C

Const Port v1.0

So over the past year I've been working as a firmware developer and I've been frustrated with the lack of quality tools for tasks that I perform daily. I've toyed with the idea of making my own version of these tools but many of them are out of the scope of a one person development team.

However, I got the idea one day to make a better serial COM port reading application. I've tried using Putty, Tera Term, Real Term and many others, and they all have certain perks but each one comes with a heavy load of quirks and design problems. Most of them try hard to be an all-in-one terminal application that supports many types of text communications. Putty is a great tool if all you are doing is SSHing into a remote server, however when it comes to data stream reading it doesn't provide most of the features I would like. And some of the features I would expect of even the simplest text editor it has sacrificed at the hand of trying to be an All-In-One Application. 

So I decided to start making my own application. Since I spend most of my day reading debug output from my embedded applications it would be a huge time saver to have something that provides me with the functionality I need. And while I'm at it, it will provide a great platform for experimentation with features that I think would be fun or exciting.

I started working on it mid last week. I started by stripping the platform layer I had from my last project and some GLFW/GLEW code I had from the project before that and started creating a simple architecture. Like all of my projects recently it supports dynamically reloaded code with a clean line between application and platform layer. With OpenGL as the rendering technology we should be able to port it nicely to other platforms later, though for now it only works on windows. The whole thing is hand written, even the math functions for Matrices and Vectors are my own. The project compiles in C++ using the MSVC compiler however most of the code is written to C like standards.

After about a week of work I'm surprised how far the project has come. Much of the basic functionality came together quickly and I've even had time to add some of the nice features I've wanted to try. There's still a lot of things to be done before I can say it's releasable, however I feel like it already at a point that I can use it for real use at work.

The name is temporary, and likely to be changed in the future

The name is temporary, and likely to be changed in the future

I figure now that it is somewhat functional I will begin releasing versions for people to download if they would like. Keep in mind that the program DOES NOT support many of the features you might expect from a finished application. For example, currently you can only open a COM port at 115200, 8n1 settings since the UI doesn't have a place for configuration yet. If you'd like to change it, you have to recompile the application. However, since I am releasing the source code you are welcome to do so. You'll have to compile with GLEW and GLFW but other than that you should be able to get it working with only some minor path tweaks to the build.bat file.

So with all that said, if you'd still like to download it and check it out you can get a windows (x64) compiled version here:

Or you can find the source code on BitBucket: 

Since the application is so unfinished I can't guarantee that I'll be able to get to any bug reports any time soon. You can still log them on bitbucket if you'd like though. I also won't accept any pull requests. However if you have any feature suggestions I'm happy to hear them, you can email me at robbitay@gmail.com

2016 Gallery 8: DirectX Voxels

Started working with voxels again. These are drawn using the dynamic buffer

Testing all the different Voxel Types' texture mapping. The textures used here come from Sphax PureBDCraft for minecraft (http://bdcraft.net/)

Added static buffer generation and the ability to add multiple chunks.

Added ray-casting method to find the block you are looking at

Built a crappy house for testing purposes.

Switched to original minecraft textures since they are lower resolution. Added a lot more chunks with a spherical view distance. Haven't done any Frustrum Culling yet so the view distance is pretty tiny

Started working with an alternate method for rendering that uses a area fill method to find everything up to a certain distance.

Added some ray-casting to the rendering to make some rudimentary shadows

The shadows don't look very nice yet on uneven terrain

2016 Gallery 7: DirectX Initial Tests

Copied some code for making a sphere and converted it to C for DirectX. The colors are simply set by the (x,y,z) coordinates of each vertex

Enabled default lighting in DirectX and generated random colors for the sphere. Also added a cube

Had a spot of trouble when trying to pass texture information to DirectX

Eventually got the texture problem fixed.

Changed the background color, tested drawing a single vertex buffer with different transform matrices, and got the 2D rendering working on top of the 3D world.

Trying to get stb_truetype.h to render text for me. Had a problem with DirectX wanting square textures

Fixed it by simply rendering all the characters into a packed texture. (Well to be fair, I didn't do the packing, the stb library did. Thanks Sean Barrett!!)

The emerald texture for Sphax PureBDCraft texture pack had a nice color to it

Adding a skybox makes everything look so nice!

Tried generating a heightmap from a bitmap. Grass texture was made by me, looks pretty terrible.

Loading in .obj files. .mtl file loading isn't working yet.

Got the texures working for obj model. Also made a simple function to print strings on the screen using the font pack made earlier. (stb_truetype is awesome, you should go check it out: https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_truetype.h)

Loaded a model ripped from Super Mario 64. Good ol' Whomp's Fortress.

All of the matrix math in the engine was done by me so there are still some bugs to be worked out. For some reason when I changed the near and far distance it messed up my FOV

Stress testing a dynamic buffer in DirectX.

2016 Gallery 6: Other OpenGL Stuff

A side project that never developed into anything. Simply got some rendering stuff copied over and then it was abandoned

I worked on making a rasterizer for shapes defined by quadratic curves. It works off the assumption that, taken any point you can cast a ray in any direction, count the number of intersections going one way and going the other and the resulting numb…

I worked on making a rasterizer for shapes defined by quadratic curves. It works off the assumption that, taken any point you can cast a ray in any direction, count the number of intersections going one way and going the other and the resulting number determines whether the point is inside the shape or not. The white interior here is actually a rasterized bitmap created using the curves. I looped through each pixel and performed the containment test to determine whether it was white or transparent. There was no antialiasing and it was painfully slow and unusable but it was a great educational project.

2016 Gallery 5: Bitmap Font Creator

I toyed with the idea of making a editor that would handle creating the meta-data I needed to load in and draw a bitmap font. It wasn't very useful once I found some libraries to actually render TrueType Font files into a bitmap but it was a fun project to work on.

First attempt at finding the different image parts. I believe the problem was a simple for loop comparing the y with width instead of height

Found all the characters. We are drawing them with random colors to show that they are separated

Some stuff is coming together. The blue lines indicated the alignment to the bottom of the line. The width of the characters was not adjustable yet.

Added the ability to specify the width of each character so they fit together better when drawn in a word/sentence. Also added some alignment guides

Loading a smaller font

Had some fun with shaders again and made a cool moving background for the selected and hovering characters. Added a message in the bottom right for outputting information. Also, not in the image, I tried making a Lua console that you could call C functions from. It used the fonts created from the program.