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]

The Process Is the Project

Recently I had the great pleasure of observing final project presentations given by students at San Francisco State University. The course, Global Software Engineering, taught by Gary Thompson of Sun and Dr. Dragutin Petkovic, Chair of the SFSU Computer Science Department, was a project management and collaboration course: project participation metrics. Each student project team created a web based application that gathers statistics from the collaborative development tools provided by java.net to allow university level instructors to assess and measure levels of teamwork within a collaborative development group.

I observed ten presentations. Six teams were all SFSU students; two teams included students from Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton as well as students from SFSU; and two teams included students from University of Fulda in Fulda, Germany as well as students from SFSU. I was particularly interested to hear about any communication issues and how decisions were made in the project teams. Of special interest to me was how these issues were handled when some team members were in different time zones, three or eight hours away, and some team members spoke different native languages. Most teams preferred to have frequent team phone meetings; other teams divided the work so that team members in different locations handled separate pieces of the work and phone meetings were less frequent.

Posted at 09:55PM Jan 14, 2009 by alta in General  |  Comments[0]