Boost your Octave (for MATLAB users)

Posted on 23 June, 2015 by Mayitzin

Let’s face it, you are using Octave because MATLAB is too expensive for you. Maybe you’re not student anymore and got used to play with MATLAB, but now you need the best free alternative.

Certainly, if money is not a problem, MATLAB would overperform Octave in most of their characteristics (not all of them and I’ll show you) and is surely the best option.

Fear not! GNU Octave is here, and yes, it is indeed the best alternative to MATLAB, but… it’s not the same. We know, and here I present some useful tips to avoid any conflict with your migration to the Octave world.

Continue reading →

Song of the day – Who am I (OST)

Posted on 15 June, 2015 by Mayitzin

I found it hard to pick one single song, actually, and not because they’re not good enough. They are, but their combination makes it even better.

This time I go out of my usual taste. I’ve never been fan of electronic music. Everyone knows that. However, I recently watched the german film ‘Who am I – No system is safe‘ and, besides a good story, the film features a great soundtrack.

It start with the main theme Alarm, originally made by Boys Noize, and is followed by other themes by Fukk Offf, Carpet and Royal Blood.

This is the kind of soundtrack that exactly fit that insane notion of artificial adrenaline hitting your head while coding at 3:00 am… or am I the only one experiencing it?

Egal! Please have your dose of Who am I:

Kalman Filter – A painless approach

Posted on 4 June, 2015 by Mayitzin

Needless to say but Kalman Filtering is one of the most powerful estimation processes in almost any Engineering field. From robotic vacuums to Satellite Guidance, it is everywhere. Here I will explain the how’s and why’s of the Kalman Filter (KF) in our lives.

Any decent technological project will use this robust method for the final estimation of the position of any intelligent system. The format of the given information can be, fortunately, represented as a Gaussian state.

Thanks to this property, it is possible to use Gaussian filters (KF is one of them), in order to improve the final estimation.

Gaussian modelling estimations are going to be carried in this explanation, so it is preferable to have this mathematical background (a simple understanding is enough) in order to follow the presented technique. Continue reading →