Month: July 2005

Great interview with Colin from iRobot! What sort of add-ons could you have for the Roomba? Angle: For the Roomba, there is a group that’s working very seriously and looking at the idea of using the Roomba as a physical avatar. I might log into a Web page and see what the robot sees, hear what the robot hears and be able to drive the robot from my Web page. Over time, there’ll be probably more of this type of interest. The rate at which it becomes economically interesting? I’ve no idea. We’re putting up the APIs and doing what we can to encourage people. Link.

I wanted to do a GPS nav screen in my car, but I didn’t have an in-dash system. But I did have an old laptop..hmmmm. What if I used this as an excuse to use my brother’s welder to create a little stand so I can use GPS software on the laptop while I drive? Materials: About a foot of 1 inch square steel pipe. An old music stand shelf. About 2 feet of water heater copper tubing. A couple of connectors. Link.

Use a Smart Media Card, Compact Flash Card, SD Card, USB Flash Drive or even a USB HDD with a PSP. Team Xecuter is developing a simple plug in device where you can expand the PSP Memory Stick Port to connect to several other memory devices, thus saving massive costs and giving you a multitude of storage options for your PSP no matter what you wish to play with be it games, web browsers, ebooks, music players, media managers and much more ! Using this same development kit we have been able to downgrade v1.52 / v1.51 down to v1.50 or even a v1.00 with no problems whatsoever Link.

Everyone’s heard that the TiVo “runs Linux”. In this installment of Linux on board, Peter takes a look at the Linux system installed on the TiVo. Examining the TiVo system reveals how one company made the transition from desktop operating system to embedded system. There are a lot of sites about “hacking” the TiVo, to do this to it and that to it (and there’s always the other thing too). After all, half the fun of owning something that runs Linux is to make it do something more (or different) than it was intended to do. But most of us only need so many Web servers (off the top of my head, I think I have 10 or 15 Web servers in my house already, including the embedded systems). Link.

This car will be at Macworld next week- The goal: To edit 30fps @ 140mph. The car is equipped with: Apple Xserve Dual 2GHz G5 1U server with Fibre Channel, Apple Xserve RAID 3.5 TB Drive Capacity, RAID 50 configuration, AJA IO capable of Analog and Digital capture of video in a variety of formats, Netgear 16-port Gigabit Ethernet switch, with integrated jacks in-dash…Link.

We posted about the super-cool retro electronics gallery previously, but if you actually want to play these games, emulator style, LEDhead seems to be the best way to do it. There are Windows, Palm and Pocket PC versions. Once I get back, I’ll check these out–the screenshots look great. Thanks karramarro! Link.

There are a few HOW TOs floating around on getting Podzilla on 4G iPods; here’s another. (And it’s for Windows folks.) I tested the installation instructions on Windows XP, but I haven’t tried any other OS. I will also tell you how to watch videos on your iPod. Link.