My son is a Minecraft addict. If fact four of my five kids might qualify for that description. I think there is probably more redeeming value learning how to engineer things in that world then in most video games, but I would like him to learn some skills for the real world. When the new Netduino 3 Wi-Fi came out I was inspired do a project with it that could cut the cord from previous wired Ethernet or USB boards. Now we could put a web server anywhere and connect it to real hardware of our choosing. I had just gotten a set of security cameras and a NVR(Network Video Recorder) it was cool using remote desktop to get to the app, or the FLIR cloud and see what was going on at home when I was miles away. A few times I realized that one of us had left the garage door wide open when no one was at home. I wished at that moment that I had a long range remote to fix the problem. Calling the kids to make them shut it is a rather effective remote unless they are not home either!

So with this problem in mind I got on Amazon and ordered a few parts and started talking thru the problem with my son who is 14 this august and seeing where he would take this. He loved automating everything in Minecraft and makes all sorts of cool stuff connected with switches. I told him this would let him try that in real life. We talked about what we would need to come up with a solution. First we discussed the high level functionality we wanted. An app with buttons that would open and close the doors as well as display the current door status and maybe even a picture to confirm the door state visually. Once the functional concept was there I had him identify ways we could implement this. We could hack apart a remote control and wire relays to the buttons so when we closed the relays, it would signal the doors. We could connect into the hard wired switch on the wall and signal that with a relay. We looked at other off-the shelf internet garage door openers. They were expensive and did not seem very adaptable, and assumed one unit per door. We had three doors to deal with so cost was prohibitive to buy anything else.

We experimented with each of the wiring designs. We decided on the hard-wired version and worked to that end. We mocked up the code for a simple web server and had a set of commands to read status, and then a command to toggle the door state. We tested the relays and finally got a reliable 250ms delay time to hold the door to make sure it toggled each time. We also realized we would have no idea where the door was at any time so we needed positive feedback of the doors state. My son Hal (subtract 14 from 2015 and you get 2001, no coincidence!) suggested we use burglar alarm magnets and reed sensors. He had helped me wire up the alarm system that I had revived after years of being off-line and we had to replace a few of the sensors. I had walked thru with him how to wire and test each of the sensors to make sure they worked. He decided if we put a single magnet on the top of the door, we could place the sensor an inch away at the top and bottom limits of the garage door range and then we could tell if it were open, closed, or moving. He also suggested that since we knew where the garage *had* been we could know if the moving was opening or closing.

He is not up to the C# code yet, but I walked thru line by line what was going on so he understood. We also wired all of the sensors and pulled and stapled all the wired going to and fro. We found we could run two wires from the relay to the garage door unit to trigger the open/close toggle. We then wired the magnetic sensors to data in lines and activated the internal pull down resistors so we had a clean zero level when the sensor was open. We used a 4 channel relay board and made sure that we initialized the state in such a way that when we power cycled the unit that the door would not accidentally toggle.

One we had all the functionality bench tested we deployed the release binary to the Netduino. There are a few tricks here. You have to set the WIFI SSID and password settings thru a utility on the Netduino. The other important thing I learned is to set aside a IP/MAC address lease on your Wi-Fi router to make sure you always know the IP address of the board. I could have exposed the board directly to the internet by enabling a port pass-thru on the router, but since I had my own server already on the net, I could tunnel thru it and abstract out the access to the device. That also meant I could have it run security and map other aggregate services together thru one interface. There are services like If This Then That that could have done some of this for me, as well as a number of home hubs that given the right plugin could have integrated into their applications. Since half the fun of a project like this is building the whole stack we did.

We created some ASPX web pages on my server to manage communications with the opener and this allowed us to add more logic without having to deploy new code to the Netduino on the roof of the garage. It turns out while Wi-Fi makes it easy to move it out there, pushing code there is a different matter altogether. We wired in all the sensors and the control lines and tested it out for real using the web browser in my phone over the Wi-Fi and It all worked just as we wanted so we moved on to the app.

Since we all have Windows Phones in our house, I started out with a data bound panorama like app framework and wired up the data provider to the functions that processed the status bits from the web calls. The web calls would run async on a timer, with the timer events firing more rapidly when the UI was triggered by button taps or launching the app, then the timer rate would slow down so as to not use lots of traffic, but still keep the UI up to date. I could have done long polls or Windows Phone Push notifications but this was effective and quick to write and debug. I had to implement a INotifyPropertyChange interface to have the UI bound to my data model update when the status changed in the background. With this quick hack I had the buttons and status feedback in an app on my phone in less that 30 minutes! Since I could slide from page to page I asked Hal what he would add to the pages. He wanted the security camera images. Video was cost prohibited, so I looked at taking snapshots of the current video frame from the IP based full HD network cameras and then scaling them to phone sized images. I used a ASPX page on the home webserver to proxy the thumbnails. This was not as easy as I hoped it would be. I had to capture traffic from the web app on the NVR and reverse engineer the API from that. It turned out it had a way of doing a frame grab with a URL, but only if you had a valid session ID. So I implemented a Digest protocol login with a WebClient and logged in to the NVR, got a session ID, then pulled frames from each camera, then scaled them to phone size.

Now I had a page with garage control, camera feedback, then another swipe to move to a set of thumbnails of the security camera, and a tap to show a larger version of each of those. The next page I wired up to my burglar alarm status and added buttons to arm and disarm the alarm remotely.

After we were done I realized that open/close was not all the information we could want. It would also be nice to know if a card is parked in the spot or not. So Hal and I got back to it and tried out a ultrasonic range sensor and tested it out with the spare Netduino. We were able to tell if the bay was empty or not by mapping the ping time on the sensor to Speed of sound and getting the approximate distance. It the floor was the closest object the distance would be above a threshold, if a card was there it would be below. This could give us status on when a car was done. It also could give us triggers such as "Ring an alarm when mom gets home" or if all the cards are gone turn off the air conditioner or heater. We have not yet wired of the distance sensors, but we know it will work now and it opens up some cool options.

It was fun working with my kid on a project like this. He is learning the basics of reading input, sensing state and acting on changes. He is also seeing how you can layer a system and link small sets of functionality together break a large project down into a set of simple services.

Jonathan (with Hal)

Some Resources:

The Netduino 3 Wi-Fi http://www.netduino.com/netduino3wifi/specs.htm

The Relay Shield http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BOZ7V02

Magnetic Proximity Switch http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0011W4YNK

Wire Terminals http://www.amazon.com/Dual-Position-Screw-Terminal-Strip/dp/B008X0NNEY/ref=sr_1_25?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1433907118&sr=1-25&keywords=wire+terminals

As you may know, I already have a Ford Focus Electric. I love the car. The exterior and interior are well designed and beautiful. The Ford Sync system has been great and other than some consternation with voice commands its lived up to expectations. That given I should just get another one, but I would not learn much from that, and given the FFE is significantly more expensive than the Nissan Leaf, I thought I would get the cheapest electric car I could lease and see just how cost-effective I could make this.

I went to the dealer and after using information from our companies electric car alias to get the best deal I ended up with a Nissan Leaf SV with fast charging and LED headlights. The SV has a navigation system included, so it will make for a great comparison with the Ford Focus, which only has one trim level... everything included.

Exterior

The Focus wins here. The body is the same as the regular Focus, and I think the design is great and the World agrees. The Focus is the best selling car on Earth. The Nissan Leaf looks like a 1990 futurists ideal about what a futuristic electric car wood look like. Its stunning, but not in a good way. Both my wife and I hate the looks of it, but when you sit in the car you can't see it.

Interior

Generally the Focus has a better looking and more functional interior than the Leaf has more room all around.

The Cabin.

The Leaf has a much roomier interior than the Focus. Just getting in the drivers door at 6'1" I can instantly tell the difference. Its not the leg room, but the headroom here. The rake on the Focus windows is so aggressive that you don't have much entry clearance for tall folks like me. The rear seats also have and extra 4 or so inches that make all the difference in the world for leg room when the driver is talk. The Focus is ok if you have a short person driving or a short rear seat passenger, but two tall folks will have to scrunch to make it.

The Trunk

The Leaf has a huge expansive trunk, with the 60/40 fold down seats you can get a bunch of gear into it. The Focus has the battery charging station and batteries taking a good portion of the trunk and space between the rear seats and the trunk. The 60/40 Folding seats are a vestige of the fact that it rolls off the same line as the internal combustion Focus. 

The Dash, Gauges and Electronics

While the Leaf has a bunch of gizmos and graphics, its not well done. It looks cheap and instead of functional full color Dynamic displays around a standard speedo like the Focus has, the Leaf has a cheep 1 bit black and white dot matric LCD combined with fixed function LCD panels with colored lighting. The MPH is displaying digital instead of with an analog dial like the focus. The Focus takes the glass for the dash. The Steering wheel is much better designed and implemented on the focus as well. The d-pads give you selectable control over all the cards functions with two separate LCD panels to the left and right of the speedo, so you can have two separate controls going at once rather than having to switch. Combine that with the main Navigation screen and you have 3 displays all connected and working well together. The Microsoft Sync is a much slicker than the Nissan system, but the Nissan still has similar capabilities, but without the refinement, and two extra screens that the Sync system in the focus has.

On The Web

Both cars can do remote unlock and scheduled charging. Again the FFE seems better integrated and more refined, but the Nissan can do quite a bit with the Car Wings feature.

Service

I have not had to have the Nissan serviced, but I am totally unimpressed, in fact ticked off with Ford's service. They keep offering to change the oil every time we talk to them. They don't seem to know how to service the unique aspects of the Electric car, and as I write this my Focus has been in the shop three days for what was supposed to be a quick 30 minute software update, and I have no ETA on when I get it back. Ford gets a worse than zero at the service level from my experience. Other folks have not had the same bad luck I have had, but still get oil change offers. So you know what they are thinking. The Nissan sells many more Leafs than Ford sells FFEs so I bet they will have more service experience.

Preliminary Winner

Well I have to say I can't pick a winner yet until I know more. The room in the Leaf, is offset by its cheap execution. The beauty of the Focus, is offset by the fact that Ford seems to not know how to service it. If I had to do it again right now, I am leaning to the Leaf because I would rather have and Ugly well-services car, than a Beautiful car sitting in a dealers garage, when my Ford Focus Electric still is... after 3 days..

I will post updates as I go along..

Jonathan

.

As you know already I have been proud of my Zen master rating that my car has assigned to me given my very environmentally conscientious driving behavior. Well that is long, long gone now! There were several events in the class that consisted of a high speed slalom course, with several runs. Maximum acceleration to a gate, then maximum breaking, then a set of high-speed runs where the instructor would have your either break, go left or go right with a last minute hand signal. The high speed acceleration, with threshold breaking were terrible on the range. We lost about a mile point five for every run we did. After a while of this I gave up any home of getting home without a recharge.

The other students, parents and instructors were very impressed with how fast, how quite and how well the Ford Focus Electric handled. Essentially this was a day of autocross, and it was quite a good experience.

By the time the event was over we were 17 mines short of range to return home. Rather than find a charging station I decided to see just how much we could milk the remaining battery an go for broke. We headed home and slowly gained a few miles. It seemed we were not going to make it home at freeway speeds. That weekend the 405 North and 520 bridge were shutdown for repaving, so we had a stop and go detour route to get around the repairs, and that was just what the doctor ordered. The lower speed stop and go was perfect for getting maximum range out of the EV, and mile by mile we got up to a 2 mile surplus from a 17 mile shortfall.

We finally got back on the freeway and headed home. I knew the long downhill grade would help the return trip, and after having lost much of the stop-and-go surplus getting back on the freeway, the decent got us back to our +2 surplus and it stayed there till we drove into the garage. The two miles seemed like a rounding error in a single charge range limit, but I think you can really scale the mileage to the range you need. I made it work because I had to!

I doubt I will have to cut it this close in the future, and knowing we passed several level 2 charging stations that would have gotten us all the way home with plenty to spare for a quick 20 minute stop, I think I can say I am cured of any range anxiety I might have had.

As an update since my wife had taken over the car and replaced driving here 12mpg Ford Expedition, we are saving almost $400/mo in Gas for $28 in electricity, we estimate that the total cost savings nets us $60/mo after the lease payments and insurance so we are essentially paid $60/mo to drive a electric car while still keeping our original 8 passenger vehicle for towing and family outings.

Jonathan Fay

When Robert Scoble saw a demo of WorldWide Telescope under embargo he was so moved that he posted his now famous "Microsoft Researchers make me cry" blog post. If he saw what we have been doing lately, hooking WorldWide Telescopes Eclipse release up to Oculus Rift, he might post "Microsoft Researchers make me sick". Robert did not do a lot of crying during the original WWT demo, and he probably would not be doing any real heaving now if he saw it, but many astronauts get at least a little queasy their first time in space, and I am sure he would have fun with the headline.

Over the last couple of weeks the folks in my office have been getting mind-blowing demos of the total immersion that comes with putting on a Oculus Rift head mounted VR goggles and being transported into space. I usually start people off orbiting with the international space station. They look around them and see all the modules, solar panels and radiator panels surrounding them, then look down at their feet and see the Earth slowly moving down below them as they zoom 17,200 mile per hour orbiting the Earth once every 95 minutes. Grab and XBOX 360 controller and now you are flying around the space station. They we fly down and soar thru Yosemite Valley, speed time up and watch the sun move across the sky, the light dims as night falls and the sun sets to a brilliant red atmosphere and the stars come out. Turning your head north you see the big dipper, and pointing from the end of the cusp we follow the line to Polaris, the north star. I have videos I captured of colleagues giggling, saying "Wow!" or "Oh my gosh!" over and over again. Most agree it was the single most amazing thing they have every experienced.

By this time you may have completely forgotten that you are not actually in Yosemite Valley or orbiting the ISS, but wearing an  1280x800 HDMI 7" LCD panel with a combination of Gyro, Accelerometer and compass mounted on you head. The technology does such a good job at fooling you because the head tracking is so fluid. To make this illusion successful the sensors are read about 500 times a second and the orientation of your head is tracked quickly and accurately, while WorldWide Telescopes new Eclipse DirectX11 is rendering frames at the LCD limit of 60 updates a second. The combination of low latency sensor reading, and high-performance rendering mean the feedback to your brain is near instantaneous and you are fooled into thinking you are really there.

While 3d and Stereo environments have been considered "immersive", they come nothing close to this experience. The WWT/Rift integration does use stereo, but with a twist. Many of the pixels are used to fill your peripheral vision to a point where you can't see them all. They use a lens to give you a very high perceived field-of-view. While this sacrifices some of the resolution in the center of the field, large field of view that allows your eyes to gaze left and right and see more of the scene, even before you head moves. When you add the head tracking you can't ever "get out" of the image. An IMAX has a impressive field of view, a full dome planetarium even more, but the moment you turn you see walls and seats and the projectors behind you. In the WWT/Oculus experience you can't ever turn far enough around to get out of the scene: it becomes your reality. People have talked about virtual reality for years, but no product has every come this close to achieving it.

The Oculus may have been designed to gamers, but with WWT it is already showing its chops for Research and Science Visualization. I loaded data from years of earthquakes and flew under the Earth to analyze the patterns, seeing the distribution of quakes along the tectonic plates. Then I brought in 30 years of rainfall data for the entire US, and flew over the "Terrain" of rain fall stacked over the ground in a grid of a half-million 3d bar-charts. You get a real understanding with visualization of this data, and with the Oculus you can really focus on the data without distraction. The scenarios are endless and your get more out of every data set you view.

Just when you think it could not get any cooler, I added Kinect to the mix. Now I am flying around using my hands and arms, manipulating objects, giving voice commands all without losing the illusion of being there. If you have the space to work with the Kinect lets your really lets you naturally interact with the virtual environment. Over the summer we are going to do more development of this combination, both for standing and sitting scenarios.

The impact to education could also be amazing. Imagine kids with the closest planetarium several hundred miles away, sitting down in a class-room with a headset on, immersing themselves in a WorldWide Telescope tour teaching them the astronomy (or science) lesson of the day. Exploring the Earth, Mars, the moon or the sky and getting contextual answers to their questions. All at a price that almost any school can afford. You could even have virtual planetariums where a whole group of students could put headsets on while their instructor virtually flying around the "dome" showing them the sky.

For researchers, educators and science enthusiasts the combination of WWT and the Oculus rift is a real game changer, and far beyond the gaming it was designed for.

About now you are probably wondering how to get your hands on all of this. Well around July 1st the WWT Eclipse Beta will be on our website, with built-in Oculus Rift support, so if you were lucky enough to get one thru the Kickstarter then you can be up and running right away. Getting a Rift device will be more of a challenge. They are selling $300 development Kits right now, and delivery is quoted as August. We are still developing the integration of Kinect in WWT so that part is purely a demo for now, but we hope to make it public later this year. Their are so many new scenarios that this will enable, what we are releasing now is just the beginning. The sky is not the limit!

Jonathan Fay

PS. Thanks so much to George Djorgovski from Cal Tech who loaned us his Rift to make this work possible

Related Links

• WorldWide Telescope Homepage
• Oculus Web Site
• The Original "Microsoft Researchers make me Cry" blog post.
• Scoble's WWT reveal blog Post
• Joy of Tech "Scoble Tear Harvest Comic"

WorldWide Telescope Web Client showing results of clicking View in WWT link in Flickr Astrometry group

One of the cool things about WorldWide Telescope is it is not just about the images and data that are built in to the WWT catalog, but about brining in data from where ever it lives. Images are especially interesting as they may be pictures of the sky and belong in a specific alignment in the sky. For images in the file format used by professional astronomers call "FITS", there is built in support for a standard called WCS, or World Coordinate System. WWT can load these images and place them in the sky. For random PNG and JPEGS there is not a build in way of storing sky coordinates, so that is where AVM comes to the rescue.

AVM, or Astronomy Visualization Metadata, is a standard created by the Virtual Astronomy Multimedia Project (or VAMP for short). AVM uses specially designed XML tags to tag, the Who, How, Why and When of the image to allow astronomy press release images to retain all the information relevant to their use and interpretation no matter where the images might roam. The AVM data also will tell you where you can get the original image at full resolution and what rights you have to use it.

Adding AVM data to an image is not trivial, but with the right tools it's not hard either. The tagging tools on the AVM website (http://www.virtualastronomy.org) and the tagging tools in Photoshop when used with the AVM plug-in and optionally FITS liberator, can made the process pain free, but this process is usually the domain of the image publisher, not an ordinary user. The process also requires the publisher to know all the WCS data and other metadata. If you don't know this data, then how do you get it?

There at least two other ways to get the image aligned in the sky. One is Astronomy.net. Astronometry.net has a convenient service in that if you post a image to Flickr and tag it with "Astrometry" it will grovel the images with those tags and solve the alignment and add metadata to the tag list, including a link to view the image in the WWT web client. The alignment data is *NOT* added to the image, like AVM, but instead is encoded in the viewing link. Since the viewing link actually creates a WTML file on the fly, you can use that part of the link to create a WTML file to view that images directly in the desktop version of WWT. To do this you need to add the text "&wtml=true" to the end of the Flickr WWT link and paste it into your browser. When loaded, it will pop up that image and allow show it to you in the sky in WWT.

At this point I should mention that using a huge image as the source of data in WWT is not the preferred way of distributing images. WWT is mind blowingly fast because it in fact almost exclusively deals with images that have been pre-transformed into tiled multi-resolution image pyramids. In other words when a astronomical image first comes into view, all you need is a very small thumbnail sized image of it to view it, and when you zoom deeply into the image, you only need a few small chunks of the highest resolution data of that images, but you never can look at more than a screen-full at a time, so why force the computer to download the whole image before the user can see anything? Using this trick WWT can completely hide any network latency from the users notice. When you prepare you images for mass use you should tile them with the WWT image SDK, rather than use monolithic images. It's kinder to your viewers!

The second way to view an image on the sky that does not have WCS or AVM data embedded into it is to use the Explore...Load... Astronomical Image menu. First you need to zoom in to the area of the sky where the image is located. Then select the menu item to load the image, and find your file. It will display a message about not finding alignment metadata, and then load the image into position on the Sky where you are pointing. Now Click Ctrl+E and it will bring up an alignment menu. You can either use the keys and mouse to align the image by hand or drag the image so that one star in the new image aligns directly with a star in the background image. Then right click directly on the corresponding stars. This activates the two star align mode. You can now drag any other star and align it to its representation in the background image. A couple of iterations of this might be needed, but WWT will rotate and scale the images so the stars correspond in each image. With just two stars aligned, you should have a very close match almost everywhere else. You can use the B" key to blink the images and compare the location, then click Ctrl-E to exit the edit mode.

When you are done with the alignment you can right click on the image thumbnail in the explore tab and save it you a new or existing collection. The WTML file for that image collection will be automatically saved in your Documents folder under WWT Collections.

If you want to share this images with friends, you can put the original image on the web and edit the image location in the WTML file (using a text editor or XML editor) and put the URL to your image on the web and save the file. Now that WMTL file points to an image everyone can see, and your alignment metadata is saves. Images can also be used in tours, but remember Tiled images load much faster that monolithic ones, so use this method sparingly, or when instant loading is not as important.

Jonathan

Flickr astrometry group http://www.flickr.com/groups/astrometry/

AVM/VAMP Website (http://www.virtualastronomy.org)

With all that experience with WWT when it came time to create a new show Mark knew just where to turn. He had been using preview releases of the WWT Eclipse for a while and had success using WWT to produce Chris Lintott's "Hubble's Greatest Hits" so he was not entirely breaking new ground technically, but this would be a entirely new kind of Planetarium show in that while it was scripted, it was a live performance every time.  Almost 100 % of the show was actual imagery of the sky, artifacts and 360 degree panoramas. There was none of the pre-rendered Hollywood style effects that many shows live on today. It was a step back in to the roots of the Adler but using modern real-time rendering technology to tell stories in the planetarium like they used to do with the mechanical starball and Atwood Sphere. 

There were a number of features and refinements in the WWT Eclipse release that helped make this possible. Firstly full dome tours now support all of the rich overlays that have been in desktop tours. The overlay elements can be positions and rotated anywhere in the dome. The new transitions allow for graceful fades and cuts between sky, Earth, Solar System and Panoramas to make a polished look. You can also animate rotation and tilt of the dome to further animate the experiences. Positioning in a dome can be a challenge, but the new authoring tool allows you to preview on a flat panel in either a dome master layout, or using the dome preview mode, which lets you tilt and pivot you virtual head to look around the dome. You can also your the overlay list to see all the objects in a slide and act of them, even when you can't see them on a flat display. You can also edit scale, and positioning as numeric entry's to get exactly what you want. You can now also select multiple objects and act on them in groups, and using alignment tools to lay them out. In a full dome environment you can simply load a tour and it will sync the tour with all the projector servers, and you can keep track of them now with a handy build-in cluster management tool.

No show is complete without music. While WWT had great built-in audio handling capabilities, a world-class planetarium needs more that just a stereo or 5.1 track.  Most theater domes are equipped with digital playback system that use SMTPE code to synchronize 20 or more tracks to fill the dome with a perfect multi-channel audio mix. How do you keep the WWT tour in time with the audio? Sounds like it would be complex, but it is really quite simple. Just add a master audio track to the tour with a SMPTE signal track and feed the master's audio output to the SMTPE sync signal. Now as you play the tour, or skip around from slide to slide, the audio will always be in sync!

Since Eclipse is not quite out the door this week game me the chance to run and tune WWT in what may be the world's most advanced and complicated planetarium dome. There are a total of 20 projectors blasting 81 megapixels onto the dome. Each unit is controlled by a separate PC running WWT. It is important that everything be running smoothly on all 20 machines to get the best looking show. So we worked to tune the display engineand the shows hardware and software to get the best balance of image loading and rendering performance.

I got to see the finished product this week at the press preview and I was really impressed. The imagery, music and narration work together impressively and the Adler has created a unique show that really delivers the wonder of the cosmos.

Jonathan

http://www.adlerplanetarium.org/shows/cosmic-wonder

I also have trouble with the voice dial. Everything else was listening and working fine, navigation, climate, radio, etc. but not phone. None of my contacts seem to respond to voice commands. I re-paired my phone several times to no avail. Finally I called service and they recommended I re-pair the phone. When I told him I had done that he said it would probably need a master-reset. That sounds harsh. He said he was not authorized to walk me thru it but would transfer me with the group that would; the MyFordMobile support team.

First a bit about the MyFordMobile site. When you get your car you register with the website, add a user-name and password and then enter your vin. A message pops up on your cards 8" LCD screen asking if you want to give access to the person with the e-mail address entered in the sign-up. If you click yes, it sends a second confirmation 24 hours later and then you can take full control of the car from the web site. The website lets you monitor the cars charge status, remotely turn on and off the car, toggle the locks on/off, schedule warm-up times so the car is ready and warmed up to drive on your schedule while still plugged in to maximize your range. It also tracks driving habits by individual, showing your how energy efficient you are, rating your use of regenerative breaking, etc. Each key can be registered with a different driver. The car rates your driving style on a scale from Zippy to Zen. I am an off-the-scale zen so far and when I use my key it estimates the range at almost 90 miles, while it only gives my zippy wife 64 miles of ranges when she checks in with her key. Very smart. This is almost like the analytics I mentioned from my ALMS race car, but instead of optimizing for lap times by looking and throttle positions, breaking and gear selection, it is optimizing for batter range, by rating regenerative breaking, use of the accelerator peddle and cruising and wind-efficient speeds.

Well not back to that reset, soon after doing the master reset, I got a text on my phone telling me the car had been removed from my account! What?!?! I had to re-pair my phone, but now everything worked as it should so I was up and running, but what about my week of driving history? Would I have to wait for the 24 hours for the 2nd confirmation before using the car's website again? Well I did have to re-enter the VIN, but once I confirmed, I got all the control back immediately and all my history was restored! That was some good scenario management. I would have liked to have never had to hit reset in the first place, but it was a good experience to have it all come up back on-line without losing a step. That is what you get with a cloud connected car.

So now to the range test. After work last night I decided to run a test. A fiend of mine was very interested in getting a FFE as well, but worried that it would not have the range to climb from Seattle to North Bend, so I decided to put it to the test. Over the charge I logged 57 actual miles going all the way to North Bend up the I90 pass, I had an estimated range of 23 when I pulled into my garage, but at the end of the trip I was covering about 2 miles for every mile of range I was losing so I figured I could have milked a total of 100 miles out of that charge. I used to get crazy when my old car would give me the 50 miles left warning light, so driving an electric is like always driving with the fuel-low warning light on. You are always aware, but on the flipside you can just wave bye-bye each time you pass the gas station.

Jonathan

The Hubble Space Telescope using a custom TLE reference frame and imported 3d Model.

WorldWide Telescope is a platform for temporal/special scientific data visualization. Space and time are a big component to data, and with all sorts of objects whizzing around one another its often easier to describe the coordinates of the data in some sort of fixed coordinate reference frame. There are standard reference frames that are common, like specifying astronomical coordinates in RA/Dec in J2000 epoch, and the familiar Lat/Lng for Earth in the WGS84 reference frame, but there are many, many other reference frames where you can plant data. There are several hundred by default in WWT, with the sky, planets, moons, fixed and rotating, the ISS, etc. Even with all those orbits, its not enough. WWT gives you a way to specify orbits or objects around another body. WWT uses Keplarian orbital elements for this. Six elements are required for an orbit, but there are many variations of which size elements you need. Often this can become confusing because most users don't have either the desire or skill to pluck just the right elements and fill them in the reference frame creation wizard. Well for Earth centered orbits there is a format that comes to the rescue. They are called TLEs by those in the know, or Two Line Elements. They are a specially formatted set of 80 character lines that exactly defines an Keplarian fit for an orbit at a certain time. NORAD developed the specification but it is widely used by NASA and other parties.  Since most satellites do station keeping, and frequently adjust their orbits, and the Earths gravitations field, drag, and other forces slowly chip away at orbits, these elements need to be frequently updated.

TLEs can be found on mission web pages, or enthusiast web pages such as Heavens above and CelesTrack. But first you will need to create a new reference frame to manage the orbital calculations.

When you start the Wizard select you reference frame name, and type Orbital.

Enter the Mean radius for the object, for moons & planets that will be big number, for Hubble a 7 meter sphere will contain it. You can make this bigger than life if for better visibility.

While you can take the data from a TLE and decode it and enter it into WWT, there is a much mode clever way to do it. One you are at the orbital elements page in the reference frame wizard (you get there by right clicking a reference frame in the Layer Manager), you can just click the Paste TLE button and like magic all the elements are entered. In fact because of the checksum in the TLE spec, you can actually just select a chuck of text containing the TLE, or even the *whole* web page, and when you click Paste in WWT it will automatically find the first valid TLE in the clipboard text and transfer the elements for you!

One you have a new reference frame you can do cool things like import a 3Ds model of the satellite and use right click on the reference frame in the Layer Manger and select "Track this Frame". Your camera will now be orbiting around the reference frame.

Besides 3d models you can add other data such as a spherical planetary map. Just right click on a Imageset thumbnail, and select the "Add as Layer" button. You can do this with WMS layers, spreadsheet data, etc.

Another options is to bulk load a file of TLE's. Just save the TLE's in a file, You can have three lines per set. The first line is the readable name of the object, and the other two lines are the TLE data body. Just save it with the .TLE extension, and right click on Earth and click Add. Select "*.tle" as the filter and find your file. This will import all the orbits. Another right click on the imported layer, will let you expand the list to see the individual satellites listed.

This is an examples of a NORAD download list plotted with thousands of Satellite orbits.

Now go and have some fun. Use Bing and find TLEs and then Bing for 3ds models of those objects and import them. Make a tour about it and post me comments and I will share a collection of interesting orbits and objects on Layerscape.org.

Jonathan

Since we first launched WorldWide Telescope almost 5 years ago I knew we would have to have a major rewrite of WWT's graphics engine eventually to move past DX9. Managed DX had been deprecated, and XNA would not support anything beyond DX9 either, so we had to have an alternative. I considered SlimDX, but eventually Microsoft's Windows® API Code Pack for Microsoft® .NET Framework  emerged and when we spun off code for the GeoFlow project we took that route but I was never satisfied that it was the best option. With .NET your code is not processor dependent, so why would you want to tie yourself down to x86 or x64 specific code if you could have ANYCPU as an option? Then I came across the SharpDX project. Here was a project that was designed to have make .NET code have unrestricted access to the DirectX framework, with the lowest overhead, and preserving the DirectX API, but making in .NET friendly.

One of the first thing you will notice in ShardDX is that there are not nearly as many sample code projects as you might expect for an API. The reason is the mapping is so close, and you can almost line for line port samples code from the  C++ DirectX SDK to C#. The wrapper is also special, it is machine generated code that makes use of some snazzy code probably designed for the C++ IJW features of .NET to create ANYCPU compatible code. That means that I compile *ONE* version of the code, one version of the setup, and it runs transparently in 32bits on a x86 O/S and 64 bits on a x64 O/S, and even ARM in the Windows 8 case.

Another very compelling feature is they got the same API to work on Windows Desktop, Windows 8 App Store apps and Windows phone 8. You can't necessarily run the same binaries, but you can create a graphics engine with common code that will target all of these systems. Compare this to having three different graphics API's and you can appreciate how cool that is. One set of code instead of three. I like that simplicity. While it is not entirely free, you may still need three different codebases for the UI chrome to custom fit each app to its platform, at least you can save writing on the graphics front.

So with the WorldWide Telescope Eclipse release we will be bringing much faster graphics with our new DirectX11 engine, but gracefully degrade when only DX9 or DX10 hardware is available. This also means if you have a 64bit O/S you can now bring massive amounts of data into WWT to visualize.

In the future we will be making much more extensive use of the DX11 API with more GPU compute, geometry shaders and much more. I have been very satisfied with the development ease, performance and stability of the SharpDX platform and I can't image going back to the old ways.

There has been a trend for people to "go back to C++", but leaving the efficiency and safety of developing on .NET, when the GPU is doing the heavy lifting just does not seem right. SharpDX lefts you have the best of both worlds, and now it is powering all 190+ worlds in WWT.

Jonathan

The reason caching works is while there might be potentially a petabyte of data your *could* download, your interests are usually narrower than that. Just imagine how often you drive down a street you have never been before. When you are young, that might be often, but as time goes by you just keep going by familiar territory.

So if you have to setup a WWT laptop running off a solar charger in the middle of the Kalahari dessert without access to the internet how do you give a new laptop the experience of your age? That is where the WWT Eclipse cache management tools come in handy. They allow you do save and load an entire cache to a portable USB memory stick or hard drive. The cache tools also allow you to download entire time sets for popular times, or purge un-needed cache entries for others. Using these tools together you can create a cache that can be loaded onto a memory stick, DVD, hard drive so a free-standing computer can run WWT and have a fairly rich experience without ever connecting to the internet.

Explaining this all in text in a blog post would be a bit much, so I produced a video to explain the process.

You will need one of the Eclipse builds of WWT, available right now in the WWT Eclipse page here.

See the attached Word doc for more details.

Jonathan

[View:http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-01-59-01/6153.WWT-Cache-Managment.mp4]

Creating WorldWide Telescope Caches.docx