There’s only a little more than a week to go and we’re in a mad rush to get things done. The weekend started off with switching all our code to Python since there was better support for Python on Maemo than Java for device specific things such as the GStreamer for multimedia.
I’ve never programmed in Python before but I got PyDev plugin for Eclipse and searched up a lot of Python how-tos on the Internet. For the functionality I needed from NXT and the camera I spent a lot of time on maemo.org searching for packages such as json and gstreamer. Accessing the camera was not intuitive at all so I resorted to a command line call which the KAPing With The N900 (another PUSH N900 team) used. The maemo.org thread can be found here.
I didn’t run into Bluetooth driver problems with Python so that definitely made my weekend better. The NXT-Python package worked really well but documentation was on the weak side. I had to play around with the motor controls a lot until I got Niko to turn or even move forward properly.
At the end of Sunday I got the N900 posting to Twitter, taking a photo with flash on, posting to TwitPic, and even got the Lego components working! Here’s a video of Niko’s first completely automated movement, camera capture, touch sensor, and posting using just the N900!

Looking good, very good progress!
BTW, I rewrote all of my software, so now I’m using Python, too (and it was also my first try with this language). I’m using the Python bindings for gst (python-gst0.10) instead of calling gst-launch, which gives a lot more flexibility…
by Ricardo on March 15, 2010 at 9:42 pm
hehe… Glad to see someone else do the switch to Python as the easier choice for Maemo development. It certainly is fast to program in, even if you aren’t terribly familiar with the language.
by Timothy on March 16, 2010 at 3:33 pm
That coming from Tim who had minimal knowledge in Python when he decided to switch to coding in it…
Loving your comments on the blog guys!
by mattbrawn on March 17, 2010 at 11:22 am
How did you do it with gstreamer? it’s not working well with gst-launch
by Eric on March 18, 2010 at 10:36 pm
I saw this at CTIA – awesome – and congrats on the 2nd Prize win. The buy I spoke to on the Nokia booth suggested he might write up a ‘How To’, any chance of that?
by Jim B. on March 25, 2010 at 5:59 pm