wheelchair disk brakes
A long standing project, and a big part of the open PAW concept, is controlling braking with software (on board arduino or android). As a quadriplegic I don’t want to take my hands off the wheels to apply the brakes because this throws off my balance (especially on uneven ground or with muscle spasms to...
free education in computer science
I am finally ready and wanting to learn again. No papers and exams, but learning for fun. Remember when that was true? As a kid, my friends and I would create small dams with sand and mud, then upend the buckets of water to see if our design actually worked. A few summers later, I...
telnet to oculus
News update: Oculus can now be purchased via RobotShop.com in most counties. As a follow up to the blog on using good old telnet to control oculus, I’ll give a few examples of how you can test your own scripts. A standard telnet session from my OSX machine follows, note the password can be plain...
oculus circuit boards shipping
After well exceeding Colin’s kickstarter goal, circuit boards are getting turned out on mass. How would much you enjoy boot loading a 100 PCB’s in your garage?Colin says it’s zen like. I really prefer writing code, breaking things etc. Cool new 3d sensor for Oculus is available for developers. More information on the new page...
sending gmail attachments from android
Here is a simple class to send yourself a gmail from your Arndoid phone, which can be something like the T-Mobile Samsung phones. You’ll need mail.jar in your eclipse project, but the rest is just this one class below. We are using this to test on the chair bot (OpenPAW). It is very useful to...
oculus on kick starter
Now you pledge support (buy a robot or a shirt) to support Colin’s garage alliance of robot builders and coders. Kick Starter is a really cool way to crowd source funds and interest for your new project. Lots of clever devices you wouldn’t get with the current, odious venture capital game. The bot has also...
new battery and chair mount
From drawing board to being ready to install in single day? Colin, same guy that is now selling wifi robots, salvaged an old power drill to go with the new Lithium-ion battery pack for my chair. More Ardiuno and IOIO protects are possible now that I have a power supply I can remove and charge...
oculus developer
New updates to open source projects this week. You can get from SVN Trunk. Basically this is a developer API to control the bot. You can send commands and get notifications about changes. This lets a 3rd party application hook in even without the web based GUI. So, you are free to write your own...
oculus ROV
My friend Colin has project that I’ve been helping him test for the last few months.. and now oculus finally ready for market! Colin has made bikes and my custom climbing rig in the past, but he has always wanted to make affordable wifi robots. The key to oculus is the low cost but fully...
aldebaran robotics’ nao
Solid state sensors and high torque servos are getting cheaper all the time, but it is the software methodologies that needed to change for walking to be considered a “primitive behavior”. Any kids learning about robots would, and should, assume that we have walking sorted. Getting back into standing from an unknown state, say on...