The acceptance of my project "Implementation of a heart primitive " for
GSoC 2013 under BRL-CAD stands out as a transition point in my computing
career, the first time I contributed to the open source community, a boon
to developers' morale in my entire community and one of the best birthday
gifts I've ever had :).
For the past quarter, I've been implementing a heart primitive for the
BRL-CAD package. This project focused on writing and testing callback
functions in the ray tracing library for the aforementioned primitive.You
are invited to read my diary *on*
http://brlcad.org/wiki/User:Izak/GSOC_2013_logs .
Despite the challenges I encountered such as the lack of Internet
connectivity for over 5 weeks, before the *mid-term evaluation* period, I
hooked the heart primitive into the BRL-CAD source by adding a magic number
for the heart in include/magic.h and src/libbu/magic.c, stubbing an empty
heart in include/db5.h, include/rtgeom.h, include/raytrace.h,
src/librt/db5_types.c,src/librt/primitives/table.c and
src/librt/primitives/hrt/hrt.c as well as adding typing support for the
heart in the *mged* interface in include/wdb.h,
src/libwdb/wdb.c and src/libged/typein.c.
After the mid-term evaluations,I implemented ray tracing
callback functions for serialization (rt_hrt_??port), textual description
(rt_hrt_describe, rt_hrt_print) and ray tracing (rt_hrt_prep, rt_hrt_shot
and rt_hrt_norm) . I also wrote a test to ensure that BRL-CAD's root solver
is stable for sextic equations and after consulting some mathematicians, I
learned that the heart's sextic equation cannot be solved in radicals -- A
pointer to which method does not work :). Feel free to watch the animation
of the heart primitive on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErmljjeY_-A or
download it from http://brlcad.org/~Izak/HeartImages/Heart.mpg (using
*wget*) . You can also look at images of the heart from 360 different
angles
using http://brlcad.org/~Izak/HeartImages/.
As GSoC 2013 comes to an end, my passion to continuously contribute to the
open source community grows. I intend to finish the callbacks functions for
the heart primitive and hook the heart to the *mged *and
*archer*interfaces so the heart gets into the next BRL-CAD release :)
I'll like to thank all the BRL-CAD mentors who have helped introduce me to
open source development.
Sean, you are a great mentor who knows how to get a novice's juices flowing
:), great developer and administrator too .You taught me to be flexible and
always be ready to learn. Erik, you were always there when I needed help
and you're a great mentor too.
I'll also like to thank my fellow GSoCers who have really encouraged helped
me too :)
Vlad and Mohit, thanks for your tips on generating patches and
understanding compiler errors;
Check, thanks for your companionship and help during this period.
The GSoC 2013 experience lead to the authorization of the Google Developer
Group Buea and an invitation to attend the 2013 GSoC Doc Camp in Mountain
View, CA. In the coming years, I pray that BRL-CAD always gets selected so
that other developers in my community can contribute to this great software
package too.
Be good.
Isaac Kamga.
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