Friday 30 December 2011

Sparkfun's coverage of an autonomous boat / free day.

A small propellor-driven boat with similar electronics to the Sailbot was featured on the front page of SparkFun yesterday. Points of interest include the interface, written in Python and built using the Google Earth backend, also the demo of its mapping capablities provided by depth sensors - if some generous researcher at MUN felt like providing us with the transducer, I'm sure we could make room for this feature. Sparkfun also hosts an annual Autonomous Vechicle Competition, the 2012 comp is June 16th.

Also, Sparkfun's Free Day is Januaray 11th, great time to stock up on a few parts if we can get a pass

[Which reminds me about my own order, can't wait to try out a few of their 8-pin microcontrollers (PICaxe,ATtiny). They come in a variety of small SMD packages which means a pretty tiny footprint and at less than a buck they'd could be a nice replacement for a bunch of discrete components in a control circuit or swarm robot. --Jordan]

Monday 5 December 2011

Launch of blog / first post / tech talk

[So the old PHP News was great, but given that it wasn't frequently used and the site has been updated (Moreso because I just got a new Google phone for Christmas) I thought I'd launch a blog for Sailbot and replace News if all goes well. (Scott, if you'd rather do it another way, give me a shout, the blog has a few cool features like RSS and Atom feeds, we could just integrate with News.).  -- Jordan]

Sailbot presented a tech talk at the IEEE Newfoundland and Labrador Section's Annual General Meeting with distribution of new newsletter, hot off the presses (by that we mean printed at the last minute in the lab). Thanks to all Sailbot members who attended, IEEE:NL for the coffee card and thanks to Dr. Peters for inviting us. If any executive IEEE member hears new developments regarding the McNaughton center, please keep us in mind!

[Read the newsletter here.]