Squeak Experts Near Portland Oregon
Robert F. Scheer
rfscheer at speakeasy.net
Sat Dec 15 02:04:55 UTC 2007
Hi all,
I'm the President of the local robotics club, the Portland Area Robotics
Society and a fairly new squeaker. Jon Hylands posted a little bit of
Squeak hype from me awhile ago.
My personal robot development is coming along pretty well and I'm still
quite interested in this language. Still a raw newbie though.
Now we're starting a rather big project within our club that we hope
will establish a very popular open-source outdoor robot kit for $500.
By popular, it all depends on how well it performs, but it might end up
with thousands in the field. It's performance goal is to be the best
RoboMagellan robot to date so it must rapidly navigate on an unmarked
course of around a mile in length and use vision to locate and touch
(softly) a few orange traffic cones. This has historically been a tough
bag of requirements and we'd like to catalyze a breakthrough entry point
to the hobby.
Who knows.
I was thinking it would be a good idea to use Squeak for this project
but it will be a tough sell because literally nobody knows anybody who
uses Squeak for robots. The opinion ranges from mostly totally ignorant
to negative. Only one well-known roboticist in our sphere of
communication uses Squeak and that's Jon Hylands. Lots of people use
assembly language on microcomputers. Most people use C/C++ and Java I
think.
Is there anyone expert enough to give an interesting talk here in
Portland that would be directed at people with widely varying
programming backgrounds all interested in robot development. We'd
really appreciate it!!!
Thanks.
- Robert Scheer
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