NMEA 0183

NMEA 0183 (or NMEA for short) is a combined electrical and data specification for communication between marine electronic devices such as echo sounder, sonars, anemometer (wind speed and direction), gyrocompass, autopilot, GPS receivers and many other types of instruments. It has been defined by, and is controlled by, the U.S.-based National Marine Electronics Association.


Link to the wikipedia article.
Arduino NMEA device driver library.

How to get VTK working in Eclipse

EDIT: These links seem to be down. This is bad.

Although I mentioned in this post that VTK was too complex and powerful for what we needed, I have decided that it might be a viable option after all. I was able to get it working in eclipse using the following process.

Thanks to the guys at http://dev.artenum.com/ for most of this information.

1. Download the latest Cassandra release from here.
2. Run the installer.
3. Open a project in eclipse
4. Add vtk.jar to your build path

• right click on the root project
• click 'properties'
• click 'libraries'
• click 'add external jar'
• Add 'vtk.jar' which can be found in '\Cassandra\thirdpart\vtk5.0-32b\bin'

5. Edit your run configuration

• click the drop-down arrow next to the green run button
• click 'Run Configuration'
• In the right hand pane, expand 'Java Application'
• choose your project
• click the 'environment' tab
• click 'New' to create a new environment variable
• name the variable 'PATH'
• set its value to the absolute path (include drive letter etc...) of '\Cassandra\thirdpart\vtk5.0-32b\bin'

Everything should work now. Here is some sample code (also taken from http://dev.artenum.com)

Thanks again to http://dev.artenum.com. Original article.

Desktop Application Research

• Evaluating the programing language "Processing"
• Processing Kicks Ass
• Easy to generate 3D models
• 3rd party library supports direct serial communication with embedded device (Arduino is mentioned specifically)
• Can automatically export the program as a java applet so that it can be viewed in a browser