Nerdtalk: The Tuxdroid has arrived
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 major order at ThinkGeek.
A few weeks ago, I was paying this friend another visit and the Tuxdroid had arrived.
I would not recommend this Tuxdroid to lesser nerdy people, because buying this will involve uploading new firmware and you need some programming skills to write your own gadgets. These gadgets, e.g. a mail checker, will alert you when a mail comes in. The droid will even read the sender's name and subject aloud. Using Linux is also more or less mandatory, as it is the preferred OS to use with the droid.
Currently there rewriting the API to be able to support Java. Being a Java developer this caught my interest, so when I find some spare time left, I'll be looking into this API.
To be continued ...
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 major order at ThinkGeek.
A few weeks ago, I was paying this friend another visit and the Tuxdroid had arrived.
I would not recommend this Tuxdroid to lesser nerdy people, because buying this will involve uploading new firmware and you need some programming skills to write your own gadgets. These gadgets, e.g. a mail checker, will alert you when a mail comes in. The droid will even read the sender's name and subject aloud. Using Linux is also more or less mandatory, as it is the preferred OS to use with the droid.
Currently there rewriting the API to be able to support Java. Being a Java developer this caught my interest, so when I find some spare time left, I'll be looking into this API.
To be continued ...
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