[CCC DEV] Brief update (week of N7)

[Matt Jadud]

Hi all,

Much of my time was taken over by things related to local
administrative type work (in the real world).

In the project world, I attended the Pittsburgh Mini Maker Faire not
too long ago, and handed out around 50-60 business cards. (I had the
campus print shop print something up with the c.cc logo.) Related,
next semester I'm going to be offering a "Collaboratory Studio"
course, which will be a 1- or 2-credit (out of 4) course where
students engage in making and doing with the Arduino. It should be
good.

We're making progress on a new aircraft---we have a nearly complete
Google Sketchup design that I'll get into a repository soon. This will
become the new o-pi powered UAV. Our goal for the summer is to be
doing aerial photo work, but we're still in early stages. We should be
cutting the plane in a week or two on the foam cutter, and I'm looking
at Flight Gear as a simulation environment. That is, there is a simple
network protocol for getting data from the sim and sending commands
back, so wrapping this up might not be too hard. (This way, we can
work on developing control algorithms year-round and without risking
the aircraft.)

Lastly, students in CS220: Programming Languages will be diving into
o-pi on the Arduino shortly. I'm going to introduce them to the users@
list, and expect them to ask questions there. The nature of the
project is such that any help is welcome. If any of you are able to
pick up a question before I do, that's great. My experiences starting
into the cookbook and getting tools ready for them again are, in part,
why I'm thinking that a pure-Python IDE like Editra might be easier
for us to work with/build/bundle/etc. Or, there might be something
else... but I'm looking for ways that we can lighten the
dev/maintenance load if at all possible.

That's my update. Questions or updates from others welcome. (Hm. A
bunch of that is "user-type" update, but hey. We'll get the hang of
keeping things moving.) Lets aim for quick(er) updates from others by
email this week, and try a focused IRC chat next week.

Cheers,
Matt