When downloading movies from the internet using a torrent client, I found it useful to make a script to automatically download subtitles to the movie (I always forgot the right filebot command and was too lazy downloading from a browser).

This semester I’m writing my master’s project, which seems to be a time when procrastination thrives. When setting up Ubuntu on my school PC i had to decide what to use for desktop image. I therefore wrote a script to update the desktop background to the most recent XKCD comic strip:

Computer Vision is in many ways the ultimate sensor, and has endless potential applications to robotics. Me and 2 classmates (Vegar Østhus and Martin Stokkeland ) did a project in Computer Vision at UCSB and wrote a program to recognize and track finger movements.

Vim is a very popular text editor for Unix-like systems, written by Bram Moolenaar. I have been using Vim for a couple of years now and have found some nice features that make it more efficient for my use.

When using the University WiFi I found it annoying that I always had to login through a browser using my university username and password. Using the simple scripts below, this bothersome procedure can be done automatically each time the computer discovers a network.

I am pretty new to Android and decided to play around with the sensors. I always find accelerometers fun to play with, and like to visualize the sensor reading through a real time plot. In the java-script for the android app below, the acceleration in the x axis is read and streamed through a TCP socket to the PC over wlan. A simple python server script reads the data from a socket and writes it to a perl script, logging the data in GnuPlot, and thus setting my personal record for mixing different languages.

I wanted to animate a furuta pendulum, and include the real dynamics in the animation. First off, what is a Furuta pendulum? It is a pendulum with two degrees of freedom (see wikipedia) where, from a control engineers’ point of view, one is interested in stabilizing the second arm of the pendulum, by applying torque to the first arm. This poses quite an interesting control problem (much the same as in e.g. a segway). First lets look at the dynamimcs of the furuta pendulum: