Lego Truck Trial GPM 1/2011

...who said LEGOs aren't ready for the real world?

Check out these LEGO OFF-ROAD vehicles!

Pauls Points Pertaining to Power

If you work for a large corporation, you may never worry about power, since you don't pay the bill. However... we will all pay a price if we don't manage our power footprints.  PLEASE do your part to minimize how much power you waste.

1) Power down when you can.  Going home for the weekend?  Shut down your computer, or at least turn off your monitors.

2) Use notebook computers whenever you can, instead of full-sized PCs.  They're much more power efficient.

3) For always-on infrastructure, use virtual machines rather of real ones; again, much more efficient.  As a side benefit, virtualization gives you other operational benefits like snapshotting.

4) If you only print things occasionally from your printer, power it on when needed, then power it back off after you're done for the day.  Printers are a big power drain as well, even when not printing pages.

5) Last one out, turn out the lights.  Especially on Friday evening.

6) Be aware of how you use power; it's here for all of us, but its not for all of us to waste.

befuddlement

I love technology, but this is getting ridiculous.  I'm no longer sure; should I blog, twitter, buzz, wave, chat, IM, or email?

I do have to say, Buzz's aggregation capabilities are a welcome feature; it helps make just a bit of sense of all of this.

Me? I'm healthy, happy, and helping customers... as it should be.
-pbr

Sharing a Fractal Favorite

LEGOS aren't toys any more!

The LEGO Mindstorms kits, and an assortment of LEGO technic pieces and kits, have launched LEGOs into a new era, where they're no longer just toys which fall apart under any reasonable stress; rather they're now the components of insanely strong, resilient, easily integrated, and versatile robot kits.

The educational and social impact of these robot kits has yet to even begun to be explored. They're new, different, and powerful, and I hope to exert at least some small influence regarding how they can be better utilized.

I'm building a number of autonomous and semi-autonomous robots and robot control devices using the available parts from LEGO, and welcome you to be part of the effort. I'm happy to incorporate the ideas of others into my efforts.

I've invested over 1500 US dollars recently in LEGO robot piece-parts, sensors, and motors. I plan to share the resultant robots and the techniques I've used in creating them with the world. I welcome you to be part of this collaboration, as its far from a one-man-show.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you'll get involved in whatever most motivates you!

Regards,
-Paul Reiber

Xen rocks

'nuff said - Xen rocks.

Latest version's got it going on... HVM, paravirtualization,
the memory-size bugs are gone for 64bit...

It just keeps getting better every day.

Virtualization is virtually here! :-)
-pbr

One Laptop Per Child

I'm lucky enough that I already have one of the OLPC XO units to play with. They're pretty awesome and I think they'll catch on like wildfire. It occurred to me that cities could, in return for providing OLPC machines to children, ask them to help with some simple neighborhood clean-up type tasks. Most parents I've asked have thought this was a good idea. Do you? Please let me know. I'm toying with the idea of approaching the mayor of my city with this idea.

Visit Laptop.Org

Lego Mindstorm NXTs

EDIT:  EV3 Units available for sale, end-of-september 2013!  Linux-based Programmable Brick!

LEGO Mindstorm NXT robot kits absolutely ROCK!

I recently bought the latest NXT kit - $250 is a little steep,
but it turned out to be worth every penny.

It comes with only three motors... that's odd... ( ob. bad math joke :-)
-> not four (one for each of the four wheels on a car).
-> not six motors (for the traditional six-degrees-of-
freedom x,y,z,yaw,pitch,roll tooltip model)
...but just three motors. What to do with that?!?

I did some research and learned about holonomic drives and about killough platforms.
Since they use three motors they're ideal designs that'll work with the parts from
just one NXT set (a noble design goal for obvious reasons.)

These are pretty neat - they're triangular platforms capable of accelerating in ANY direction, regardless of its current orientation, and capable of changing/controling the platform's orientation (i.e., indirectly, sensor orientation), regardless of what direction they platform is accelerating in.

This is really useful for line-tracing and other types of goal-seeking robotic control. The same control loop manages both the orientation vector and the acceleration vector of the unit... meaning it can move around while aiming a camera at a fixed point, for example.

Design issues:

how to get the a reasonably low c of g?
How to mount the motors so they can't come off?
Where to mount the controller?
What should the wheels look like?

Control issues:

- bluetooth from the blackberry? How hard?
- clap-on/clap-off easy enough
- various hunting modes

This is all still very much a work in progress... I welcome your input!
-Paul