Cooking With Glass Part 1

Hello, World! A phrase that most anyone who’s done any kind of programming is all too familiar with. Today I started working with the Google Glass at my local community college, Montgomery County Community College, or if you wish to be more trendy, MCCC or MC3.

A little about myself to get this started. I am currently majoring in Computer Science, and I’m about two semesters in. I’ve been having a ton of fun and making contacts with some great people. At home I’m a husband and a father of two. The support of my family helps tremendously with the projects that I take on, for classes or otherwise. When it comes to class work I’m always trying to find ways to expand the lesson to challenge myself. You want a program modelling a musical note? I’ll make a synthesizer that outputs an ASCII score and plays back the melody you want. You want a program that models a quadratic formula? I’ll make a an Android Graphing Calculator. My final project this semester was a team effort, and he modified existing code to turn an OCR (optical character recognition) app that will pick up text with the camera and translate it for you into one that will do it in real time as well as text-to-text when you type it in. A couple of my professors have approached me to become a lab aide and a tutor, and I hope to start that in the fall. As for this summer, I’ll be volunteering my time to first and second semester CS students as well as developing for the Glass.

And now we’re back to the Glass. I’ve done some light to more complicated Android Development, and when asked I was excited to start working on the Glass. Before I was able to get my hands on it, I went through some blogs and forums, trying to make sure I had everything setup and ready to go when the time came. Today I finally got to sit down with it and as anyone who’s tried something new for the first time could guess, I had some problems.

Although my computer would recognize the Glass for what it was it wouldn’t let me set it up with the Android Device Bridge, or ADB. It just wouldn’t show up. After Googling for a while I found a few workarounds and fixes, and through persistence… I ended up uninstalling the driver and reinstalling it and it was fine. The major problem, it would seem, is the drivers were created for Windows 7, and I’m running Windows 8 and therefore had to disable driver signature enforcement.

And so finally, after a couple hours of getting everything setup so I could create my “Hello, World!” on Google Glass, I looked through a bit of sample code that comes with the software development kit, or sdk. Light development for the Glass, being an Android device after all, is the same as developing for an Android phone or tablet. I played around a little, drawing colored squares on the screen, but using the bulk of my time allotted for today on software troubles, I decided to call it a day. I’m going to spend the next week reading up on voice recognition and using the head-tilt and touch gestures.

I hope to come in at least once a week to work on the Glass, and plan on writing about my discoveries/failures when I do. Until next time, Vogel out.

Vogel I am a gamer and a parent, lost in the struggle to balance the two. You can Email Rob or follow Rob on Twitter @ or Facebook

One response to “Cooking With Glass Part 1”

1. Daniel Pisko III says:

   May 9, 2014 at 2:52 pm

   Where is all the cooking? I’m hungry.