The hectic days of exams are over and the winter has begun. I am home now and ready for a big push in developing for Northern Bites (Trademark forthcoming).

My goals for developing over the break are two-fold: creating a Python layer for the majority of the code-base, and really getting started with finer ball control.

I’ve snuck (or was given full permission) an Aibo home and have gotten the wireless to work on my home network. A two-thousand dollar robot is a great excuse to buy a forty-dollar wireless router.

The good news is the wireless is pretty fast: aiboConnect was able to maintain a fast framerate sending over the non-compressed images. However, the thresholded configuration from the lab is horrible in my low-lit basement. This won’t matter with great new vision system Yi’s implemented this fall (details later), but I may still need some basic hand-done thresholding for aiboConnect’s sake. Or maybe I’ll figure out how to compress the new vision system the same way the old one does (bytes and chars and ints-bleh).

Regardless, I’m going to take a few days off from active development and focus on drafting some research guides for the independent study dudes. Their only task this winter is to catch up to speed on their various areas of research. Dudes: I’ll be sending them out soon.