Justin reviews the OLPC and reveals some neat applications

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Roving VI Shots corespondent and LAVA member Justin Goeres participated in the “buy one get one” program that the OLPC foundation announced last year. This is where you spend $400 and you donate one laptop to a child in an impoverished nation and in return you get one laptop for yourself.

I caught up with him and got his feedback on the unit. One thing I learned was that it ships with an application called TurtleDraw. This little app is great for teaching programming in a graphical way. If you’re thinking LabVIEW here, well, take a look and judge for yourself.

  1. [...] of mine from back in California has a video blog, and while I was out there a couple of weeks ago he interviewed me demonstrating my XO Laptop (from One Laptop Per [...]

  2. Yair says:

    Nice…

    It’s been quite a long time since I’ve worked with Logo. Maybe I should look for something online.

  3. News Update: It looks like the OLPC give one get one program will be started up again soon according to this Engadget post:
    http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/20/olpc-unveils-first-prototype-of-xo-2-0/

    In the same post it describes the next generation of XO laptop. Neat. Here’s a post with a video:
    http://blog.laptopmag.com/first-look-olpc-xo-generation-20

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New ExpressionFlow Studio video series

As you know, here at VI Shots we love video. So I’m excited that one of our favorite blogs has started producing a new series of videos focusing on LabVIEW Object-Oriented programming. I’ve embedded the first video above.
Tomi’s done a great job on the graphics, and he cuts from wide to close up shots nicely. [...]

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Goldfish following camera powered by LabVIEW

Well, this video could use some editing but here it is. A totally useless application demonstrating the vision capabilities of LabVIEW. Watch a camera mounted on an X-Y motion platform tracking the movements of a goldfish in a fish tank.

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Free Spore creature creator

I just downloaded the free Spore creature creator. I created my first creature, took some photos of it and even uploaded a video to Youtube directly from the software. All of the above in just half an hour of playing with it. It’s pretty slick.
I gotta hand it to the creators for coming up with [...]

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Mars rover demo exhibit powered by LabVIEW

Describes the Mars Rover Exhibit Project made by students in the EPICS program at Purdue University and powered by LabVIEW.

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Styrobots help Robotgrrl fund her school tuition

I always do what Google tells me to do. A few weeks ago my Google reader suggested that I should follow the robotgrrl blog RSS feed. So I did. This blog is about robotics from a Montreal, Canada High School girls point of view. Erin loves robots. So much so that she applied to the [...]

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Slashbot Update – It’s finished!

We were the first to blog about Slashbot back in March. Now, Slashbot is Internet famous after it was featured on Engadget. It now has 177K+ hits on Youtube. A record for any video featuring LabVIEW or NI technology. I like the fact that it uses solenoids to hit the guitar buttons. This means it [...]