Guard Dog Robot Project

While I continue documenting the progress of the project direct comparison of my code with other algorithm implementations reveals some interesting optimizations that can be squeezed in..!

Apart from a low complexity algorithm , implementation has also a crucial importance. For example in libElas SSE optimizations boost its performance considerably on many operations that happen many thousand times every second..

A nice blog describing the rough ideas for some of these optimizations is http://supercomputingblog.com/ and in particular these parts talk about image processing optimizations , ( the parts that interest me the most ) :
http://supercomputingblog.com/windows/image-processing-with-sse/
http://supercomputingblog.com/windows/advanced-image-processing-with-sse/
http://supercomputingblog.com/windows/advanced-image-processing-with-sse/2/

Although the Intel Development manual is huge I will gradually try to add some support for the improved instruction sets to improve performance .. I will also keep the default cpu agnostic implementations for a possible switch to an ARM cpu in the future

Speaking of ARM I was also delighted to hear about the Raspberry Pi finishing the final stages of development and entering mass production..!

http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs

It features an 700Mhz ARM Cpu , ethernet 256MB Ram and 2 USB ports for $35..!
I am definitely buying 4 of them , one to replace my web server , one in order to carry a computer with me everywhere i go , and two to test out a parallel rig for guarddog..
GuarddoG uses a Celeron 220 CPU @ 1.2 Ghz anyway so there wont be much of a performance hit , and it will drastically reduce power consumption and remove psu’s and other things from the design !

Raspberries , Arduinos and RepRaps are game changing developments of technology in my opinion!
I am really looking forward to January and I hope that I get my hands on one!!

One last thing that caught my eye is the Sony 3D OLED Headset - HMZ-T1

Although I must admit that I despise SONY for many reasons ( killing Linux on the PS3 , controlling both the creation of movies , music , media AND the technologies that play them AND the end user devices market and thus being a particularly nasty company..
This kind of display technology seems very nice since it will deliver 3D the way humans are designed to see it i.e. binocular vision

The cost is very high for now at $700 but I hope it catches on and I guess it will because for a family of 4 instead of a 50″ monitor that costs $1500 there is a profit margin for $700 x 4 = $2800 and this exactly the kind of profit that companies would like.. Not to mention how less than a 50″ screen it will cost for transporting such a device all the way from China or even produce one..