Dorkbot DC September meeting

30 September 20087 – 9 PM (ET)
Smith Hall of Art, Room 114
George Washington University
801 22nd St NW
Washington, DC 20037

Schedule for next meeting

Bruce Howard : The Lightglove Virtual Controller  : 

Lightglove is a “virtual controller” technology worn underneath the wrist that optically senses hand shape and tracks position with motion sensors in real time. Not only does it allow the user to control elements in virtual space, but the interface itself is virtual since it is a non-contact optical sensing platform that moves untethered with the hand(s). The host system emulates any hand-input device e.g. mouse, joystick, on-screen keyboard or virtual reality glove. The benefits of this unique technology include ergonomics, instant availability on the wrist and gesture-based control. We will discuss the advantages of Lightglove technology and provide a live demonstration to illustrate operation and the fine degree of sensitivity the controller offers.

Bruce Howard is Co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Lightglove(tm) and has over 28 years’ experience in hardware systems design and support including radio communications, electromagnetic interference and nuclear / EMP. He designed and prototyped all hardware and has written and debugged all the software and firmware associated with the Lightglove. He also wrote all 4 patents for Lightglove technology and has been involved with optical design since his undergraduate work at Virginia Tech (VPI-80), where he earned a BS in Electrical Engineering.

Andrew Harris : Functional Programming for Hobbyist-Class Platforms

Functional programming languages are used by discriminating hackers around the world because of their power and elegance. But for those discriminating hackers that want to target low-power hobbyist-class platforms such as ARM and XScale based systems, or even smaller systems, a quandary exists: popular functional language compilers such as the Glasgow Haskell Compiler and the MLton Standard ML compiler are very big, complex, and employ large run-time libraries. Recompiling the run-time libraries for new platforms is difficult. As an alternative, this talk presents an open source functional programming language compiler that generates pure C code — code expressly designed to be suitable for compilation and execution on these hobbyist-class platforms. This eliminates the quandary that those discriminating hackers face when targeting small, low power hobbyist-class platforms for building REDACTED and REDACTED.

Andrew Harris is a member of the professional staff at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory where he develops spacecraft flight software for deep space missions. Andrew holds M.S. degrees in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, and Robotics. He is also an amateur radio operator (KB9OOH) and a PADI certified SCUBA diver.

Dorkbot DC