Monday, January 19, 2009

Accelerometers hit Canola2 and PDF viewing

Of course, if a unit comes out with an embedded accelerometer in it then using a "slightly clunky" wiimote will no longer be needed as the source of motion data. I recently added the ability for libsixdof to control closed source applications as well as properly patched open source ones. This was mainly to let Google Earth finally take some advantage of proper sixdof devices, but it works equally well for Canola2 on maemo.


Controlling Canola2 using libsixdof and a wiimote from Ben Martin on Vimeo.

Two big features that libsixdof brings is the ability to configure what happens when the controller is moved on an axis, and how frequently that happens. So, if you don't like your images flicking past at 20 images / second in Canola, you can limit it to whatever / second. In the video, having maximum axis movement will only ever scroll 3 images / second. So when I hold the unit causing a continual next image movement I can still see what is happening and Canola2 does not get overloaded with events.


Flipping pages in a PDF by moving the n810 from Ben Martin on Vimeo.

Again the wiimote is actaully held behind the device. I'm sort of getting the hang of the controlling code etc so that you can use more subtle rotations of the device to issue commands to the running program. This is using the same stuff that the Canola2 video did, I could patch a PDF viewer, but for discrete events like next-page it doesn't really make a huge difference. Panning is the big thing that screams out for patching.

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