Homeschool day 17 of 180
One of the things we got for Christian on his eleventh birthday was a subscription to a set of tutorials to learn C# programming. He is doing the tutorials for twenty minutes per day as part of his homeschool. Yesterday he started into if-else loops. He has quite a ways to go, but by the end of the school year he is going to be doing some serious programming. That has gotten me inspired to get back in the saddle to continue work on Linux programming. I have decided to write a program to inspect and measure rosettes as they come off of our manufacturing line. I am going to try to use Video4Linux to capture images with a webcam, Gnome as the UI, and Eclipse as the IDE. I will write my own vision and SPC algorithms. I will also have to figure out a way to talk to some digital I/O to control lights, know when a part is ready to be inspected, and tell when to reject or accept a part after inspection. The point is not so much to have such capability, but to keep learning new things. If I can get this done, I will be set to do full blown machine vision and robotics programming with Linux. That will be fun and maybe even profitable. In the meantime, Christian will have come way up the curve with his programming and we might embark on a robotics project that we can do together.
Meanwhile, Kelly and I need to sit down and make a plan on how we are going to proceed on her book. Maybe I will let her take the first crack at the plan and then we can refine it together.