As it was anounced some time ago, Cherokee 0.8 will once again have a native Windows binary. We’ve been having a lot of requests because our Windows users haven’t had the chance to taste Cherokee-Admin since it was born.

Beware that the Windows build has to be taken with a grain of salt under Windows. A lot of work is still needed since some major changes -like a totally rewritten I/O cache, a lot more efficient and stable- will be coming by the time 0.8 is released.

These are the necessary steps to setup a suitable building environment.

Like Alvaro said in his blog, installing the whole bundle of needed tools is not trivial. In fact, there was a strange problem with the provided autotools (automake 1.8.2 and autoconf 2.59) of the previous environment that made us have to manually tweak things in order to successfuly finish the compilation of Cherokee. This has been tested on a Windows XP virtual machine.

This is what you need to install.

Our next release of Cherokee, 0.8.0, will once again have a native Windows package.
A few moments ago it was officially announced at the mailing list.

We had plans to finally fix it in the very near future, but Alvaro decided to speed things up a bit. This guy is amazing! ;)

I’ve been rather busy these days and haven’t been paying all the attention to the project I would have wanted, but everything started moving on Windows’ side of things just a couple of days ago. I really didn’t expect it to be ready this soon, but here it is: Cherokee Windows Build. The development branch already compiles and works on Microsoft’s OS. Just check out the latest SVN version and give it a try.

Alternatively if you can live without Windows and want something more stable, you can just download the latest official release, Cherokee 0.7.1 Cherokee 0.7.2 (as of June 12th).

A couple of months after the previous Cherokee stable release, and once a lot of work and testing has been done, here it is: Ladies and gentlemen, Cherokee 0.7.0 is out!. You could take a look at the official announcement, but what you should really do is try it out. Seriously. Every single one of us is working hard on the project -make that extra-extra-hard working in Alvaro‘s case-, and the results are clearly visible.

We have a lot of fresh ideas, and as always feedback and feature requests are more than welcome at the mailing list. The Summer is almost here, and this one will prove to be extremely productive. Just trust me for now. It will ;-)

Here is the download link.

A couple of days ago I mentioned this in the post about extending libStargate for a class assignment we had. The team was formed by Miguel, Gonzalo and myself, and we received a pretty good grade, by the way. I wanted to write again after having some patches sent to the main author of libStargate by the end of this week, but it turns out I won’t be able to properly test them until after that. Since a lot of friends have been having problems with their own projects, ours is going to be temporarily cannibalized until their time is up. Wish them luck! ;)

Anyway, I’ll post again once  I have the things properly tested and I’ve spoken to the people of IEArobotics. For now, here is the link to download Wiilson if you want to try it out.

As mentioned earlier, it is just a PWM Wiimote implementation to control a Skybot. The Wiimote is interfaced thanks to the excellent pywii library, Orienting the Wiimote makes the bot move and it goes faster or slower depending on the inclination of the controller. Changing from mode ‘A’ to ‘B’ (or ’1′ to ’2′) overrides this behavior and controls the bot with the direction keys of the Wiimote, being able to alter speeds with the ‘Plus’ and ‘Minus’ buttons. It’s not pretty, but it is a quick hack and works fine. If you want something better you’ll have to wait for the release of pybot, a Python module to control (extended) libStargate managed robots with PWM support. The only class present right now is to control the Skybot as it is out of the box, so PWM support is software based -you’d have to rewire it if you wanted a hardware version of this, much better but totally out of the scope-.

Coming up soon, at least as soon as our bot gets de-cannibalized if that is even a word!

By the way… I think I’m getting to love this stuff. I’ll have to buy a Skypic or Arduino for myself. You can’t ever play around enough with these things. And to think it was always there and I never knew!

In a previous post I mentioned that we would be playing around with a bot project to interface our Skypic board and the Wiimote as an assignment in class.

Hacking these things has been fairly easy thanks to some pretty handy pieces of software we stumbled upon at IeaRobotics and a bit of Python magic. The tools of the trade were Pydownloader to program the Skypic, libStargate to interface the PC and the bot, and finally Pywii, a wonderful Wiimote library.

We ended up implementing a new server for the Skypic that should enable a smooth control of the acceleration applied to the Skybot in response to the Wiimote’s movements. To handle it we had to extend libStargate. Our job wasn’t particularly hard to do, but up until now you only had the chance of applying an all-or-nothing type of movement. Now the acceleration is proportional to the pitch and roll values of the controller. Since the controlling code is in the PIC instead of the computer, the effect is really smooth.

The bot has dual power. 6V for the Skypic and 9V for the servos. If only we had used 12V for these the effect would be nicer yet, but overall its fine.

I’ll clean the code a bit before submitting the patches to the project’s author, and I hope to have it ready and submitted this week along with a new wrapper class around libStargate to control specifically the SkyBots with PWM capabilities. It is called pySkybot, by the way.

Following up a post about the Wiimote, here is something interesting I stumbled upon. It’s also about cheap 3 axis accelerometers, only this time it isn’t about the Wiimote. It is about the Wii Nunchuk. Check this out!

You can see the whole story at Hackaday. Although I’m not really used to hacking with circuits, I do check some of these sites on a regular basis. And I must say every now and then they come up with things that make me wish I were Ajo ;-)

I’ve never done anything bot-related and just couldn’t let it stay that way. A couple of friends and I (Hi there Miguel and Gonzalo!) have put together this simple bot and will be playing with it to discover the wonders of the Wiimote shortly.

It uses a Skypic board as brains and a Sky293 board for power, both of which are free hardware licensed under Creative Commons. Besides that it has some cheap sensors, the simplest skeleton ever, a couple of Futaba servos and a Wiimote (yet to be incorporated) as inexpensive do_it_all sensor. It’s not that a Wii Remote is cheap. Compare what it has to offer (accelerometer, optical sensor, Bluetooth connectivity) to the price of any single raw component from that list and you’ve got yourself the best deal ever!! And yes… if you own a Wii you can play with it too as a bonus. Thanks to Andres Prieto-Moreno (Hi, Teach!) for pointing out the possibilities of this little wonder.

Here… take a look.

Precisely one week after releasing the long awaited 0.6 version of this web server, Cherokee 0.6.1 has been released minutes ago. As I’ve said once and again, the project has been gaining momentum and here you have the download link to prove it.

It is mostly a maintenance release since most of the development efforts are being put towards the future release of version 0.7 with a lot of goodies. I’ll be writing about that when the times comes. For now the list of changes in 0.6.1 includes support for “Personal Web” -a missing feature in this release that was requested for the administrative interface-, a fix for a bug introduced in handler dirlist right before the previous release, and some other minor bugs in documentation, compilation and cherokee-admin.

As before, you’ll have more information at Alvaro’s site and the official Cherokee Project’s website. We’ll be waiting for your input. Happy hacking!

As I anticipated some weeks ago, Cherokee 0.6.0 has finally been released. It was a couple of days ago but it caught me away and with no Internet access until now.

Anyway, the trunk was branched on March 6th and after some exhaustive testing and a little polishing here and there … here it is!!!

You should take a look at Alvaro’s site and at the official Cherokee Project’s website. Suffice it to say a lot of work has been put into the new release, and the effort has been well invested. Work will resume shortly to improve an already impressive web server, and as advancements are made towards 0.7 a lot of new features will be added. A fast look at the TODO file will give you an idea of what is yet to come: a bunch of new handlers and modules (WSGI, AJPv13, WebDAV, mod_evasive, upload progress module), generic caching, new header entry, AIO based fdpoll, memcached support, chunked encoding, Dtrace hooks, better language support…

As I said previously, stay tuned. You’ll be able to expect a lot from this project in the near future. That is a given ;)

UPDATE: I forgot to mention the most important thing. Here is the original announcement of the release at the official mailing list.

Lately I’ve been getting more involved in an interesting open source project. It is an extremely fast and flexible web server called Cherokee that has been around for some time now. The project started in 2001 and currently Cherokee is available in most Linux and *BSD flavors. You can find those, the source code and versions for Windows and Opensolaris at the download page. The code base is really nice in my opinion, and the server is rock solid and pretty fast.

Although a lot of effort has been put in the development branch, a new version hasn’t been released for quite some time. That is going to change shortly since the project has been steadily gaining momentum and release 0.6.0 is right around the corner. I strongly encourage everyone to check it up as soon as it’s ready. Besides too many improvements to list here, a new graphical interface called cherokee-admin has been developed in Python to make the configuration process easier.

I’ll be writing a couple of HOWTOs about the new version as soon as it is production ready, but keep a close watch on the project’s and Alvaro’s websites for the upcoming release. If you can’t wait until then, take a look at the Subversion repository. As I said before, the server is robust, fast and feature rich… and each of these qualities is only going to get better and better. Stay tuned! ;)