VI Shots

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.

Resources:
• Download Video
• OLPC Wiki
• Justin’s LAVA thread on the OLPC

In this video taken at Robo Business 2008, Jim Lynch gives us an overview of the latest iRobot robot called the Looj.
Resources:

• Download Video
• Looj product page on iRobot

VI Shots talked with Maria Bualat from the NASA Ames Research Intelligent Robotics Group. Gigapan.org is a website where people can upload super high resolution panoramic photos. These photos were taken by a prototype motorized automated pan and tilt camera mount that figures out the exact positions of all the multiple snapshots required to make an awesome high resolution panorama. Gigapan (gigapixel panorama) was developed by Carnegie Mellon University in collaboration with NASA Ames Intelligent Robotics Group, with support from Google. The price for this technology seems within reach of the consumer market at $279.

At the end of the video, Maria talks a little about here background and the K10 robotics platform which NASA used in the Canadian Arctic recently. The robots, K10 Black and K10 Red, carried 3-D laser scanners and ground-penetrating radar. The two NASA robots surveyed a rocky, isolated polar desert within a crater in the Arctic Circle. The study helped scientists learn how robots could evaluate potential outposts on the moon or Mars.

Resources mentioned in video:

• Intelligent Robotics group
• NASA Robots Practice Moon Survey in the Arctic Circle (Haughton Crater Site Survey Field Test)
• Gigapan Website
• Gigapan Hardware
• Download Video

Additional Video:

There are several interviews on GIZMODO with Bug Labs CEO Peter Semmelhack. I encourage you to watch them all. I envisioned hackers running around hacking ATM machines with these things. I also liked the reference to home automation: “a central brain talking to a distributed network of sensors”. Of course stand-alone DAQ modules come to mind. It would be cool if NI made DAQ modules that plugged into this thing. Gee, this whole thing just might work…

Videos:

• Open souce hardware and software.
• Interchangeability demo
• Concept interview

Bug Labs is betting on the fact that you want to build your own custom gadget instead of buying a slick polished device that just works out of the box. I understand the market for it but how big is it? The “styling” is kind of boxy. Of course it comes in Apple white, but once you start assembling your blocks, I’m sure you wouldn’t be caught dead in public with this thing. Ok, the geek in me agrees on one thing. It’s freakin’ cool. The only question I have is: when can you run LabVIEW on it!?

Quote from their site:

BUG is a collection of easy-to-use, open source hardware modules, each capable of producing one or more Web services. These modules snap together physically and the services connect together logically to enable users to easily build, program and share innovative devices and applications. With BUG, we don’t define the final products – you do.

From looking at the specs of the hardware it seems like they’ve thought of everything. The BUGbase is powered by an ARM microprocessor, (isn’t everything?) runs Linux, has built-in WiFi, USB, ethernet, LCD display and has four sockets that accept other accessories. The current announced list of accessories:

• GPS
• Digital Camera / Videocam
• Touch-sensitive, Color LCD Screen
• Accelerometer, Motion Sensor (eyebrows raising)

On the software side of things it appears that the company is counting on a large community cult-like following. It’s planning to roll out BUGnet which will allow collaboration and sharing of BUG applications.

Again, from their site:

BUG is built entirely with open source software. BMI, the BUG Module Interface, attaches devices to the BUG. Device-based services and applications are dynamically available based on which modules are connected to the BUG. Higher up the stack is Java, which hosts a service-oriented component runtime called OSGi. Java and OSGi make creating new BUG applications simple and intuitive, as BUG applications are essentially one or more bundles. In addition, each BUG module launches an OSGi bundle which in turn creates services for other components to consume. BUG applications are created using the BUG SDK (internally named Dragonfly), and are shared with other developers and users through BUGnet, our online community.

Some future accessories:

• Touch-sensitive, Color LCD – 2X
• Mini-QWERTY Keyboard
• Teleporter (WTF?)
• Audio Speaker, Input/Output Mini Jacks

As to what you can build with this thing? Bug labs offers an example:

You can easily assemble and program a GPS + digital camera device that automatically publishes geo-tagged photos as a web service. Integrating with an online photo-sharing service like Flickr is only a few more lines of code away, and now you have your own real-time, connected traffic-enabled mobile Webcam!

Well, it would be pretty cool to see someone hack this and manage to run LabVIEW embedded on it. But i’m not so sure this is possible. One thing that I need to get over though, is the fact that it’s called a BUGbase. Bug and software don’t go well together.

A pic of the internals (attrib: pt):

More:

• Video on GIZMODO