kennywest

Just a quick update on the Tuxdroid / Java story. I followed the wiki page describing the installation for the 2.0 beta software and launched the new control center (which is entirely written in java). The screenshot above shows this UI and it looks and works awesome. It has a lot more possibilities then the Python based 1.x UI and the attitunes stuff now really works. Attitunes are some kind of scenario's you can _play_, instructing the droid to do and say stuff. If you take a closer look to the screenshot, you can see the "Computer Alert 1 Nl" attitune highlighted. Pressing the play button executes the attitune and makes the droid speak and move. Using the UI you can also download, install and execute attitunes contributed by other people from the Tux Is Alive website. Anyway, I've checked out the code and I'm going to take a closer look at it.

Earlier this year I was visiting FOSDEM and together with a colleague I attended a talk about how to design a Linux robot companion. Although I studied electronics a long time ago, resistors, transistors and other electronic components have never really been my cup of tea. That's why I started to work as a Software Engineer, rather then a chip designer, but that's a whole different story. Anyway, the talk was not that difficult to follow, given my background. Even for people without a hardware background, I think, the talk was not that "nerdy". In the talk David presented a few Tuxdroids and told the story on how they designed it. The presentation was crystal clear for everyone, so the only question that popped from the audience was "Where the hell can we buy this thing?" (laughter all over the place). ThinkGeek was of course the place to be. At that time, we, Europeans, could buy stuff rather cheap on ThinkGeek, so a friend of mine decided to place a m...