Wayne Piekarski

wayne piekarski

Blog
Table of Contents

Blog postings - Table of Contents

Map Extraction Tools for BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks Inception
April 2024
DOSBox-based reverse engineering project to extract a high-resolution game map from the old 1988 DOS game BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks Inception. An automated tool walks over the entire game universe and stitches together a 16384x16384 map.

Replicate the acrylic viewport pressure experiments of J. D. Stachiw with Calculix finite element modelling
January 2023
J. D. Stachiw performed experiments to measure the deflection of 3 different sizes and thicknesses of acrylic over a flange with a range of pressures until implosion. My goal was to replicate these results using finite element modelling in Calculix and then compare this against the real-world experiments to see if they match.

Computer vision-based IoT monitoring
June 2017
Many gas, electricity, and water meters do not integrate with modern IoT monitoring. I explore how to use computer vision with OpenCV to read the dials from a gas meter, and the challenges associated with it

Modifying Microsoft Flight Simulator 4 to run on three immersive monitors
June 2017
How I modified DOSBox and the original Microsoft Flight Simulator 4 from 1989 to run on my immersive multi-display flight simulator set up.

Cheap and low power web server with local Wikipedia
May 2017
Building a super low power web server and WiFi access point, with a full 50 Gb copy of wikipedia, for when you have no Internet access.

IoT water meter monitoring
March 2017
How I implemented my own water meter monitoring at home. There are differences between the various kinds of water meters, and it is important to understand this to accurately measure water usage.

Immersive Home Flight Simulator Using X-Plane 11
January 2017
How I built my own immersive flight simulator at home, using three large 42" televisions and X-Plane 11

Announcing updates to Google’s Internet of Things platform: Android Things and Weave
December 2016
Blog post I wrote for Google announcing the developer preview of Android Things and Weave, as part of Google's IoT developer platform.

Removal of a large tree root from the koi fish pond using an engine hoist
December 2015
Time lapse video showing the removal of a large tree root from my koi fish pond. I needed to use an engine hoist to lift it out of the water.

Using ADB from a remote build machine with a local Android device over SSH
November 2015
How-to guide on building Android apps on a remote build machine via SSH, and installing them to a local Android device connected to your laptop.

Using the Google USB Driver on Windows for ADB with any Android device
May 2015
How-to guide on using the generic Google USB driver on Windows for any Android phone, tablet, or wearable device.

Adding a DismissOverlayView and dispatchTouchEvent() to your Android Wear Activity
October 2014
Discusses how to quickly add DismissOverlayView to your Android Wear application, which is a nice user interface to handle exiting a full screen app. Also talks about why you should use dispatchTouchEvent() instead of onTouchEvent() in your Activity.

Signing Android APKs with gradle from the command line
August 2014
How to build and sign an Android Studio gradle project from the command line without editing any files. Makes it very nice for storing your project in version control while keeping the keys and passwords in a separate repository.

Clearing Android Wear cache
August 2014
Discusses how to clear the Android Wear cache when resync does not work

Recording the screen with Android Wear and screenrecord
August 2014
Discusses the Android screenrecord command, and how you can use it to capture video of an LG G Watch.

Porting notification code over to Android Wear
July 2014
Describes how to port code from the Android Wear public preview over to the full Android Wear SDK released at Google I/O 2014.

Multi-User Virtual Reality
November 2013
The most amazing virtual reality system I have ever seen

GoPro Dog Backpack
September 2013
How to construct your own GoPro backpack for your dog, using a few simple parts, and how to make it stable while the dog is running around.

The state of Linux, distributions, OpenGL, and laptops in 2006
June 2006
Some notes and comments about what OpenGL implementations and Linux distributions are the best to run on laptops in 2006 (obsolete)

XChanger
April 2005
Regenerate XFree86 and XOrg configuration files with a GUI configurator based on templates.

Hacking Your Own Virtual and Augmented Reality Apps for Fun and Profit! - Linux Conf Au 2004/2005 Tutorial
January 2005
A detailed tutorial with slides and notes on doing 3D rendering, video capture, 3D object tracking using ARToolKit, and custom hardware interfaces, for building your own virtual and augmented reality systems

Rover talking agent, for your Windows XP desktop
September 2004
A simple example showing how to embed Microsoft agent characters into a web page, and deploying it on your Windows XP desktop.

PhD Thesis Completed
March 2004
My PhD thesis is titled Interactive 3D Modelling in Outdoor Augmented Reality Worlds, and was submitted on March 8, 2004

Project Oxcart - Repairing a TSB41AB1 Firewire Controller Chip
December 2003
This project was was started to replace a broken TSB41AB1 chip located inside our Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop. The chip is a 1394 Firewire controller and was blown by a voltage surge on the firewire cable. We thought it would be an interesting exercise to see if we could repair it.

Rsync and Cygwin Windows Time Zone Problems On FAT Filesystems
April 2003
How to deal with strange issues with timestamps changing on FAT filesystems, caused by the way Windows incorrectly handles time zones for FAT.