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Self driving car – Take 1

The following video shows the first quasi autonomous movements of my 1:8 sized buggy. I wrote a little script that makes movements suitable for turning the car.  I had no space in my flat for letting it run right now so I stuck with the ‘dry run’ for now. After adding some more sensors I will replace the script to be event driven instead of timer based.

The electronic components are: Toradex Colibri T20 on an Iris carier board running Linux (I got that one at embedded world this year) and an Arduino for controlling the servos. There also is a DC motor controller for driving the wheels that came with the car.

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Fixed Issue in SpringerlinkBatchCreator

Springerlink updated their website causing my userscript “SpringerlinkBatchCreator” to not display the “add book” link. Thus today I searched for a solution to fix this issue and found it. It is now working again.

I also added chromium and chrome support. To support these I had to include some third party code that reimplements GM_setValue and GM_getValue.

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Downloading Springer books easier

I am very glad to have free access to a lot of great books at springerlink.com, and to be able to download them as PDF. But the bad thing about it is that you get every chapter of a book as a single pdf file.

One day I had the idea to make a shell-skript that gets all these files for me and merges them to a single file. But first step was to check google if there was no such skript. Fortunately there already has been a piece of great software that was better then I expected.
This skript is written in python and is named springer_download.py from Milian

After some month I wanted a couple of new books for the new semester. And there was also a new version of the software that was now also able to take the ISBN of the books. Unfortunately I had a lot of books to download. I was lucky again: a friendly guy from my university gave me a skript that calls springer_download.py in batch to download multiple books without taking care about it too much.
You can find it here.

But to use this batch download more efficiently I wanted to have a small greasemonkey plugin. There was nothing like that before, so I programmed it the last days. It adds some links to springerlink.com book pages that allow you to make a list of ISBN numbers. These numbers can be copied to the file batchlist.txt that is needed for the batchdownload.
You can find it an Github as well: SpringerlinkBatchCreator
I will add some features sometimes, but that should be ok for the moment. Feel free to change it and to say something about it.