Meet Codie

Codie is a robotic toy and a custom-built graphic coding language. Codie is an educational tool which fits into the playing style of the children and augments their experience — blurring the line between learning and play. While playing with Codie, the children become familiar with logical thinking that all technology is based on while gaining invaluable problem solving skills along the way. Codie provides educates on algorithmic thinking without the constraints of traditional educational tools.

The Codie app makes it fun for children to learn algorithmic thinking. We organized complex robotic code into colorful blocks children can arrange and connect with arrows showing the direction of execution. While having fun, they learn the basics of coding, using real programming patterns, including: if-else structures, loops, varia-bles and subroutines.

The Codie robot is an affordable and fun toy that pairs with the intuitive app. This sturdy robot is stuffed with equipment and sensors that make it responsive and fun. Codie will provide entertainment for the whole family for many hours to come. Codie comes fully assembled, just take it out of the box, pair it with your smartphone via wireless Bluetooth connection and play. The body of the Codie robot is carved out of high-quality wood and every single unit is hand-crafted.

Technology needs to be part of every child’s education and schools have realized that they need to expose children to technology at an early age. Constraints in our educational system result in the inability to pay attention to every child’s own unique needs. At Codie, we want to inspire these young bright minds to be interested in learning about technology while having fun at the same time. Codie is not just a toy, but rather a creative tool. It’s a companion that augments other games. Playing with Codie is a high-quality learning experience, and it allows your child to understand coding in a fun and interactive way. Children get empowered by the knowledge they get with Codie and the whole process feels natural and seamless. Codie grows with your child. It provides more sophisticated programs as your child surpasses the basics. While playing with Cody your child will become familiar with the logic of computer coding — providing a foundation of understanding they will draw from for the rest of their lives.

more information here: http://www.getcodie.com/

Dynepic® to Launch Internet of Toys™ Platform & Debut Product on Kickstarter: 15 November

Dynepic® is pleased to debut the future of toys with our premier device, the DynePod™, which will launch 15 November on Kickstarter.com.  DynePods™ operate on The Internet of Toys™ (IoToys), Dynepic’s state-of-the-art open platform designed to share cloud content and connect toys, merging elements of child’s play and technology to enable children to interact with their toys in revolutionary and modern ways.

The DynePod™ is an educational, Bluetooth connected toy designed to introduce fundamental concepts of customization, socialization, programming and engineering, by allowing children to create their own interactive programs for their toys. Using a graphical If, Then programming interface, developed under contract with the National Science Foundation, children can create a multitude of unique, useful programs that involve both the digital and physical world.  DynePods™ are modular, fully customizable toys that are compatible with a multitude of self-designed and 3D printed accessories, encouraging the next generation to start innovating.  Enabled by the Internet of Toys™ platform, DynePods™ can morph and grow with the child through cloud updates, as well as connect wirelessly with other DynePods™ and a host of other future toys linked to the platform.

„DynePods™ and The Internet of Toys™ platform will enable new play patterns and encourage open-ended exploration for the future of toys, for children, makers, and toy inventors alike,“ Krissa Watry, Dynepic’s Co-Founder & CEO, comments.  „We hope you will join us by supporting DynePods™ and the Internet of Toys on Kickstarter, 15 November.“ For more information on how Dynepic is working to build the COOL aisle for toys, please visit our website www.dynepic.com or contact us at [email protected]. A Press kit is available.

Founded in 2011, Dynepic® is focused on building cool connected toys and an open architecture and cloud platform to drive child friendly content in new and innovative ways. Dynepic® is a women owned, veteran owned, small business focused on creating the Internet of Toys™.  

Free German NXC Tutorial

Not eXactly C is a high-level programming language for the Lego Mindstorms NXT. NXC, which is short for Not eXactly C, is based on Next Byte Codes, an assembly language. NXC has a syntax like C.

There is a new version of the NXC Tutorial available at the Roberta Homepage. It is an extended german version of the tutorial original based on the work of Daniele Benedettelli.

You can download the german tutorial for free here: http://roberta-home.de/de/was-bietet-roberta/roberta-reihe/nxc-tutorial

The English original version is available here: http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nbc/nxcdoc/NXC_tutorial.pdf

http://roberta-home.de/sites/default/files/images/Tutorial.thumbnail.JPG

FAIR Libary is online

As we have already reported is the „Fraunhofer Autonomous Intelligent Robotics Devices“ Library now open source and available at the sourceforge project „OpenVolksBot„. In addition we can know report some more details on it.

  • The FAIRlib is now organized as several Eclipse-Project (fairAlgorithm, fairCore, fairDevices, fairGraphics, fairTestAlgorithm, fairTestCore, fairTestDevices and fairTestGraphics). This allows an easy extending and compiling the projects and minimizes the cross dependencies.
  • The dependences  are listed in the ReadMe and can be auto installed by using the script „apt-get-fair“
  • A way of easy installing is given by the script „install-fair
  • The current version is tested on the Ubuntu 9.10 (64-Bit) ,  but will also work on other OS (by side of auto solving the dependences)
  • Fair is published under the CC-by-sa-nc License .

So now we all can reuse and cooperated in a create library, instead of reinventing the „wheel“ again and again. 😉

The RepRap Project – An open source 3D-printer for less then 500€

Everybody who has ever designed and built a robot by him self knows about the difficulty by building special components like sensor holders, adapters or axes bearings . Either you have to pay a huge amount of money to a company that is willing to build small product series on it or , which is more common you build them by your self and spend a lot of time on prototyping and manufacturing tasks, and then build it by hand. For the last option the  usage of a 3D-printers can speedup the process.

Generally spoken is a 3D-Printer an industrial robot with several degree of freedoms, that is moving an extruder and injects either plastic or metal in a way that a plastic or metal object (the prototypes)  are created. This technology allows therefore to print physical objects. By using this technology, the coast of one object/prototype are dramatically shrinking. More or leas the coast of one object is given by the material coasts and the time which is needed to build a CAD-Design of the object.

The major drawback of 3D-Print is the acquisition costs. Professional printer can easily coast more then 20.000€. But there is hope. The open source project RepRap allows us to build our own 3D-Printer by coast round about 500€. RepRap stands for Replicating Rapid-prototyper and is a hardware open source project. Like the big industrial machines does this project support a easy way do build your first prototypes.

RepRap from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.

Mendel’s improvements over Darwin from Rep Rap on Vimeo.
Of course there is also darkness. The RepRap-hardware is currently on the state of the industrial machines from 5 years ago. For example does the open source version not support to printing two type of material simultaneously. But this is extremely usefully if you have to build object with huge holes, which would collapse if there is no filling material inside that will be removed later.

But still this technollogy makes prototyping that easy and quick that it is worth to give it a try.

Updated:

The „Elektrischer-Reporter“ (German) has a reportage of the background and the ideas for the close future on 3D-Printing and homemade products. The basic stadement is an upcoming change of production lines. Every customers will be also a small factory and an upcoming market of „digital construction plans“ will showup.

Open source is FAIR – IAIS released the „Fraunhofer Autonomous Intelligent Robotics Devices Library“ as open source

Developing and programming robotic systems can sometimes be an unsatisfying task. This feeling is mostly not related to problems that occur during „high level“ problem solving. It is mostly appearing if you try to get the system it self up and running. So tools and solutions are needed to help us to overcome these initialization barriers.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems or for short Fraunhofer IAIS, does now offer a special computer library that can support the developer to get a width field of sensors and actors up and running. In addition it includes a various number of algorithmic for every day robotic problems like Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) or image processing. The so called „Fraunhofer Autonomous Intelligent Robotics Devices Library“ or for short FAIR library, is a C/C++ development library which is actively used in the VolksBot® projects and is released as open source project under the GNU-license Creative Commons.

FAIRlib is soon available at the sourceforge project „OpenVolksBot„.

Updated: The initail version is now available (see also here) and is published under the CC-by-sa-nc.

Introduction to I2C

I2C is one of the most used electronically data bus that is extremely often used in embedded systems. It is used for attaching sensors, actuators of other subsystems into the system.

Recently i have found a good introduction which includes background knowledge and a HowToUs on www.uchobby.com.

Programming Tutorials and free Mindstorms Software Addons

Before starting this new blog here, i have been collecting Lego Mindstorms related material in my public Wuala Group „ Robotics, Robotik, Mindstorms, Asuro, Yeti, more (www.nxtreme.net)“.

I also uploaded Tutorials for different programming languages.

Feel free to join this group.