Robots

Robots! that is right people the word of the day is robots.

I was trying to come up with an idea for a robot body the other day, when I had an revelation. Ever one always goes for the really cool drone type, or bug type robot, then they attach a remote control and wham we have another expensive toy.

So my idea was to spend as little time as possible on the body, and really make sure my robot was going to be autonomous. I've been dabbling around with an OpenCL+fann library and also with ROS, they are available through a Google search if you really are interested. So after toiling  for a few hours and sacrificing a few toys, I give you Nubby the touchy robot.

This will serve as a test bed for sensory organelle as well as being a test bed for me and neural networks in general.

heh heh heh...robots

Rockbox Robot

I've been day dreaming off and on lately of starting a project to design robots with mp3 players for brains. Most players that run Rockbox have at least a com/usb port and of course audio capture/audio output.

The Com or USB port would be for sending and receiving  information to and from the "body" of the robot. The disk capacity can store instructions and collected data. These two things are simple but, the real innovation would come by using the audio input/output system of the mp3 player, along with some home brew transceiver circuits and some guru level code, as a wireless communications channel. And perhaps I could strap it all on top of a Hex bug. Honey, you now know what I want for my birthday.

But for now just a dream...

Ubuntu on IPAQ hx4700

I recently set out to get a pair of hx4700 ipaqs running linux. A google search away we can find this link. But the angstrom distribution is a bit dated, also I already tried these instructions earlier and the boot loader specific parts of the how-to fail. I will eventually try to construct a NBH file for maybe android one day, but for now I resigned myself to play with HaRET, I found out that the newer builds of HaRET do not boot correctly on the hx4700. I think I am using version 0.1.3 that I had laying around, it works pretty well.

Building a new kernel was made easy with openembedded, and rootstock made short work of the file system. Something that could have been complicated turned out pretty simple. Pics or it didn't happen? okey here ya' go.




For at least tonight all I will be able to do is look, tomorrow maybe I can get the touch screen and mouse pad working.

Update - I logged most of my experience with this at XDAforum.  Where there are instructions and a download.  The mouse pad is working but the touch screen needs some TLC.  Maybe tomorrow...