Arduino Night 2

Last night was Arduino Night 2 at the Silicon Valley OpenSolaris User Group meeting.

John Weeks brought his robot, Marvin, right, which is based on an iRobot/Roomba vacuum with an arduino on it. Marvin has a motion detector connected to the arduino, which in turn communicates with the Roomba over a serial connection. The arduino also gets its power from the iRobot/Roomba (white cord on the left of the photo).

Marvin's mouth is an infrared sensor. When the infrared sensor detects something in front of it, the eyelids (the red Lego truck cab parts) open using an RC servo, and the sonar eyes detect how far away the blockage is. As Marvin detects the object moving closer, it plays a song, then enables the vacuum motor to scare away the threat :-) [Note that the Roomba is still a fully functional vacuum:)]

We discussed how to turn this robot into a larger community project. An OpenSolaris.org project could provide a reference platform to be used for robot competitions. Individual robots could use a standard reference platform based on OpenSolaris, the Roomba/Dirt-Dog, and arduinos and other small devices, but would be unique configurations and fabrications.

A future Marvin enhancement will be the addition of an Intel Atom Mini-ITX motherboard running OpenSolaris. A Roomba with OpenSolaris on an Atom CPU? Yes, a small vacuum with a brain the size of a planet.

The sparkfun site has quite a list of devices that could be supported on this reference platform, such as: color light sensor, heart rate sensor, sound sensor, fingerprint reader, temp, LCD/text display, lights, GPS, compass, alcohol/gas sensor, accelerometer, camera, pressure sensor, humidity, infrared, Xbee, magnetic card reader, motion sensor, membrane potentiometer, and range finder.

For more fun with Roomba, see Hacking Roomba and the Hacking Roomba Projects Repository. And let us know what you think about starting an OpenSolaris project for this.

Posted at 07:28PM Jan 23, 2009 by alta in OpenSolaris  |  Comments[2]

OpenSolaris in VirtualBox and Playing MP3s

The latest issue of the OpenSolaris Ignite newsletter includes a screencast "that demonstrates an easy, risk-free way to take OpenSolaris for a spin in VirtualBox."

The January 2009 issue also contains a link to an article that describes how to play your MP3s on the OpenSolaris OS, a link to the forthcoming OpenSolaris Bible, reviews of the OpenSolaris 2008.11 release, and much more.

Ignite is our monthly newsletter by, for, and about the OpenSolaris community, featuring news, how-to articles, tech tips and reviews.

Go here (http://www.sun.com/emrkt/opensolaris/ignite/) to read the newsletter or to subscribe to have it delivered to your email box each month.

Posted at 02:06PM Jan 21, 2009 by alta in OpenSolaris  |  Comments[0]

Student Grantees Honored at Tech Days

One of the grant recipients in the OpenSolaris Undergraduate Student Research Grant Program was recognized on November 21 at Beijing Sun Tech Days.

The team of Zhou Li, Zhao Jinhua, Zhou Bin, and Zhang Yu from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China gave a 30-minute presentation on their grant project, Application Flow Controller, in an OpenSolaris break-out session. In their presentation, the team described their project in detail and also showed a demonstration. After their presentation, the team answered questions from the audience. The team believes their project could be useful at many universities in China.

In a general session, Ian Murdock asked the team to help him throw gifts into the audience. The photo shows Murdock with the grant team: Zhang Yu, Zhou Bin, Ian Murdock, Zhou Li, and Zhao Jinhua.

Posted at 09:30AM Dec 01, 2008 by alta in OpenSolaris  |  Comments[0]

OpenSolaris Ignite

OpenSolaris Ignite is a new newsletter that you can sign up to receive monthly via email.

"Welcome to the OpenSolaris Ignite monthly newsletter by, for, and about the OpenSolaris community, featuring news, how-to articles, tech tips and reviews."

The newsletter is produced by Sun marketing, but they do invite readers to submit content ideas.

Also, be sure to read The Observatory: A Closer Look at Using OpenSolaris.

Posted at 12:07PM Oct 08, 2008 by alta in OpenSolaris  |  Comments[0]

Winners Are Announced!

Sun Announces Winners of OpenSolaris Community Innovation Awards

Some of our winners were honored in person at the keynote address at Sun Tech Days in Sao Paulo, Brazil on 29 September. One had this reaction:

It was a very, very nice the ceremony in Sun Tech Days!! Really great! I will put my checks on the wall... ;-)
[Winners received poster-sized replicas of their checks.]

Listen to interviews with winners: Sun Honors Community Awards Winners

OpenSolaris Community Innovation Awards - Contest Winners

For the contest portion of the OpenSolaris Community Innovation Awards Program, we received entries that are complete distributions, tools that will be useful to many other community members, documentation, and an art entry. See Contest Entries. You can download and try these entries yourself. Some of them already are OpenSolaris projects, and others might become projects and continue development on OpenSolaris.org.

In June, 2005, Sun Microsystems took the Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) movement by surprise when they published the source code of Solaris - long considered the company's crown jewel - whose technical features, legendary stability and standards compliance is the "gold standard" for other Operating Systems (developers) to emulate. Initially there was a lot of scepticism and many predicted that Sun would never open up the latest/greatest technical gems like the ZFS file system and DTrace. The sceptics were proven wrong - and the OpenSolaris project is now over 3 years old, has a healthy and growing user community and continues to gain mind share. I am convinced that in the future, when a timeline depicting the history of computing is drawn, that the launch of OpenSolaris will be seen as a major "tick" on that timeline and will be viewed as the most significant event for 2005 and a precursor to the runaway success of the F/OSS revolution.
- Grand Prize Winner Al Hopper

Undergraduate Student Research Grant Recipients

For the student grants portion of the awards program, we received some fine proposals including DVD authoring software and an image storage and retrieval application. See Grant Proposals. The OpenSolaris Undergraduate Student Research Grant Program is intended to build working relationships between the OpenSolaris community and colleges, faculty, and students.

Community Members: If you are particularly interested in any of these projects, please post a note to the awards-program discussion forum. We need community members to get involved with these students, including to review monthly progress reports.

Posted at 12:23AM Oct 01, 2008 by alta in OpenSolaris  |  Comments[0]