We’re (Maurice and I) building one! I hope it works out well, so far it looks really neat and extremely basic. The “drums” are wood with a mousepad on glued on top, standing on a wooden pole that stands on a wooden base. The 2 drums in the middle are hopefully looking the best but are yet to be made. Their base is handcrafted and polished and rounded and owell. The electronics aren’t too hard we hope, some piezo buzzers, zenerdiodes and resistors and an arduino. Nothing too complicated right? We did run into a small problem: We need 7 analog inputs. We have 6. So the first version will probably have a digital basedrum. Owell.
Besides that we’ve (Maurice and I again) a arbitrary length number class, dubbed superint. Original huh? It’s efficient with the bytes and cycles, uses x86 ASM for all the instructions and gives the right answers. Currently support addition, substraction, multiplication, division and modulus. We’re making a version 2 with what we’ve learned so far which will have some more features. Stay tuned for the source, zlibbed we thinks.
Posted by Nick on August 7th, 2009 @ 12:57 pm | Tags: almost done projects, Arduino, Drumkit, electronics, superint
Posted in Hardware, Programming, Uncategorized | No Comments »
You might remember that the Aia project was nominated for participation at this year’s Science Congress of the University of Leiden. Well, at June 12th 2009, the congress finally took place. My team and five other teams each gave a ten-minute presentation about their “research”. These presentations were actually part of a competition in which the best, or rather the most favored, presentation was rewarded a price of €400,-. Unfortunately my team didn’t win. Quite possible because the Aia didn’t work completely during the presentation. Still, €200,- is very nice and luckily we still have the pictures.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Michael on June 14th, 2009 @ 3:53 pm | Tags: Aia, Presentation
Posted in Hardware, Open Source, Personal | No Comments »
The Aia project has been nominated for participation at this year’s Science Congress of the University of Leiden. At June 12th 2009, me and my team, will hold a presentation about the Aia and its development. While it’s a Dutch event I figured it would be nice to share this information as it shows that the hard work behind the Aia project hasn’t gone unnoticed.
More information about the congress and participation can be found here.
Posted by Michael on May 13th, 2009 @ 4:04 pm | Tags: Aia
Posted in Hardware, Open Source | 1 Comment »
This is probably going to be my last post about the Aia-project. It’s going to be a short post as I don’t have much to say about it anymore. When I talked about the Aia-project I always talked about the software, but I never showed you how the Aia looks. It’s time to correct that. In this last post I would to show the Aia as it is now.
A small note: I just uploaded the final release of the software and documentation of the Aia-project. You can find it here.
Posted by Michael on February 13th, 2009 @ 10:18 pm | Tags: Aia
Posted in Hardware, Open Source, Programming | No Comments »
Michael says:
Recently I had a discussion with Nick about open source handhelds. Reason for this discussion was the upcoming release of the GP2X Wiz. As with many other things it looks like we disagreed with each other about the GP2X.
Nick argued that these kind of handhelds are slowly becoming obsolete as small notebooks such as the Asus Eee PC are becoming increasingly more affordable. Considering this fact he called devices such as GP2X pure luxury. I understand why he feels this way. After all, why wouldn’t one buy an Eee PC for a little bit more money? Although, I don’t think you can compare the GP2X with an Eee PC. The GP2X is in a completely different market than the Eee PC. The GP2X is just a simple game/media handheld. It doesn’t claim to be more than that.
If you consider that the GP2X is a game/media handheld, it becomes a lot more interesting. Especially the fact that the GP2X is open source is interesting. This makes it a lot easier for developers, especially unproven developers, to develop applications for this handheld. I think this is a great way for hobbyist developers to get into handheld game development. This would be a lot harder if only the Nintendo DS and PSP were around; those platforms are very closed. So, it’s very good that there is an open alternative.
But the GP2X isn’t the only open source handheld out there. Besides the GP2X there is also the Pandora. Ironcally, Nick’s argument seems to apply completely to this device. Unlike the GP2X the Pandora isn’t only a gaming handheld. In fact, it offers a complete OS. It’s also a whole lot stronger than the GP2X. Unfortunately, the Pandora doesn’t really attract me. I’m not looking for a handheld that has the same functionality as a simple notebook. If I wanted something like that I would buy an Eee PC. No, I want something simple. Besides that I don’t really like the control scheme of the Pandora.
Nick says:
Just look at the thing! It’s so small… Okay, so maybe it isn’t really obsolete, at least it’s not my cup of tea. The eee would be a way cooler handheld, but it won’t really be an handheld. You can just put in your controller and play any game for example. Combine that with the huge offer of games that are already available through Ubuntu’s apt-get and you have a wicked gaming console. Kinda like that mini PS1 there used to be, but with a long batterylife and a high resolution screen too. I don’t see people in the train playing on their handheld, I see people in the train with their laptops. So yeah, in that way, it’s quite obsolete. When will you play this and actually have a better experience then you would with an eee and a nice controller? Maybe in the back of the car/bus/public transport, but I am more of a music listener when traveling and if I really want to play a game, my handheld is my phone.
I think Michael and I actually agree over that the Pandora is rather useless. Just buy an eee.
Picture to the right is a GP2X by the way, not the GP2X Wiz which admittedly looks more comfy. Maybe just as comfy as the PSP or DS, but those aren’t exactly comfy now are they?
I fired up my gameboy (the first, big, gray one) recently and played Castle Chess. Wicked soundtrack. Don’t tell anyone.
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Posted by Michael on January 28th, 2009 @ 11:23 pm | Tags: Eee, GP2X, Pandora
Posted in Discussion, Hardware, Open Source | No Comments »
Nick already mentioned it shortly yesterday, but I’m currently busy with my final school project. That doesn’t mean that I can’t work on .simplicity anymore, though. On the contrary. Because Computer Science plays an important role in my final school project I’ve more than enough to tell on .simplicity. You see, I’m currently developing an artificial intelligent robot called Artificial Intelligent Agent (Aia).
Aia is build around the Arduino. The Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform. It’s a cheap solution for developing hardware. The fact that the Arduino is cheap doesn’t mean that it’s low-quality. You can make great things with it as it’s highly flexible. Besides that it’s also very easy to use as the Arduino uses a programming language which is based upon C and C++.
Photo by Nicholas Zambetti. Taken from Arduino.cc
But lets talk a bit about the project itself. The goal of the project is to create a robot that is able to do simple pathfinding. Aia will perceive the world through colour analysis and distance estimations. Maybe it will also be able to recognize shapes, but we’re not sure about that yet.
At the moment of writing our control panel (Aia|CP) is able to perform colour analysis of webcam images. It also contains a Lua terminal. And it’s able to set up a basic connection with Aia. On the other things we still need to work.
But that’s all for now. You’ll hear more about it in the future. And when it’s done the source code will probably become open-source.
- Michael
PS: In case you didn’t notice it… I’m not the only person working on this project. I’m just the developer. Bryan (surname-less) is responsible for the electronics. And Arjan (surname-less) is responsible for the design.
Posted by Michael on November 13th, 2008 @ 8:48 pm | Tags: Aia, SuperSecretProject
Posted in Hardware, Open Source, Programming | No Comments »
