From day 1, I am a visitor of the annual Free and Open Source Developer's Meeting in Brussels. This conference has gained much respect because each year, the organisers succeed in attracting some big guys from the Free world. I had the honour to present 2 times a topic on the 'embedded track' as well. No talks have yet been announced on this track, but I've reserved my seat already :-)

I'll be there again this year so if you want to meet, drop me a note. FOSDEM is completely free (except from food and beer) and is an excellent place for networking.

The last month of development was relatively calm. The main discovery was a bug in the important AtomicQueue class. A fix has been commited, but a more memory efficient implementation remains work in progress. Normally, RTT 1.0.2 will be released next week.

My main focus for the coming months is an internal application for Orocos, thus no big features are planned for the RTT. A CAN library was contributed
though, which allows to invoke real-time commands and read/write data over a CAN network between Orocos Components.

A spur of interest kicked in on a thread on the Orocos-dev mailing list regarding the lock-free data-exchange in the Real-Time Toolkit. It started with the mentioning of libatomic_ops, which is a portable atomic operations library which could help making the RTT more portable.

As the discussion proceeded, it came clear that the music software industry/enthusiasts are looking for a real-time lock-free algorithms library. It did not yet kick-off, but the algorithms present in RTT largely match what they are looking for. I posted an overview of the algorithms present in the RTT and how well they work.

I've attended a Real-Time Workshop (Embedded Coder) training in Gouda (NL) the last two days. The feature set of this product (and it's pay-some-extra extensions) keep impressing me. Especially the Stateflow and code generation features are relevant to the Orocos context. I think though we'll go for a 'simple' Real-Time Workshop for starters: It plainly converts a simulink model to C code and allows integration with legacy applications and any type of hardware (given you provide the compiler).

After our server upgrade, one could login but not do anything 'user' related: the login information was forgotten every time and 'Access Denied' was displayed.

This has been fixed now and was a Drupal issue: http://drupal.org/node/92802

Also, www.orocos.org was offline for the major part of past sunday (10/12/2006) because of a too strict server configuration.

During the night of saturday december 9 to sunday december 10, the Orocos.org website will be moved to a new server. The website may be unreachable between 00h00 and 08h00 EST.

In the coming days (weeks?), Orocos.org will be moved to a new server with a newer PHP version (4.4.4 or 5.2.0). Hopefully this will solve our migration of the generated documentation to the website, which will allow far more searchable content. In case the website shows hickups, you know what happened.

On the software front, we're fixing any bugs which show up in 1.0.0 and will soon release the first bugfix release. The ultimate release date for 1.0.1 is 10 December, but it may be sooner as well. The most important fixes were Xenomai 2.1/2.2 and RTAI 3.4 related. But the build system and documentation got a lot of attention as well.

Yesterday Duccio Fioravanti has succeeded in tracking a planar target using image based visual servoing with a kuka robot.

He used the CaptureCamera Component to get the images from a AVT Guppy firewire camera which was connected to the robots end effector. He created his own components for the control in the image and used the CartesianControllerVel and CartesianEffector to control the robot. He could track an object and made the robot follow it.