of it (i.e. the database client & server). Since I am working on a project in Visual Studio under Windows and set out to use TC over the network, I needed to access the TT client API with MSVC.

I a gave presentation at Dorkbot Sydney (24/02/2009) on the Eyesweb Visual Programming Language. It was an overview that exemplified some cool things you could do using live video, iPhones (with accelerometers), mrmr, OSC, and multiple Eyesweb nodes on a network.

T_Visionarium was officially launched on 08/01/2006 as part of the 2008 Sydney Festival. Please read my blog post about it. Here are some pictures:

The festival banner:

Crowd before the speeches:

The digital maestros (Matt McGinity & I):

09/01/2007 - SBS World News:

August 2006 - Channel Nine News:

This series of pages summarises the contribution I made to TVisionarium Mk II, an immersive eye-popping stereo 3D interactive 360-degree experience where a user can search through a vast database of television shows and rearrange their shots in the virtual space that surrounds them to explore intuitively their semantic similarities and differences.

It is a research project undertaken by iCinema, The iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research at the University of New South Wales (my former uni) directed by Professor Jeffrey Shaw and Dr Dennis Del Favero. More information about the project itself, Mk I and the infrastructure used, is available online.

I was contracted by iCinema to develop several core system components during an intense one month period before the launch in September of 2006. My responsibilities included writing the distributed MPEG-2 video streaming engine that enables efficient clustered playback of the shots, a distributed communications library, the spatial layout algorithm that positions the shots on the 360-degree screen and various other video processing utilities. The most complex component was the video engine, which I engineered from scratch to meet very demanding requirements (more details are available on the next page).

Luckily I had the pleasure of working alongside some wonderfully talented people: in particular Matt McGinity (3D graphics/VR guru), as well as Jared Berghold, Ardrian Hardjono and Tim Kreger.

This started with my desire to build a Woktenna.
Of course you can't very well put a PCMCIA wireless card at the focal point of a cooking wok!

So the alternative is using a USB WiFi adapter that can hang on the end of a USB extension cable and
introduce minimal analog signal loss and USB is digital!

Despite the fact is says "Linux compatible" on the box, it wasn't immediately possible to do what I wanted to do,
which is: monitor mode!
With monitor mode, I'd be able to point the woktenna around and pick up the beacon frames of distant APs.

I found two drivers available for this device:
one over at BerliOS,
and the other at SourceForge.

My friend Rafal Kolanski and I decided one night to put our gigabit network cards to the test and measure how quickly a user-space program could generate packets and how many would be discarded before the destination's NIC would receive them. Therefore we wrote a small Linux program to complement my Broadcast Flooder, which I had previously written to test other aspects of my network.

Although there exists a plethora of programs that count lines of code, I thought I would write my own. It is designed to analyse C/C++ code and ignore whitespace, // and /**/ comments (both the single and multi-line sort). It also counts the number of FIXME's one has left in their code. Other languages (eg: Javascript, assembly) that also use such commenting conventions are compatible too.