![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Academic projects
Mar. 1st, 2009 11:34 pmNear the beginning of January I wandered around the CS department on my local campus, talking with the instructors and staff I knew and seeing what might be happening for this year's open house event.
Interesting what you can get into when you know people, and they know you.
Apparently, one year an instructor used the last twenty-five hundred dollars of his grant money to buy as many iRobot Create robots as he could, and ended up with eight of them, along with all the accessories.
As they were not purchased for a particular use, they were not being used for anything, and it was wondered if anything could be done with them, and not just for the open house (which, in itself is pretty big affair on this campus).
As some of you may have guessed, I stepped up to the task and was given access to the lab and use of a laptop (so I wouldn't have to lug my 4-pounder around too much) and was mandated to provide an educational tool for programming them.
A demo of the current progress was also scheduled for the open house so we had something interesting to show.
So, over the last six to eight weeks I've written a nearly-complete Python API which, unfortunately, required that the robot be plugged into the computer to use, limiting the capabilities.
As they also came with a microcontroller to plug in the back, I also wrote a C API which was more powerful, more useful and more portable.
To test the API, I wrote a short demo program that attempted to escape from a room, using one of the Virtual Walls across the door to indicate when it escaped and the wall sensor to follow the wall once it found one.
(it was also dumb enough that it could get "stuck" on an obstacle in the middle of the room indefinitely, which was one of the things I pointed out during the open house demonstration, and asked for ideas for identifying when the robot got stuck)
Anyway, the open house had been on Thursday, and was a huge success, with the vast majority of people seeing the demo responding positively (and were also interested in some first- and/or second-year CS courses being taught with them, which may be my Master's thesis if it and I get accepted as a graduate student).
I definitely had some fun building the software and testing it, and then almost got hoarse during the open house due to the number of people to talked to.
(I'm pretty sure that I spoke to one off-campus reporter, too, in addition to our public-relations person)
The software will be made available for free under some open-source license once I figure out how to use SVN...
(man, I didn't realize how much I liked Git until I tried to use other version-control systems...)
So, yet another example of stepping in to fill some semi-useful role...
Kinda feels good, you know?
Interesting what you can get into when you know people, and they know you.
Apparently, one year an instructor used the last twenty-five hundred dollars of his grant money to buy as many iRobot Create robots as he could, and ended up with eight of them, along with all the accessories.
As they were not purchased for a particular use, they were not being used for anything, and it was wondered if anything could be done with them, and not just for the open house (which, in itself is pretty big affair on this campus).
As some of you may have guessed, I stepped up to the task and was given access to the lab and use of a laptop (so I wouldn't have to lug my 4-pounder around too much) and was mandated to provide an educational tool for programming them.
A demo of the current progress was also scheduled for the open house so we had something interesting to show.
So, over the last six to eight weeks I've written a nearly-complete Python API which, unfortunately, required that the robot be plugged into the computer to use, limiting the capabilities.
As they also came with a microcontroller to plug in the back, I also wrote a C API which was more powerful, more useful and more portable.
To test the API, I wrote a short demo program that attempted to escape from a room, using one of the Virtual Walls across the door to indicate when it escaped and the wall sensor to follow the wall once it found one.
(it was also dumb enough that it could get "stuck" on an obstacle in the middle of the room indefinitely, which was one of the things I pointed out during the open house demonstration, and asked for ideas for identifying when the robot got stuck)
Anyway, the open house had been on Thursday, and was a huge success, with the vast majority of people seeing the demo responding positively (and were also interested in some first- and/or second-year CS courses being taught with them, which may be my Master's thesis if it and I get accepted as a graduate student).
I definitely had some fun building the software and testing it, and then almost got hoarse during the open house due to the number of people to talked to.
(I'm pretty sure that I spoke to one off-campus reporter, too, in addition to our public-relations person)
The software will be made available for free under some open-source license once I figure out how to use SVN...
(man, I didn't realize how much I liked Git until I tried to use other version-control systems...)
So, yet another example of stepping in to fill some semi-useful role...
Kinda feels good, you know?
