Sketch Processing Progress

After a week of doing very little work on my sketch processing project, I decided to get some more coding done. Well it is now 6:25am and a lng way past my intended bedtime, but progress is good. I started by fixing a few bugs from my last coding session and quickly got back into the swing of the code. I started to put together some code to generate a set of curvature data from the initial stroke information.

In comparison to XNA and C#, the biggest problem with programming on the Nintendo DS is that there is almost no help from the IDE, every error takes about 10 times longer to debug and the actual writing of the code is so much more tedious. Anyway, my point is that with something like C#, all the functionality is at your fingertips allowing you to quickly print to the screen or output information to a console window or to a file. The lack of all this on the DS means debugging or writing new and specifically math-intensive code, becomes all the more difficult.

So I had put together this basic code, but without some tests I wasn't confident it would be getting the correct output data, and without break-points or any decent interface, I was working blind.

So instead of continuing as I was, I decided to create a simple C# app that loaded some pre-written stroke data from a text file (created by copying values from the screen of the DS app), and processed the data with almost the same code that was running on the DS. This was I could visualise, debug and check the code effectively, and reflect any changes in the DS code afterwards.

I basically ended up writing a nice little app that drew a representation of how the stroke would be seen on the DS screen, a dynamically sized curvature graph of the data with a mean cut-off line, data values, feature point identification and labeled, zoomed views of identified corners.

All in all the tool is quite useful and I will be using it for analysis on data taken directly from the DS app to visualise the information as image files, graphs and much more. All these can then be used in my report as evidence of the data and processing.

I also updated some of the GL rendering code on the DS app, but still need to fix some of the timer code.

So overall, quite good progress. Now I must get to sleep before the sun comes up and I'll fix the spelling and grammar mistakes in this when I wake up.