Three CS students and a tablet | Hacker News Reader

Three CS students and a tablet

smotko.si

27 pointsSmotko9 comments

I still can't believe someone can make a contest, promise you a shiny new gizmo, and then say "you'll get that after milions of people touch it and do who knows what with it."

I know I shouldn't complain about "free stuff" but we did work our butts off.

They even failed to mention this little bit of information before we started working.

That is pretty lame. I know students rarely value their time appropriately, but it's not right for a large company to take advantage of the fact.

What a beautiful git commit history on the their github account[1]. The punchcard graph is very revealing as well. Interesting that there are almost no commits on Saturdays.

[1] https://github.com/zidarsk8/galaxyCar

The allnighter on Wednesday was fun and we tried to have a social life on Saturdays!

I'm also working on an Android group project (3 students) backed by a repo (svn in our case). We're sharing 1 tablet and relying on the emulator a lot. We actually have planned prototyping to Android phones similarly as you did. Can you say more about how this worked out for you?

We had a library project that we shared between the tablet and the phone app. The only problem we faced was that eclipse didn't always update the lib correctly and we had to clean the projects every time we added a new public function/class to the library.

Apart from that it worked out great. Writing a simple Activity for the phone took less than 5 minutes and we could work on the OpenGl part without the tablet. But it all depends on the application that you are trying to build.

Also I hear you can run a x86 version of android inside virtual box, which is way faster than the emulator, check it out.

Really cool project!

It was fun looking at you guys chat about it all the time on IRC and I still haven't seen the app in action. That's not nice!

By the way, are you just plotting data as it comes in raw, or is there some mechanism to take care of any fuzziness from the sensors?

You will see the app once we get the tablets :)

We used two kinds of filters for the sensor data - a simple alpha filter and rolling averages. Both of them can be adjusted by the slider on the left.

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