Preparing for The Assembly

I have been lucky enough to get a speaking slot at The Assembly in Finland at the end of the month. 7000 computer hobbyists in one place for four days. Naturally I am talking about robotics! My plan during the session is to show how to build simulated worlds and robots to play in them. This will allow delegates to explore the world of robotics without cost - remember Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio is free for non-commercial use and requires only free runtime downloads from MS including Visual C# Express 2005/8.

However, I'm only speaking for a couple of hours and the event is four days long - although I can only attend for the first two days. So while manning the Microsoft booth I need a few more things to play with.

So, I have been plotting the rebuild of the Wotudo blimp! Today I got the final part - a new 5.8Ghz wireless camera. The camera from Flyonthewall is superb quality! I mashed up a battery connector for it (using a PP3 9V battery) and was able to walk around my garden getting excellent colour images and audio from the camera. My garden is pretty big at 1.1acres, I only got signal interference when line of sight was broken by bushes and trees at about 40metres out, but once line of sight was restored it continued to work very well.

The plan is to use two new blimp balloons and the original blimp gondola with the camera to fly within The Assembly venue. Rather than having the two blimp balloons stacked - as we did at Mashed - I'm hoping we can make more of a 'X-wing' horizontal arrangement with them side by side and the gondola and camera in the middle.

The camera receiver isn't USB so I intend to use my camcorder as the bridging device. This can take a video feed in from the receiver and convert it as required to a USB output which my laptop can use as a web cam. I can then process the feed as I wish - probably using the Volts-IQ visual SDK again to detect faces and other objects. Being 5.8Ghz of course I don't cause interference with Wifi :-)

I also have an iRobot Create to take, and will put the camera onto this also, providing me with a remote camera I can process the feed from, for vision guidance etc. I don't have time to mount a PC on the Create as I intended too, so having it under remote Bluetooth control from a PC and with a wireless vision system is pretty cool to demo and play with. I may take my Lynxmotion 6 Axis arm with me as I can also control this via a wireless mechanism if I plumb the servos into my Devantech servo controller board rather than the servo controller supplied with the arm. Both the controller board and the arm run from batteries, so no real effort required to put this all together. I do need a new micro servo for the gripper as the gears break very easily - something to get ordered I think!!

I think The Assembly is looking pretty cool. I am very excited to be going and to be taking my toys with me!! Although the Sauna in the speaker lounge could be one step to far - even my Stockholm past hasn't prepared me for this ;-). If you are also attending do drop by the MS booth and my seminar to say hi!