Monthly Archives: February 2018

Devnexus 2018 keynote – nasa

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Title: Designing and Visualizing Deep Space Manned Missions
Speakers: Diane Davis & Sean Phillips

For more blog posts, see the DevNexus 2018 live blogging table of contents

The keynote speakers started with a nice disclaimer about not working for NASA

Lunar Orbital Platform Gateway

  • Next outpost in space
  • ”only” 5 days away
  • Need to find an orbit that is not too hard to get into and out of
  • Big data problem  – can’t look at all the orbits.

Tools/Tech

  • ”We are builders we are creators; it is all about the tools”
  • ”You are more than the lines of code that you write. It’s not about the tools; its about the ideas”
  • ”Disturbing trend where measure based on lines of code. We need code; but we also need ideas Ideas that lift people up. Don’t leave here with the latest API/framework. Leave here with an idea”
  • Look at data points vs orbits to reduce dataspace
  • NetBeans – version 9 in beta
  • Cloud – so can plot more trajectories

JavaFX

  • Tried JavaScript canvas – not fast enough to render *lots* of data points. Redraw anvas every milliseconds based on current data
  • FXyz library – 3D library

Parallel

  • Using parallel stream API
  • Hard to make parallel
  • Lots of math
  • Works great in cloud; lots of cores
  • Generates states/points or spacecraft

”As we all kow, the enemy’s gate is down; space is three dimensional” – nice to have an Ender’s Game reference in there!

My take

This was a fun start to the morning> A current event and very relevant.  The pictures were awesome. Showing code was awkward. Aside from being too small, dark colors on a black background does not look good in the distinace. (And I’m in the fifth row).  They both speak really well and the images of orbits are cool

Iive blogging from DevNexus 2018

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This is the table of contents for my DevNexus blog posts.

Wednesday

  • I taught a half day workshop on JUnit 5. You can try it out from the github repo.

Thursday

Friday

General notes

  • 27K attendees and over 100 countries! Outside of JavaOne, this is the largest Java conference in the US.
  • The auditorium would have been full if people took the front seats. Good they had an overflow room.
  • I love that the badges have names on both sides.

using eclipse launch configurations to deploy FRC robot code faster in eclipse

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I use Eclipse launch configurations at work and coding at home all the time. It never occurred to me to mention them to the team until last week. A student asked “is there a way to use a keyboard shortcut to deploy.”

Before

For those not familiar with FRC (FIRST Robotics Challenge), the deployment procedure is:

  1. Select the project in your workspace.
  2. Click “Run”
  3. Mouse over “Run As”
  4. Click “WPILib Java Deploy”

This kicks off the Ant build to do the deploy. Certainly not a terrible process. But when you do this dozens of times and in a rush, it can feel tedious. I think that’s why I never suggested it. At the lab, I ensure the students always drive at the keyboard. So I never have to click four things to deploy and it doesn’t feel tedious. Whereas when I’m coding myself, I feel it and optimize my time/clicking.

Setting up a launch configuration

The first thing I did was show how to set up and favorite a launch configuration.

The initial setup:

  1. Run a build the “long way”
  2. “Run” > “External Tools” > “External Tools Configuration…”
  3. Click build.xml or build.xml (1) or whatever you see in the list. Confirm it is for this year’s robot. (You may find it easier to select all the build.* configurations, delete them and then run one new build.)
  4. Change the name to one that you like. For example, “2018 Robot”
  5. Click the “Common” tab
  6. Click “Display in Favorites Menu”
  7. Click “Apply”

Then to run it, you just click the triangle next to the launcher and it is stickied first in the list. (Be sure to click the triangle next to the green arrow with the red box. There’s also one without the red box which is used for running Java command line programs.)

This gets us down to two mouse clicks. But it is still not a keyboard shortcut; the initial request.

Keyboard shortcut

I had to look this up, but you can provide a keyboard shortcut. Sort of. I couldn’t figure out how to create a keyboard mapping to a specific run configuration. But that doesn’t matter here. We want to map to the last run configuration.

  1. Open the Eclipse preferences. (The Eclipse menu on a Mac and the Window menu otherwise)
  2. “General” > “Editor” > “Keys”
  3. Type “Run last” in the filter to find the matching entry
  4. Setup a binding. I chose command F + command R. (The beginning of spelling out FRC), but you can choose anything.
  5. note that the contest/when is “in windows”.  This means the shortcut is avilable when you have any file open. Just when you want when looking at or making robot code better.