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Sun, 04 May 2008
Report from Maker Faire
We spent the day yesterday at Maker Faire, probably the largest DIY techno / craft / electronics gathering of its kind (60,000 projected attendees) anywhere. Lots of robots, a giant mousetrap, steam punk, an electric cupcake parade, r/c battleships battling with BB's, 800kV Van de Graff generator, flamethrowers, 20-ft homemade rockets, etc. Felt just like home ...
Main purpose of attending was to support demos given by Team FREDnet for their Google Lunar X-Prize entry - they had a small swarm of SRV-1 Blackfin robots available for test drives, including a couple of prototypes of a quad-motor version we're developing with Inertia Labs.
An SRV-1 Blackfin was also spotted in the RoboRealm booth, and there may have been other SRV-1's at the show.
At the other end of the faire from the FREDnet project, we got to hang out with Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail at the geekdad.com booth. Chris is the creator of the DIYDrones, a very popular destination for UAV developers. In particular, Chris has been working on a couple of entry-level robotic blimps, and he asked us to bring YARB 1.0 to share the booth with BlimpDuino. There seems to be a lot of interest in robotic blimps, and it was fun to talk with Chris about a divide-and-conquer strategy for this as-yet-non-existent market.
The Maker Faire is still running today, though YARB 1.0 won't be there. Next time, we'll plan for a longer trip plus a logo on the blimp (as it was featured but unidentified in a G4TV interview).
Posted Sun, 04 May 2008 12:20 | HTML Link | see additional stories ...
CIS1.5 Introduction to Programming using C++ (robotics application) - Brooklyn College (City University of New York)
Brooklyn College has built cross-platform (Win, Mac, Linux) console support for the SRV-1 Blackfin and ARM7 for use in their course - CIS1.5 Introduction to Computing Using C++. This is part of a larger robotics education program called robotics.edu, which is a shared spaced for curricular materials used in educational robotics classes for middle school and undergraduates students. A complete lesson plan for a teleoperated robot lab, vision processing lab, and advanced vision processing is found here - http://agents.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/robotics.edu/bcsoftware.php.
Posted Sun, 04 May 2008 12:10 | HTML Link | see additional stories ...
RoboBrain - new console on Mac OS/X for SRV-1 Blackfin
Voxatec (Switzerland) has created a very nice SRV-1 Blackfin console for Mac users which provides a virtual joystick, real-time video display, C program editor and C program upload. It is available both as an application bundle as well as an open source X-Code project. This a very nice interface that's optimized for Mac users, and the developer has plans for further feature extensions. Make certain to visit the RoboBrain website - www.voxatec.com
Posted Sun, 04 May 2008 12:05 | HTML Link | see additional stories ...