Monday, October 31, 2016

Who am I?

This is my periodic Halloween post.  First Happy Halloween!  I wish I had the TARDIS to travel to another Dalek free time period at least until November 9th (day after US presidential elections)!



Boards are still coming in, I just have not had time to do much.  Folks in my lab do like the particle photon and we have done some interesting work with it and PIR sensors.  More later - hopefully I will have sometime over the Thanksgiving break. Later

Sunday, October 16, 2016

Meet the Robots: Cozmo



I have been collecting a few robots in the past year, some are kits and some are fully assembled such as cozmo from anki.  Here's a picture of my newest robot:
He comes with three blocks and a charging station.  As is the case for most of this mew generation of robots, cozmo is controlled by a smart phone app.  Saves the cost of a controller but I find it limiting.  So far the pre arranged software includes recognition software, cozmo when he wakes calls me Gregg once he sees me (this requires a fare amount of light).  He also has a display which is meant to show expressions.  It plays a matching cube colors  app and spending time playing it gives you points that result in upgrades (new software).  This is all cute but what intrigued me was the ability to code it.  I wish I had more to say but the mac instructions seem a bit warped and required using brew to install the necessary components.  I am not a big fan of brew.  I hope to finally get he sdk installed and give it a whirl.  My goal is to try to develop some apps for it and explore its STEM capabilities.  A stretch goal is to see if I can swarm them but at $179 a pop, it may take a bit.

The real world has me swamped so I have been slow to post and am creating quite a backlog.  Experience with some of the new small boards on the market such as the omega has forced me to search/modify new benchmarks since the linux version is rather limited.  Later!