Weekly meeting

This week:

1. Review the task list.
2. Next week's meeting canceled -- Dr. Jones traveling to Case Western.
3. Look through SVN, Dropbox files.
4. Clean and inventory the lab.

Organizational meeting

It's time to get the semester started! The agenda:

1. Introductions, group home page
2. Research overview
1. Dynamics for continuum robots
2. Desktop supercomputing
3. Alternative navigation
3. New student orientation
1. Policy -- get everyone started on training. Jacob - update policy page. Krishna - add link to library formatting zip files.
2. Make sure everyone is on e-mail list, has permissions to edit home page, task list, SVN. Dr. Jones -- add Quintin, Tommy, Jacob, Ankit (SVN). Get SVN path fixed for everyone else.
3. Look at thesis formatting.
4. Review software. Get everyone started on SVN. Dr. Jones to do -- find MathType old version.
5. Update the people page!
6. Discuss recommended courses.
4. Schedule weekly meeting times; look at the task list.
5. Lab: need to clean and inventory. Dr. Jones - card access for Steven, Ankit.
6. SVN, Dropbox need to clean up! 

Fun links

I've been focusing on staying up to date with my inbox, but my blog has fallen far behind. A bit of catch-up:

• I'm using Camtasia to create a series of videos for the "Digital approach to Bible study" Sunday School class I teach. The site uses Joomla, so I got to learn enough of that to post videos using a plugin. While the first two are just .mp4 files and therefore require Quicktime, I figured that uploading an extra file allows me to use the Flash player, which is much more widely supported.
• The Autonomous Robots blog is neat.
• Python(x, y) is great! I'm really liking it for my Intro to Robotics class. I certainly miss some features (a nice integrated debugger is one).
• I decided to have a bit of fun and purchase the original StarCraft. It is fun!

Links

Here's a random collection of links I found interesting.

• The summer bridge robotics program I created finished yesterday, with some nice 'bots built. Using Python to program them worked fairly well.
• Some fun  hobbyist robotics projects on the web.
• A help site on embedded computing.
• The PICKit3 poster nicely sums up program/debug connections for a PIC.

Electric cars

Electronic design posted an interesting article on the electric car. Here's an image of the Baker Electric, from the early 1900s. Wow.

Summer camp starting

Today is the beginning of the robotics portion of Summer Bridge camp I'm helping with. Looking around the web, I ran across another interesting teaching robot, the Finch. The Finch can use Myro, a Python robotics library aimed at education; I might take some ideas from that.

A team is driving an autonomous robot for 13,000 km -- wow! They start tomorrow.

Almost done

My time here at Eglin AFB is almost over. It's been a great time! I've enjoyed learning a lot of new things and using skills I've developed over the years to solve some of the problems. I gave a presentation, but can't distribute it publicly until I get it approved.

I recently discovered several wonderful GMail labs features on their blog: hierarchical labels, archive and send, SMS chat, and offline mode. Also, I learned that I can drag and drop attachments. Wow! That's muuuuuch better.

Now, for random links:

• BBQ by engineers
• An open-software, open-source robot from Kuka for just $24,000.

A fun video!