Jeremie and I had an opportunity to attending the announcement event for Beakerhead!

Aiming to be a fusion of science, engineering and creativity (a video presentation called to mind the kind of wacky robotic contraptions you see at Burning Man), Beakerhead is the brainchild of co-founders Jay Ingram, best known for his work with the Discovery Channel, and his partner Mary Anne Moser. Collaborating organizations at this point include the U of C’s Schulich School of Engineering, Mount Royal University,SAIT Poytechnic, Telus Spark, the Glenbow Museum and local arts groups such as the High Performance Rodeo, the Calgary Animated Objects Society and the Green Fools.

Check out http://www.beakerhead.org/ for more info!

You can also follow them on twitter @Beakerhead

I’ve been following the online AI class from Stanford.  Included in that was a video with descriptive commentary of the robot that won the DARPA challenge.  The video is also on youtube.  The ‘trick’ was to overlay very accurate but short range laser sensor data, with much less accurate but long range camera vision, to ‘infer’ what was further ahead than it could see with the lasers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Q1xFdQfq5Fk

An article from my news feeds. Good direction for those comfortable with phone ‘apps’, but not so much with microcontroller programming.

Two New Robots with Smart Phones for Brains

Found an article about some research to allow navigation / position detection where GPS does not work.  Bigger systems already use this technology, but the research is to develop it for use on small resource and battery life constrained devices, like cell phones.  That will also apply to small, mobile, indoor robotics projects.

Navigating beyond the reach of GPS

This past spring I was doing weekly presentations about how to write programs, using the Arduino for specific examples.  The presentations halted over the summer, when most of those that had been attending had too many other things happening.  People have such *strange* priorities sometimes   I mean, really.  *I* was there

I will be starting up the presentations again.  This is a complete restart.  No previous programming, robotics, or Arduino knowledge is required.  Just an interest in learning about programming, especially small computers and micro-controllers that could be used in personal robotics projects.

The sessions will cover general computer science concepts, programming techniques, and the language syntax used for the Arduino microcontroller.  This will vary from concepts that apply to any large or small software development project, down to specifics that only apply to an Arduino board.  This is intended to show some of the ‘why’ as well as the ‘how’ of creating programs to solve specific tasks.  The goal is to have small pieces that can be immediately played with, and expand from there.

The first [restarted] session will be at the Aero Space Museum

Saturday October 29 at 1 PM

This will be after our normal WCRS gathering, with enough of a gap to clean things up, get setup again, and maybe have a snack.  The current plan is to run these weekly, at whatever speed the attendees can handle.  There is no fixed list of topics.  How long any specific session goes will also vary depending on how things are going.  Generally an hour, to maybe 2 hours.  Anything more will probably just cause overload and confusion.

No particular materials need to be brought.  If you like to take notes on paper, bring that.  No handouts are planned, but links to web pages are often supplied.  If you want to be able to experiment with the examples shown, you will need a computer with the Arduino software on it.  That can be setup before the start of the presentation if needed.  An Arduino board is also optional.  There are a few boards available that can be shared around, to actually see what the code does.  For as far as the previous presentations got, all of the example programs were only turning on and off LEDs to demonstrate the concepts.  For the first few presentations, the single LED that is built in to ‘typical’ arduino boards is all that will be used.  Expansions on that will be discussed as the presentations progress.  The focus will be on the software, with just enough more to be able to ‘talk to’ very simple hardware.

We will try to adapt to who ever shows up, but knowing ahead of time how many to expect makes preparations easier.  If you plan to attend, please send me an email to let me know.  If you can provide a bit of background, that helps too.  Not just ‘I know nothing about computers’.  Knowing what the audience background really is can make it easier to present the new concepts in terms that are more familiar.  Not looking for a resume, just some indication of areas where the concepts and terminology are well known.  Whether that is mechanic, cosmetician, CEO, arcade games, baseball, cooking, or a host of other subjects.

–
Phil
remove the 3 un references
unphilduby at unphriendly . unnet
::darn junk mail and email address harvesters anyway

Members who have been around for a while should recognize this kit.

I have been working with Dave L and Solarbotics to bring forward an inexpensive kit for people to being their robotics journey.

Check it out!

http://solarbotics.com/products/60125