Jon Foote has been playing with Blender and made this…

He writes: I had a few minutes to play with Solidworks, which is pretty awesome, from my experience with the first tutorial.

I took the opportunity to export the shell model into VRML, which can be read by Blender. Blender is an open-source 3d modeling/rendering program, which is free and pretty powerful, and runs on all OSs. Get it here: http://www.blender.org/ (The learning curve is pretty gnarly, so I can’t recommend it totally without reservation.)

Blender lets you add light sources and render things (which may be possible in SW but I don’t think so). So I did a little experiment with internal lights (attached jpg). It’s wrong in several ways (no internal chassis) but it’s enough to get the idea. I may try some different light positions if I get some time (ha ha).

I will check all this into SVN so others can play. You can do animations and move things around if you know what you are doing. Look in the media/blender subdir
-J

I know we haven’t been keeping you peeps updated nearly enough. Let me make it up to you… we’re going to (at least) THREE shindigs soon!

First up, we’re going to Yuri’s Night at NASA Ames (http://sf.yurisnight.net/) Saturday April 12th from 2pm-2am!! They’re so excited to see us that we even got nice billing on some recent invitation emails. Groovy!

Next… we’re performing at this little music festival thing in SoCal. You’ve probably never heard of it. It’s called Coachella. Yessire! That’s right, 6 shiny metal orbs will be bounding around at the Coachella Music Festival (http://www.coachella.com/) Friday April 25th-27th! And us swarm-herders get to rub elbows with a bevy of music and art greats!

There’s talk about the orbs rolling to other festivals but it hasn’t been totally lined up yet so I don’t want to set the bar too too high. :-)

If SoCal is too far to go to catch orby delights, you’ll ALSO find us at Maker Faire (http://makerfaire.com/) Saturday May 3-4 in San Mateo.

Keep em rollin’!
Lee for SWARM

From Coreyfro:

While NASA is still bragging about teleoperated robots such as DEXTRE, DARPA continues to push the boundaries on autonomous robotics.

That’s because NASA nerds (or, well, two of us here at Ames, and technically, I’m a contractor) make autonomous robots for fun in our free time!

Auto choreographing, music composing, and light show generating orbs of gleaming aluminum!

Come see Orb Swarm at Yuri’s Night!

Legs? PFT! Legs are SOOOOO Precambrian era!