Ubuntu 9.04

Yesterday I upgraded my OS from Ubuntu Hardy Herion 8.04 LTS to Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. Yet again, Ubuntu has done an exceptional job making the install process fast and simple. The whole install process took only 15 minutes and required only 8 mouse clicks. Talk about simplicity!
You can also now install Ubuntu as an application inside of a lesser Operating System (Windows XP/Vista) using Wubi. This is a great option for windows users who don't want to commit to creating a partition on their machine and want the freedom to remove Ubuntu at anytime. That's the great thing about Linux in general, freedom.

Finaly Finished!

This was my end of semester project for a Realtime Digital Media and Robotics class. We used a 6-degree of freedom robotic arm controlled using 2.6 Linux and POSIX threading.
The Robot's main objective was to raster through the playing field looking for red, then green blocks stacking the blocks without any user control. We used computer vision algorithms to close the control loop for the system. This project was a lot of fun!









This is an early version of the HAMSTer cart with only infrared sensors enabled. This was my Electrical Engineering Capstone Final Project. I worked along with 3 other engineering students to build this fully autonomous rover in 16-weeks completely from scratch. The main control unit of this system is a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA which handled all the image processing as well as kinematics (6-servos). The Pathing algorithms and GPS communications were handled by the Virtex's internal hardcore PowerPC440 microprocessor.
The bot is getting GPS coordinates and calculating a path to get to that position while avoiding objects. You can see the stereo-vision cameras mounted on the front of the cart on the tilt-pan servos, but they are not currently being used in this video.