I don't have an actual robot right now. I would like to work on a project for educational purposes. I got the QiSDK tutorials running and have a Pepper emulator with Android Studio.
While testing I realized that I can't actually speak to the emulator. I can only simulate speech by actually typing it into the Dialogue window. Is this the limitation of the pepper emulator?
Can I really not test the speech recognition features of Pepper with the listen action?!?
Yes, this is a limitation of the speech recognition, which providers are licensed only on real robots. So yes, you cannot test speech recognition without a real robot, only dialogue management.
I have numerous ESP8266 / ESP32 / STM32 IOT devices, running my own firmware. One of the functions is a uPNP/SSDP provider which allows remote control from Amazon Echo devices and/or anything that can "speak" SSDP. I managed to find enough info to get these devices automatically added to the Windows network "Home Automation" view by tweaking the registry:
My next step is to have what I think is a "context menu handler" so I can right-click the relevant device and have on/off/toggle options that then send the relevant SOAP envelop to the device to switch on etc. I'd also like to either change the icon (or add an overlay) in-flight to show the on/off state of the device, but that is icing on the cake.
I am having having serious difficulty finding an example C++ framework I can cut and paste to start me off that is relevant, accurate and modern. Every example I find is either for an explorer file menu, or in C#, or literally decades out of date: no doubt much is similar but it is "hooking" the thing in to the Network Pane of Windows 10 that I simply can't find how to do. Even on the MS developer site the information talks mostly about Vista and even XP(!) and is generally quite incomprehensible. The clearest site I could find (dated 2018) recommended a book on Windows Shell programming that was published in...wait for it...1998!
I know I'm going to have to build a DLL - I'm fine with that, I just need a good "leg-up".
"NetworkExplorerPlugins" brings up precisely 0 hits here.
I have been searching unsuccessfully for weeks - can anybody point me to a recent Windows 10-specific C++ example or tutorial that will get me started?
I'm trying to search and connect to advertising Bluetooth Low Energy devices from C++ code.
I would like a piece of code to use laptop's wireless chip to discover and connect to BLE devices, regardless of their GATT Services.
I want in fine to use GATT properties (Services, Characteristics, Descriptors, Notification).
Programmatically
I have the BluetoothLEAdvertisementWatcher Class documentation from Windows API.
I tried to make working this example but without good results.
I also tried this example, but no success.
Manually
I figured out using Windows 10 Action Center, and use manual pairing to connect devices (because Windows con see and connect my device).
Then I could use directely the Windows.Devices.Bluetooth.GenericAttributeProfile Namespace
Is there a way to implement that automatically?
Hello Raphaël and welcome to stackoverflow. When you say "without good results" or "but no success", you should detail why (compilation error, runtime error...).
I used this piece of code:
Getting BLE Beacons in C++ Windows 10 Desktop Application
It compiles under Win10, so should the third link you posted (https://github.com/urish/win-ble-cpp) as it's very similar if you look at the includes here. Just note that this is not regular win32 projects: from Visual Studio you must create a new "Windows"/"Universal" C++ project, else they won't compile.
Alternatively, if you're OK with using a 3rd party library, you could simply use QtBluetooth, recent version supports windows 10. Then you can easily access BLE features from aregular win32 project.
I am writing an application using Qt and want to try and deploy it as a web-application. I want user's to be able to use my application by accessing it through a web browser. I'm guessing that's what a web-application is? What kind of options do I have? I've never looked into doing anything like this but I'd like to learn something new.
EDIT: What if I deployed my application on a Linux server and had users access/run it through a terminal? I think writing web application is going to be more complicated than I had originally thought.
If all you have is a Qt application, then the best you can do is use Qt 5 and run it using a remote visualization package:
Use WebGL streaming, introduced in Qt 5.10. Qt exposes a browser-connectible interface directly, without need for third-party code.
For Qt 5.0-5.9, you can use the vnc platform plugin. Then connect using a web-browser based vnc client.
For many uses it might be sufficient, and certainly it's much less effort than coding up a web app.
You're looking for Wt which provides a different set of drawing routines for many Qt GUI elements, turning them from lines on screen to HTML controls.
http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt
It also handles websocket calls to provide interactivity. It seems a great idea, let us know how it works in practice.
For the case of QML there is QmlWeb which is a JavaScript library that is able to parse QML-code and create a website out of it using normal HTML/DOM elements and absolute positions within CSS, translating the QML properties into CSS properties.
QmlWeb is a small project by Lauri Paimen that he’s already developing for a few years now. QmlWeb of course doesn’t yet support everything Qt’s implementation of QML does, but it already supports a quite usable subset of it. It supports nearly all of the most basic QML syntax. Moreover it has support for HTML input elements (Button, TextInput, TextArea are currently supported, more to come).
Well, QmlWeb is not finished. I hope Digia help with this project to make it ready with mature features.
Interestingly, it is possible to compile Qt applications to javascript using emscripten-qt. These run fairly fast with Firefox's asm.js interpreter:
http://vps2.etotheipiplusone.com:30176/redmine/projects/emscripten-qt/wiki
Try "Qt for Webassembly".
Webassembly allows the C/C++ code to be compiled and run natively inside majority of the browsers:
WebAssembly (Wasm, WA) is a web standard that defines a binary format and a corresponding assembly-like text format for executable code in Web pages. ... It is executed in a sandbox in the web browser after a verification step. Programs can be compiled from high-level languages into Wasm modules and loaded as libraries from within JavaScript applets ... Its initial aim is to support compilation from C and C++, though support for other source languages such as Rust and .NET languages is also emerging.
To run a Qt application unchanged over the web so users can operate it in a browser, you can compile it for Android using the x86 Android ABI, run it inside an Android emulator on a server and supply the Android Cast videostream to users' browsers. You'll also need to have JavaScript in place that records the keyboard and mouse events on the web clients and relays them back to the server.
I had previously tried Qt WebGL streaming and found it to be good over the local network but too slow over the Internet. A 10 s application startup time is acceptable, but 3 s to show a new screen is rather not. I had the exact same experience with the Qt VNC platform plugin. Compared with that, the Android Cast streaming based appetize.io solution (see below) was much faster, providing a well usable user experience even over my 8 Mbit/s connection.
Existing solutions
Here is an overview of commercial products and open source software components that I found that can help you with this approach:
appetize.io. This is a commercial product to run Android applications over the web for demo and testing purposes. I have just done this with a Qt QML based application and liked the outcome. When choosing an Android 9 / 10 device you can see that the "Screencast" setting is on; which is why I believe that this solution uses the Android Cast technology.
runthatapp.com. This is another commercial offer. Not as sophisticated (yet) as appetize.io, but providing a nice pay-as-you-go scheme.
ScreenStream. An open source Android app that provides a web server to view the screen of one Android device in a web browser, also relying on the Android Cast technology. That Android device could be an emulator running on a web server. And to make this multi-user capable you can employ a small load balancer similar to a technique that I developed for Qt WebGL streaming. The ScreenStream README shows that the application might consume up to 20 Mbit/s per client in short bursts.
Ideas for future improvements
Serving your Qt app as an interactive live video stream seems a promising idea to me, given that I found it already less sluggish than VNC and similar solutions. There are ways to make this even faster, such as using a hardware H.265 video encoder to create a video stream with very little delay. By operating multiple such encoders on a single server, the server could serve multiple clients and still keep its CPU load low. Maybe there are even better video formats for such a purpose, given that user interfaces of programs lend themselves well to lossless compression.
Some hints for appetize.io
Finally: since I used the appetize.io product for a Qt application over the last few days, here are some tips from that experience:
It is necessary to compile your Qt application for the x86 Android ABI. The default armeabi-v7a ABI will not work because most appetize.io devices are actually server-based Android emulators and the only ARM based device ("Nexus 5 Physical") failed to start any Qt application I tried to use with it.
The x86_64 ABI may also work, but you might then have to also compile Qt yourself for it, as not all versions of Qt come pre-compiled for that architecture.
All appetize.io links (both for standalone pages and embeddable iframes) support GET parameters to configure the app presentation format. Especially relevant here is screenOnly=true to show the app without a picture of a phone or tablet around it.
Features that rely on phone hardware (camera, position etc.) will not work or only show dummy data. But if you really wanted, you could create a hybrid application combined with client-side JavaScript. It would run device-dependent code in the user's browser, for example to take a photo with the webcam, and then provide the results to the Qt application via the appetize.io cross-document messaging protocol. The following message types seem suitable to build a simple communication protocol: pasteText(value), keypress(key, shiftKey) and openUrl(value).
In the default appetize.io standalone app demo pages, only the key events of ordinary letter keys are sent to the app, not keyboard shortcuts or function keys like F2 and Esc. This might be possible to fix with JavaScript on an own page embedding the appetize.io iframe, as their cross-document messaging protocol provides the keypress(key, shiftKey) message type.
Qt does not support writing browser based web applications. Unfortunately.
You need to use common web programming technologies for this. There are a lot of ways, but Qt is not one of them.
I would like, from a native Windows application using C++, to receive video/audio data sent from a browser located in a remote location. It seems like WebRTC is the way to go for this.
Most information I find is about how to interact with the browser to write WebRTC apps, but it may case the data would be received by my C++ app. Is it correct that I would need to use the WebRTC Native Code package for this, which is described as being 'for browser developers'? Document is located here: http://www.webrtc.org/webrtc-native-code-package
And what if I want to send video/audio data that I generate (ie not directly coming from a webcam and microphone), would I be able to send it to the remote location browser?
Any sample code out there which does something like I'm trying to accomplish?
The wording in that link is a bit misleading. They intend people that are developing browsers to use the native code, and advise those that are developing "applications" in a browser to use the WebRTC API.
I have worked with their native code for over a year to develop an Android application that is capable of performing audio and / or video calls between other Android devices and to browsers. So, I a pretty sure that it is completely possible to to take their native code and create a Windows application (especially since they have example code that does that for Linux and Mac -- look at peerconnection client and peerconnection server for this). You might have to write and re-write code to get it to work on Windows.
As for as data that you generate. In the Android project that I worked with, we didn't rely on the Android device / system to provide us with video, we captured and sent that out our selves using the "LibJingle" / WebRTC libraries. So, I know that that is possible, as long as you provide the libraries with video data in the correct format. I would imagine that one would be able to do the same with audio, but we never fiddled with that, so I cannot say for sure.
And as for example code, I can only suggest Luke Weber's gitbug repositories. Although it is for Android, it might be of some help to look at how he interfaces with the two libraries. Probably the better code to look at is the peerconnection client stuff that comes in the "LibJingle" second of the native code. [edit]: That is located in /talk/examples/peerconection/client/ .
If you get lost from my use of "LibJingle", that will show you when I started working with all of this code. Sometime around July of 2013 they migrated "LibJingle" into the WebRTC "talk" folder. From everything that I have seen, they are the same thing, just with the location and named changed.