Where I stand

I've disappeared of late - mainly to finish school, hunt for jobs (with unfortunately no luck) and work on some projects.

I am currently working on, and will soon expand upon, the following projects:

Unnamed Product

I am developing a product, meeting with SCORE counselors, and going through the motions of starting up a business. As of now I do not know my endgame here - selling the product off to an established company or starting a business fresh, I'm not sure. Currently I am in the prototyping phase, with hope-raising success on several ends, and a laundry list of to-do's. I might post some information about this from time to time, but for now I'll be keeping it under wraps.

Python/AVR Communication Library

I mentioned it before in the form of a Python robotics library, but then immediately got distracted with school work. Well, now I'm finding myself with plenty of free time. The project will focus upon using AVR micro controllers for their relative ease of use and low learning curve for new comers, and the truly inexpensive price to starting. I will no longer focus on robotic applications, though a set of robotic commands might sneak their way into this, as I plan on using it to control future robots. It is more of a fleshed out, ready to go rapid development Python/AVR communication library, where the computer running Python acts as the master.

Even an Arduino (I only have Boarduino, as my Arduino was stolen along with a number of other things) compatible version might rear its head. Maybe.

Since I'm rebooting this project, I have a short but oh-so-important to-do list for this project right now:

1. Find an AVR library to hasten development and support more than one AVR chip.
2. Cannibalize my old code from the project and determine what works - and what doesn't.
3. Create a standard of common commands that will be commonly used, and make creating new commands a cinch.
   

Robotic Vision

This project aims to be a super simple, octagonal robot base that I will be mounting my EEE PC and a web camera too. I will be trying to teach myself OpenCV and computer vision in general, either through OpenCV's Python or C++ version. MATLAB may also be used. Given that I have very little C++ experience, this may be the right amount of interesting and challenging. MATLAB is a pain because my computers all currently run Linux - leaving me with no known method of acquiring video from a web camera or other source and giving it to MATLAB.

The project is on hold because two separate companies completely screwed up shipping in two different ways. One sent my Asus EEE charger (lost the first two, oi!) to the wrong house, and I am now patiently awaiting another. The other company held onto my servos for over two weeks before finally contacting me, telling me that my credit card didn't go through because of a mistyped address. Who knows why that took two weeks. Once one or the other shows up, it's onto the project's to-do list:

1. Design a servo mount to go with the base and servo. Design a pan/tilt device to go on said base for the web cam.
2. Build a quick power and battery circuit for the servos - nothing fancy. Bare minimum stuff.
3. Build a servo controller for 4 servos. I plan on using an AVR (big surprise).

From there, it's exploring computer vision! This will also act as an excellent platform to test my Python/AVR library.