Vacuum Fluorescent Display Alarm Clock

I have been working on this fun little project for the last couple of days. I ordered this VFD display from Noritake as a free sample. I am quite grateful for their generosity and I decided to put this display to good use.

I have written a driver in C# that implements a partial selection of the commands available from this display. The driver is object-oriented with property accessors used to set configuration parameters of the display.

Weather Data, Emails and a Loader Animation :]

I put all of this together into a sample application for a smart alarm clock that I would like to build eventually. The sample application gets my unread e-mail from Gmail and weather data from Open Weather Map. I am also attacking the 16 custom characters that reside in ram to display a few simple animations.

Snow Day: Conky Configuration Time!

It is quite snowy in southern Ontario today so I spent a bit of time configuring Conky on my system. I have heard of conky before but never bothered to put any time into configuring it.

For those of you who don't know, Conky is a nice system monitoring application that runs on the root X window. This means that it sits on your desktop like Active Desktop, but better.

Mine looks good, but I have seen screenshots of some very artistic configurations.

Conky Configuration :]

Read more to see my conky.conf file!

3D Perspective Projection

I have wanted to write a 3D rendering engine for years and I have finally decided to spend some time on the problem. I decided to implement a simplistic rendering engine that supports the following basic features:

• 3D Perspective Projection (far objects are smaller than near objects)
• Triangular Polygons for Rendering
• Simplistic Lighting Model
• Colored Polygon Faces (no texturing)

The largest hurdle for me was getting past perspective projection. I did some research about matrix transformations and got caught up quite deeply in mathematical abstraction. It was the image below that really set my mind in motion. I decided to take a step back and use some simple high school trigonometry to solve the problem.

Leon Battista Alberti and Perspective Projection

I have spent approximately 13 hours on this project and the results so far are fantastic looking. This entire experiment has given me great insights into the way 3D geometry is rendered onto a 2D plane.

The Classic Utah Teapot :]

In this article I will show you the various steps that I have taken to render this image. I will focus on the mathematics behind perspective projection that I used to arrive at the teapot rendering above. The image is not perfect, but I am happy with the results.