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Showing posts from 2013

Attaching a WiFi Dongle to an AR Drone 2.0 (a.k.a. Compiling Drivers for ARM Based Devices)

Correction (4/24/2014): for your driver to work the AR Drone 2.0 you have to compile the kernel version provided by Parrot which can be found here https://devzone.parrot.com/projects/show/oss-ardrone2 One of the down sides of "out of the box" AR Drone 2.0 is that you can't control multiple drones from the same machine. Another down side is that you can't attach USB devices except flash memories and some other predefined devices due to the limited nature of the busybox deployed on the drone. To over come the first down side without manipulating the WiFi configurations of the built-in WiFi card (i.e. you don't want to mess up your new drone), you will need to overcome the second problem (i.e. install a WiFi dongle and its driver manually). In this tutorial, I try to walk you through the steps to do just that. I assume that you are working a Linux machine (seriously we are not going to compile drivers on Windows). Ubuntu is preferable ! Because the Drone has a

Next Generation TV Ratings Systems

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TV ratings conventionally depend on focus groups and/or set top devices that keep track of the channels and shows viewed. This approach has been the main source of information for rating TV shows, sports, news, etc and it has been an integral part of the economics of the TV industry . But with the growing sources of viewing TV programmes either live (using TV sets or online streaming) or later (using video on demand either through set top devices or online portals) and with the growing number of TV viewers posting their opinions about what they are viewing, TV programmes rating is become a more challenging task that requires innovative solutions. On the other hand, recently booming terms like "Connected Viewers" and "Two Screen Viewing" describe TV viewers that use their smart phones or tablets while watching TV. These smart devices forms a rich source of information on the TV viewing habits of the device's owners. This information can help both the TV ind

Integrating Click Router and GNURadio

Recently, I have been working on integrating Click Modular Router to work with both WiFi cards and USRPs to facilitate the development of cognitive radio testbeds. I am using GNURadio to control N210 USRPs . I found that developing routing hops to be interesting and worth sharing as it requires the USRP to simultaneously send and receive. This requires the transmission and reception to be on separated frequencies.  For transmission, first a client socket must be created in the click configuration code. Socket(TCP, localhost, 4002, Client true) Then, I used a thread to constantly listens on that socket and transmits the data once a new packet is received. This allows for the separation of tasks and good visibility of the transmission code. I noticed that there is a trend to include the transmission code within the main function which degrades the code readability. The thread takes as a parameter the top_block describing the data path on the USRP. class tx_th (threading.Threa