About

Activity Feed

Tom Kent replied to Adam Sauer's discussion Remote Village Aerial Photos
"In addition to whatever you decide to do with aerial imagery, I'd recommend just bringing a hand-held GPS unit that you have on whenever you're driving around the city.  Then (when you get back?) upload that to Open Street Map and trace the roads. …"
Mar 30, 2012
Tom Kent commented on mohammed's blog post Controlling via satellite
"If my memory serves me correctly from a study I did several years ago, Orbcomm is a store-and-froward satellite system.  When a satellite happens to pass overhead, you dump your data to it, it then will drop your data off at the next available…"
Feb 29, 2012
Tom Kent replied to eng.a.ramdan's discussion GPU CUDA programming
"I'm pretty sure that the panda board (looks similar to the beagle board) doesn't work with CUDA, which I believe is nvidia only.  Its possible that it will work with OpenCL, but I'd be a bit surprised there too.
 
When you have an actual nvidia GPU…"
Apr 6, 2011
Tom Kent replied to ip9's discussion Does anyone have any experience with CHDK
"Yeah, I've had good luck setting up repeated timed shots with my SD1000.  Once you read through the instructions on getting it setup, its really easy.  I think there are even scripts on the site already set for this, you just need to change the…"
Mar 26, 2011
Tom Kent replied to DaveyWaveyBunsenBurner's discussion Video encryption?
"AtoD on a full video stream isn't trivial. There are some fairly cheap cards for PCs, laptops, usb, etc. that can do it though.
 
(sorry, this should have been a response to the above post, not at the root level)"
Jan 26, 2011
Tom Kent replied to DaveyWaveyBunsenBurner's discussion Video encryption?
"The problem with encrypting video is that most video streams used are analog. The first step would be to make the video digital, which requires a digital connection (802.11X, cellular, etc) to the airplane. If you have that, then it is simple to…"
Jan 26, 2011
Tom Kent commented on Andre S's blog post First version of Yagcs (combined GCS and mission generator) released
"What version of qextserialport's mecurial repo are you using? It appears the latest stuff gets rid of the qextserialbase.h that you're depending on (and moves everything to the ./src subdirectory)."
Oct 11, 2010
Tom Kent replied to Noland's discussion Realtime DGPS with ublox and GPSTk lib processing, relative <1m?
"Poor man's GPS only works if you have a fix on the exact same satellites at the exact same time (and sometimes not even then).

That said, I believe that the ublox binary protocol has the information you could use to create your own actual DGPS…"
Oct 6, 2010
Tom Kent replied to reinaldo watanabe's discussion Code Pyton to VB.net
"Another option: Iron Python runs on the .NET framework, if you ran that python code in there, you should be able to call your functions from your existing VB code without having to re-write anything. Its not that much code, but if you get this…"
Sep 8, 2010
Tom Kent commented on Moss's blog post C++ or Java?
"For people who want to get into the hardware side...running servos off of pin outs, grabbing serial lines, etc I'd recommend C/C++. But you said you're going to be doing AI research, for something like that, where it is removed from the hardware,…"
Dec 20, 2009
Tom Kent commented on Tim Trueman's blog post Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones
"I'm not convinced that it would bring anyone down on us. It could be baked in as just part of the protocol, like some other protocols are using. We could even use parts of the SSL/TLS library (without the complicated public key stuff), then it would…"
Dec 19, 2009
Tom Kent commented on Tim Trueman's blog post Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones
"So should we make some plans to add encryption to the data link in our software? From my understanding, using symmetric encryption with pre-shared keys only adds a minimum of overhead. Even if there aren't serious concerns about people hacking into…"
Dec 19, 2009
Tom Kent replied to john higgs's discussion I'm new to C++
"First, if you don't have previous programming experience, I would recommend that you not jump in and start with Arduino. I know that it would have quickly confused me if I had tried to start with that. Rather, I'd recommend spending some time…"
Dec 8, 2009
Tom Kent replied to john higgs's discussion I'm new to C++
"Are you new to programming or just C++?"
Dec 8, 2009
Tom Kent commented on Chris Anderson's blog post No DIY Drones chat tonight...
"I'd like to hear from someone who has worked with simulations software like flightgear, if you're taking suggestions."
Dec 1, 2009
Tom Kent commented on Pekka Ahola's blog post 10Hz Venus GPS Module + antenna ~ $62
"Pekka: You mentioned something about more accurate altitude, do you often see altitudes that are less accurate? I always though that GPS math was completely 3D, and I guess I wouldn't expect one of the dimensions to be different from the others.…"
Oct 17, 2009
More…