Posted February 8, 2010 at 4:14pm in robots
So there’s a small hardware project I’m playing with for drop.io. A telepresence robot to help me throughout my day while I work from my home office, considering I’m 1,584 miles from HQ.
Short story, long… it’s a netbook on top of a iRobot Create platform.
At any rate, what does this have to do with Jolicloud? It’s the OS that’s running on the netbook! I’m using that as a platform. It’s very netbook friendly and behaves kind of like an iPhone, where you have a simple interface where you can “add apps” and they are part of your “in your face” UI experience.
Of course, with early adopting, there’s always bugs… and this one is no exception. There are lots of really annoying issues with Jolicloud right now, but I’m sure they’ll get taken care of. Lots of password prompts and system nuances, that are results of retrofitting their UI on top of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution.
Either way, give it a try… also check out Moblin, which is another netbook focused Linux distribution.
As president, I believe that robotics can inspire young people to pursue science and engineering. And I also want to keep an eye on those robots in case they try anything.
Posted December 1, 2009 at 11:06am in robots
High-Speed Robot Hand (via hizook)
3D Printing with Makerbot
The latest gadget that I’ve been lusting over is the MakerBot…
This thing is bad-ass… When there’s all of this exciting stuff happening with large sets of data and crazy device interactions on the internet, there’s a home-grown movement to bring 3D printing and replication to the home front.
Enter the MakerBot. A realtively cheap ($750) DYI open source 3D printer. The Cupcake CNC is the platform in which cheap hardware, combined with hackable electronics and open source software, allow the average hacker to bring a 3D printer system to their home. Typically large scale, industrial 3D printers are $10,000 to $25,000… This is a fantastic start!
There are some limitations. They only extrude certain materials (plastic and frosting) and their build platform can only support 100mm x 100mm x 130mm, which is slightly smaller than a rubix cube. But it’s a start.
Beyond printing in 3D for fun and profit… are more exciting concepts. Distributed manufacturing comes to your home. The MakerBot needed a way to get more parts (which they print from the same machine) ready for another batch of machines. So what did they do? They asked the people who have already bought the machine if they would produce parts with monetary return on each part made.
Now THAT’S impressive. It’ll be exciting
Oh and btw, I have procured funding for a machine to be purchased in October, with a probably ship date in November… I’m not quite sure if I can really produce anything with it, but I have some time to start creating some models and ideas of what to print!
