Tabus Nine Computing

We here at Tabus Nine have been pulling our hair out trying to get some audio into a STM3241G-EVAL board, an evaluation board for an STM32F416IG. The trouble is that all of the examples were lacking in detail, and it seemed that nobody else on the planet had tried to do this. We couldn’t find any examples that did this specifically, but one example used the potentiometer to display analog values, and sample the ADC constantly.

The trick here was that the potentiometer is connected to pin F9, and that used ADC3′s channel 7. When we changed the pin to F10 to connect the microphone amplifier to ADC3, very strange things would happen. Mainly, there was a lot of noise, and the values cut to 0 after about a minute.

So, the fix was to use ADC3′s channel 8 instead of channel 7. It would make sense that you have to change the channel, but the datasheet was lacking in information regarding that. We’re just putting this out here in case it helps anyone else.

Ben Oztalay
CTO + Co-Founder

Hey, this is a quick post to share something handy dandy that we just figured out while developing an iOS application.

Vertically and horizontally centering the contents of a UILabel, with dynamic text and font size, within a given CGRect. This can be used, for example, to draw numbers within a container, like a small circle, since the size of the text of a number is difficult to predict.

Vertically centering text on many platforms is simply a pain the butt. In my case, the issue was exacerbated by the fact that the text was dynamic, and had to fit within a fixed frame. I came up with this solution after trying several different things, and it seems to do the trick if your text doesn’t get too small.

This method works by using [NSString sizeWithFont:minFontSize:actualFontSize:forWidth:lineBreakMode] to get the font size the string would have to be to fit within the width of the given rect. Then, it sets the label’s font size to the font size from measuring the string, and fits the label to its contents. Once that’s done, it’s a simple matter of centering the label in the rect.

NOTE: The height of rect you pass in is NOT taken into account when resizing the text. The size of the text depends entirely on the width of the rect.

Let me know if you have any tips to improve its visual centering, since this mainly centers geometrically. It also seems to have trouble (as in, the text is too low) when the string starts to get considerably longer than the rect would fit at the label’s normal font size.

Here’s the code for a function that’ll do the heavy lifting:

Ben Oztalay

CTO + Co-Founder

Parallella is looking to be a great development platform for parallel computing, and we’re excited to experiment with it. 64 cores on one chip, on an easy-to-use development board sounds like a dream. Massively parallel computing is becoming a larger part of our research, and this would really open doors.

We’re writing this up because Parallella’s Kickstarter campaign needs a boost. Even if you aren’t a programmer, this project is creating opportunities for consumer goods in the future. Once researchers can start cracking the problem of really taking advantage of many-core CPUs, your next computer could have any number of cores. 8 cores would look like chump change.

Go check it out and see what you think. Adapteva, the guys behind Parallella, are fantastic engineers with a great vision.

Thanks,

Ben Oztalay
COO + Co-Founder

Earlier this week, Tabus Nine Computing hired two new employees, Justin Love and JD Yaske! They’ll be helping out with software development, and we’re excited to be working with them.

In other news, the Insults Live Wallpaper has served over 13 million insults, and is nearing 50,000 downloads! It should get there in the next week or so. Also, Insults Live Wallpaper Pro is approaching 100 downloads.

Ben Oztalay
COO + Co-Founder

Hey, I just thought I would write a quick update for anyone who is wondering what’s been going on recently.

Most importantly, Insults Live Wallpaper reached over 1000 downloads a couple days ago!  Other than that, in my spare time, I have been working a lot in our R&D department on our evolutionary artificial intelligence project.  I have been working with my friend, Troy Wynn, on making a brain generation program that generates brains from the neural level up, and we are making some very significant progress.  The end goal in this would to be able to generate and evolve brains in such a way that we can show evolution of intelligence in action.

As always, we are also working hard on getting new clients and thinking of new ideas for mobile apps.

-Austin Mueller
CTO + Co-founder

P.S.

Java decided to throw this error at me while tinkering with the brain generation project:

#
# A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment:
#
# EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (0xc0000005) at pc=0x00000007ac5f3040, pid=8092, tid=10104
#
# JRE version: 6.0_27-b07
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (20.2-b06 mixed mode windows-amd64 compressed oops)
# Problematic frame:
#

Despite a little bit of searching on Google about the problem, I found no good answers, however, I did end up fixing it.  So for everyone else that may happen to get this error, mine was caused by an unchecked division by zero.  All I had to do was make sure no divide by zeros happened and it was fixed.  I’m not saying this is the exact cause of the problem for anyone else, but in my case it was a divide by zero.  So, for anyone reading this because they are getting this error, make sure you are not dividing by zero anywhere at any time.  If this doesn’t fix the problem for you, I am sorry…  If you do find the solution however, I would encourage you to post it here so that it can be shared with the world.

Happy coding!