Here’s the text blurb from a short video piece that ran in the local news last night-

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=drive_to_discover&id=5584601

View a local archive.

i’ve made progress on the path smoother.  it takes a path made from a few points and converts it into a smoothed path (using cubic curves) and waypoints along that smoothed path with times and velocities associated with the waypoints.  the waypoints are all the same distance from each other in time.  the roundedness of the curves is adjustable as it the acceleration profile.  in some cases the path comes up a little short - due to inaccuracies in guessing when to start slowing down.  in any case good enough for now.  my test images are kinda fun so i thought i’d pass those along.

-trebor

a good one.

Don’t let the dead air fool ya, we’re working our little orbs off behind the scenes. We’re too busy to post! Some stats courtesy our Subversion code management software: we’re averaging 10 file changes per day. When you keep in mind we’re only a few days into August (last bar on the graph) the trend is clear.

Hey orbsters,

whiling away a slow afternoon stuck inside, daydreaming about rolling robots?  well, now you can all gaze at the juicy bits, without needing a big fancy CAD program!  Rotate, zoom,  selectively hide parts for a better view, the orb is your oyster!

I put an edrawing of the current whole orb assembly here-

http://svn.lee.org/swarm/trunk/mechanical/v0_7/integrated.EASM
(local copy)
which you can view with the free utility here-

http://www.edrawingsviewer.com/pages/products/eDrawingsViewerpage.html
(local copy)

they’ve even got a Mac version-

http://www.edrawingsviewer.com/MAC_Viewer.html

(sorry, linux… maybe VMware?)

This is great for viewing, and reality checking thoughts like “I want to put a giant speaker/flame thrower/LED array/flux capacitor on the orb here.”

The one thing I’m finding it’s not so good for is importing data into a different program.  I guess I’m still looking for a really good portable format that does real parametric solid assemblies.

-mike