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Posts under ‘opensource’

lofi hardware, delivered

A few weeks back, I wrote about my attempt to translate a low-fidelity circuit board design into something that could be run through a laser cutter. Today, Ponoko delivered the results: You can click through to a large, high resolution image. In a word, it came out beautifully. I do work surrounding the use of [...]

computers and college

This past year, I’ve been serving on a task force at my institution. Our charge is to investigate the intersection of technology and learning on campus, make recommendations regarding where we might focus our energy in the next five years, and (perhaps most importantly) recommend political structures that might then provide guidance and insight on [...]

free interaction design for your open source project

During the summer of 2009, I had the good fortune of taking part in the Red Hat POSSE programme, meeting a bunch of excellent open source peeps, and getting a sense for how I might introduce more of my students to the world of open source contribution. This last spring, my colleague and I introduced [...]

OSCON is good

I’ll have to write a longer post later, but I thought I’d just mention that OSCON is a great conference. Our presentation went well, and we’ve had a lot of great conversations with people about all kinds of things in the open source world. More later… for now, it’s time to head out the door. [...]

dinosaurs and uavs

This past week, Radu and Drew worked through the details of setting up PWM-based servo control on the Arduino. This gives us robust control over servos from our occam-pi based programming environment without having to interrupt our execution every 20ms to update a servo. Here, the Science Dinosaur demonstrates how things work. Radu and Drew’s [...]

release early, release often

Last summer, I had the good fortune of taking part in Red Hat’s 2009 POSSE. It was an absolutely excellent experience, and many of the things we did and talked about have required much reflection and continued conversation for the ideas to take root. It also took some hutzpah: along with a colleague (and super-ninja [...]

cccboard in the wild

The concurrency.cc board (cccboard) was photographed in the wild being its own bad self. Some of the Kent crew made their way to a meetup in London of the OSHUG, the Open Source Hardware Group, hosted by Osmosoft. psd shot this picture: Yes, Omer’s step-up circuit lets our Atmega328-based board run off a single AA [...]

allegheny students and open source

This semester, we’ve introduced 40 students to the Fedora project . By “introduced,” I mean they have been introduced as contributors. I want to point out that for me as a member of the faculty this is 1. hard, 2. a massive leap of faith, and 3. very, very exciting. And, it is all of [...]

plumbing is released

The concurrency.cc logo I am excited to announce the release of Plumbing, software and documentation to support artists and makers in the programming of low-cost, open-hardware platforms like the Arduino. The Plumbing libraries are a collection of parallel components written in occam-pi , a small language with a long history. Last summer, we decided that [...]

it’s alive!

Omer passed on this picture:

That is a concurrency.cc Arduino-compatible board fired up and ready to go. As you can see, the vias aren’t really lined up that well, which may account for some intermittent USB-to-serial weirdness that he is chasing down at the moment.

Awesome job, Omer! If all goes well, I think we’ll have around . . . → Read More: it’s alive!