Sunday, March 29, 2015

Moved to GitHub

Due to some unexpected circumstances, for almost 6 month I had very little time to work on my hobby. Luckily I am “back in business” now J and the first order of business was moving my code repositories to GitHub.

Just when I finally got quite comfortable with SVN and GoogleCode, Google announced that GoogleCode is slated for termination. My preferred Source Control tool was and still is MS TFS, which I use for free at VisualStudio.com thanks to Microsoft. However my free account there does not allow me to share my code with the broad community, thus the need for some Open Source solution – and GitHub works fine for this purpose.

My home at GitHub is at https://github.com/AZarenin, where I created 2 repositories – the custom-pic-quad one and the new Quad-support repository. The former one is the copy of the original repository from the GoogleCode. The structure of this repository is the same as the original one, so the links in the previous posts could be easily converted to the new location by replacing Google repository prefix https://code.google.com/p/custom-pic-quad/source/browse/trunk with the GitHub one https://github.com/AZarenin/custom-pic-quad/blob/master. Maybe at some time I will get brave enough to go back and edit previous posts, by chances for that are pretty slim – sorry J

I also used this opportunity to upload to GitHub all of my Eagle projects related to quad development – if interested, you may find them at the Eagle Projects link. These projects include both versions of the Quad control boards (the V2 that is flying and the V3 that we discuss in this blog), as well as my versions of the SD-card serial data loggers (together with the respective firmware at SD-Logger link). Both Eagle and firmware projects for SD-card data loggers have versions 1 and 2 (V1 and V2), which are not directly related to the versioning of the quad control boards except that the V1 data logger board matches dimensions of the V2 quad control board and V2 data logger board matches mounting dimensions for the V3 quad control board. Yes, I probably should have kept the versions synchronized, but I did not – and now it is too late.

The new Quad-support repository contains Visual Studio 2014 projects for various utilities I have written to support my quad development. Of these the most helpful probably would be the LogStreamer and LogConverter that we discussed in the post “Serial Data Logging”. These projects use several library projects, which you may find in the Tools folder. Besides the libraries utilized by LogStreamer and LogConverter, there are 2 custom WPF controls in the Tools directory – Compass and Horizon. These controls come with respective driver projects that demonstrate the respective use of these controls. I developed these controls for the IMU Data Display application, which takes orientation measurements from the control board and nicely display them using visual indicators. We will discuss this application later on when we will be testing orientation data coming from the quad control board. Meanwhile feel free to play with these controls – maybe you will find a use for them in some of your projects.

Enjoy!