USFIRST.org: 2010 Breakaway Game Details

USFIRST.org: Watch the video and download the 2010 game description as FIRST Robotics kicks off.

Twoddler: Twitter for Toddlers

I am not making this up: Introducing Twoddler: Twitter for Toddlers – Associated Content – associatedcontent.com.

Stuffed animals and nature posters would attract more women to computer science

Read the article for yourself:

“That tells me that it’s a cultural phenomenon,” Cheryan told LiveScience. “These objects are not inherently masculine or geeky; they’ve been constructed that way. That means to me we can reconstruct the objects or more importantly the whole field.”Cheryan added one way to change the lopsided field would be, “broadening the image of computer science to make it so that other people feel a connection to the field.”

via Geeks drive girls out of computer science – LiveScience- msnbc.com.

1961: The first computer to ever sing “Daisy Bell”

Parallax

(I have been very busy with multiple non-embedded projects … very shortly, I’m going to be back to spending probably most of my time on controllers and robotics.)

I did, however, begin running through a lot of the explanatory experiments that come with the Parallax development board. Boy, Parallax makes programming easy! Rather than the usual assembly or C programming (which are easy for me, fortunately), the Basic Stamp 2 is programmed in their own version of BASIC.

The integrated development system on Windows, compiles the BASIC source programs into a tokenized internal format, which is in turn executed by an interpreter on board the Basic Stamp (which is based on a PIC controller). Yeah, your programs are not going to be super fast but for so many applications, they are plenty fast enough.

Their BASIC includes built in functions like RCTIME that enable you to easily time the discharge of an RC circuit – and use this as a crude timing source and a simple way to convert a potentiometer setting into a digital value. The key is that Parallax hides much of the typical complexity of microcontroller programming in to some reasonably high level functionality designed as functions of their BASIC language.

The main drawback is extremely limited RAM space that limits the Basic Stamp to relatively simply applications. Parallax chips and development boards are also pricier than a number of alternative products from other vendors. There is no floating point number support either – so you need to fake floating point numbers using fixed point integers, or buy their add -on floating point module.

I had an odd initial reluctance to working with the Basic Stamp – that was geez, professionals don’t program in Basic – they program in C or assembler. Which is a bit of programming machismo when the real focus must be on how quickly can we deliver the right solution.

In reality, a lot of university engineering courses and professional engineers are using the Parallax chips to develop real world solutions.  Because Parallax has made it is simple and easy to do so. It really is more important for us to deliver a quality product quickly than to feel macho because we code in asm or C.

That said, I think Parallax has done a good job creating solutions that span the beginning hobbyist or high school student, up through college and on to professional level solutions – provided you can live within their limitations, notably on RAM and speed.

They have other chips besides the Basic Stamp, including the new Propeller. The Propeller is a microcontroller featuring 8 independent processing units – they call them “cogs”. These can be used independently or they can share information to work on a problem together. I have not used this chip yet – but the potential applications are very intriguing.

For the hobbyist – or software centric enthusiast – Parallax manuals can be downloaded for free and they provide literally tons of sample circuits and sample code. If you don’t know electronics, its pretty easy to follow their circuits and build out from their samples. If you don’t know software, you can readily adapt their source code.

Parallax also provides a great many other products including other processors, sensors, motor and servos, motor and servo control systems, robotic kits and much more.

The more I get into the Parallax solutions, I can see why many of us might want to nearly standardize on Parallax for delivering quick solutions. I’ll likely have more to say about Parallax in the future as I just ordered a bunch of parts from them to start working on some new projects.

I may use the parts for either Parallax or AVR Atmel-based projects. Time will tell!

Other options for those who are looking for low cost and pretty straight forward designs is the Arduino project boards and software. These can be prorammed in C and have options for way more RAM than is available on the Basic Stamp.

Another company puts out a product they call the C Stamp, directly competitive with the Basic Stamp modules, but providing more RAM, more I/O pins and programming C (MPLAB, in fact, from Microchip). The C-Stamp programming language provides a large number of functions that tend to mimic similar functionality provided by the PBASIC language used on the Basic Stamp. The idea, likely, is to make it easy to transition from programming in BASIC to C.

All of these products have, through language keywords or library functions and classes, provided a good deal of functionality that hides the otherwise difficult tasks of performing certain types of operations with microcontrollers.

Using Twitter to coordinate software projects

Ravens Brain: Project Management Hash Tags On Twitter.

All team-based software projects require – or should! – a fair amount of internal communication and coordination.

Twitter is a nice solution to exchanging short status updates on aspects of a project – from individual modules, to QA status, to reporting and alerting risk issues to management.

I-Shovel Robot Snow Plow

Botropolis | I-Shovel Robot Snow Plow.

Windows Embedded CE for industrial automation

I am watching an interesting online presentation from Microsoft regarding why you might want to use Windows Embedded CE for industrial automation applications.

I recently began doing some app programming in Visual Studio 2008 – and boy, their tools are a lot better than years ago. Writing Windows apps in WinForms and C# is a breeze. I had some familiarity with that already … more interesting is writing .NET web apps and am I just getting into that. I am finding the tool set really is quite good and so I will eventually put some time into coming up to speed with Windows Embedded CE.

Jury Duty: All done with that as of last Friday.

Also during the past two weeks, I decided to review a years worth of Calculus. It had been a while. I went through a calculus book and worked a number of problems, but also used the opportunity to learn WxMaxima, a free mathematics program for Windows that can be used to solve calculus problems symbolically, or numerically. That means you can use it to differentiate equations like x^2+3x – 1/sin(x) and it will output the differentiated equation. Similarly, you can symbolically or numerically integrate expressions. While all of us learned to do differentiation and integration by hand, the hard way, and we probably do need to learn the basics – in the real world, no one really solves problems by hand.  We use TI-89 calculators or programs like Matlab and Wxmaxima.  I found doing calculus problems rather fun when using WxMaxima – I was also accused of having a mental problem for having used the words “calculus” and “fun” in the same sentence

Similarly, I also reviewed a bit of linear algebra. For working those problems, I used the freely available SciLab program – which is excellent for doing matrix calculations. Another free program, R, which is used especially for statistical analysis, also does matrix operations but I have not done much with it just yet – entering matrices is a little easier and more intuitive in SciLab and R.

Anyway, all these activities have kept me away from working on embedded systems projects.

I am also studying robotics programming methodologies and hope to resume writing code here very shortly.

Jury duty update

I am still on call for jury duty. I was called into one jury selection but was rejected.

Humanoid robots to explore the Moon

Japan announced the other day that they are creating a roadmap for sending humanoid robots to the Moon a a first step towards human-robot space exploration. The current roadmap as announced by Japan’s Strategic Headquarters for Space Development includes sending the first humanoids to explore the Earth’s natural satellite by 2020.

via Artificial Intelligence and Robotics: Humanoid robots to explore the Moon.