Recent Status Report

So... it's been 10 months since my last blog post. A lot of things happened during this nearly-a-year blackout—struggle for writing papers, adventures with Unreal Engine, finally deciding to go get a Ph.D., such and such.

I think it's nice to begin my post streak with a review of my past GitHub activities, also for my own information, as I was virtually too filled up with things that I quickly forget the things I did yesterday.

November 2017

Finalized my ROS-based embedded framework. Works flawlessly and completely hassle-free for STM32-based boards. Good to have if you want to build robots with real-time features and ROS integration.

December 2017

I can't really remember what I have done in December. I think I did a lot of reverse engineering of the DJI Mavic firmware, since DJI refused to repair my damaged drone that is actually shipped with crappy firmware which essentially crashes itself. The consumer drone industry really became too crippled with no competition at all. At that time I also encountered the dji-rev community, which is really nice with tons of information on jailbreaking DJI drones. Again, DJI please respect the terms of GPL!

January 2018

Groundbreaking work for my Unreal-based robotics simulator project. Since then I was haunted by the Unreal Ghost and became lost in the woods of Game Engines. Maybe my aim for a general purpose ROS-first robotics simulator is too complex for myself to handle. Anyway I am pretty determined–I gotta complete it and show it off to the world :)

February 2018

Building my home automation system with ESP8266s and Bubblegum-96. Nothing really fancy here. Probably I should upload the Sketch to GitHub as well?

March 2018

A lot of activity indeed! This month I am more focused on refining my embedded ROS infrastructure, so you can see a lot of activity on RMBoardTest(The ROS Omniwheel Car Firmware), CubeGFX(ROS+uGFX Robot Console) and fixes for the ROS rosserial upstream. Also opened an issue in RuntimeMeshComponent for Unreal, which is still unresolved and blocking my development. Really should have migrated to the native version, in retrospect :(

April 2018

More infrastructure refinements with QtOpenCVGLViewer, an experiment for using Qt Futures to process and render image. Personally I think it is fairly complete and the code quality is not bad compared to a lot of CV projects. Take it as WTFPL if y0u want to use it :)

May 2018

May is a month with tons of trial-and-errors. Stole some code from TUNA's gaoyifan and refined for self-hosting a reverse proxy for Google Fonts, which is blocked in China. Bifurcate is my tiny effort for exploring Convolutional Neural Networks, from which I learned a lot. However the project is a giant failure :)

Also did a lot of improvements for the Pavilion simulator, though still blocked by that upstream bug, Urghhhhhh.

June 2018 (Present)

Now I think I am back to the right track! Totally changed my working schedule to have myself getting up at 7AM instead of 13PM really helped a lot. This month the biggest contribution I think is fixing the rviz for the new Ogre release. I also learned how to create custom Homebrew Taps(finally!) and created my own tap for a lot of programs that are hard to install on macOS.

Review and Conclusion

Finally decided to apply for a Ph.D. in the United States. Also pray that the recently-passed Trump visa limitations won't really impact we fellow applicants :)

See you soon!