libnifalcon - libnifalcon update

Not a whole lot to say, mostly just letting people know that no, I’m not dead, and yes, the project is still alive.

I’ve added a new paper to the documentation section, Characterisation of the Novint Falcon Haptic Device for Application as a Robot Manipulator.

In terms of projects using libnifalcon, there was recently a performance by Edgar Berdahl at CCRMA @ Stanford, using 5 novint falcons in a telepresence percussion piece:

There are also pictures of the construction at my flickr site

Plans for the near future:

• Finally releasing binary libraries, because apparently building libnifalcon is kinda hard (not disputing that, I need some work on the build system)
• Possibly start looking at grip circuits
• Optimization of communications - We’ve found that on OS X, at least, the falcon takes around 20% cpu per device running due to the polling calls. This seems kind of high, and means you can’t run 4+ on one machine.