I’ve been busy so there have not been any updates in a little while. Due to the holidays there probably won’t be any more until next week. I just came across this video on Gizmodo and thought it was funny and interesting. Enjoy.
I am hooked on Global Guerrillas. John Robb consistently writes insightful, thought provoking posts that hit at the heart of ideas that have been bopping around in my head for the last 5 years. Ideas that ultimately lead me to building this site. I hope that OpenWarfare will be come a online gathering point for people who are interested in Resilient Communities and tactics, weapon systems and the like. Anyway…I was reading this post on Entrepreneurial Hot Spots and found it interesting for two reasons. One, my cousin used to live down the road from Buck’s so I’ve been there a few times. It always struck me as an interesting location for a “hot spot”. I always figured it gained it’s status because of it’s location (it’s across the road from a grocery store in one of the more affluent neighborhoods in the bay area. Two, one of the comments provided a link to OpenFarmTech.
At first it looks like farm nerds but if you start to poke around you will see they have done a TON of work laying out the blueprints for a complete resilient community. From power generation to food production to machining, they have it all there. Really smart people with great ideas and inspiring results.
What does this have to do with open source weapon systems you ask. I think with a few changes you could take this plan and build a small, mobile weapons factory. Imagine being able to drop a couple shipping containers in an area of conflict that when supplied with raw materials and power could spit out guns, drones, water, communications gear, force tracking software etc. I know manufacturing guns is probably not what the OpenFarmTech people are thinking about but what good is a farm if you can’t protect your crops. I’ll leave you with a video of the OpenFarmTch folks making Compressed Earth Bricks (CEB) with the help of their open source tractor.
Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) is a system that uses Computer Vision (CV) algorithms to find landmarks and ascertain a vehicles speed, attitude, altitude and position. These can be as accurate (or more accurate) than GPS and when combined with other sensor input gives you vehicle a much better location information than just GPS and IMU alone. It also allows the system to augment reality by merging the real environment with a simulated one, as shown below.
This library might be useful for rapidly developing and prototyping systems. It would be particularly useful for computer vision and UI design. It includes libraries for facial recognition, servo control etc. It’s written in C/C++ so its fast. I’d be interested to see how well it would run on an embedded system like gumstix.
made with openFrameworks from openFrameworks on Vimeo.
While I was looking for a simulation environment for the Arduino I came across Fritzing. It is a very exciting project. Their goal is to allow someone to go from a virtual breadboard design right to a PCB layout. I’m downloading it as I type. If it’s as good as it looks a review should show up pretty soon.
Tags: Arduino
I consider Australia and New Zealand the up and coming meccas of civilian UAV development. Here is a cool video about a recent UAV challenge.
Team Telemasters 2008 UAV Outback Challenge Documentary from Aaron Donaldson on Vimeo.
I ran across this little gem the other day. It’s an OS meant to run on the ARM that is entirely pythonic. From their site: “Pycorn is an interpreted operating system written in Python, intended
to recreate the easy learning possibilities of 8-bit microcomputers.
Device drivers, file systems, network protocols can all be implemented
in Python with no C or assembler code.”
It seems like a promising platform for building hacker friendly embedded systems.
I’ve been tossing an idea I call DrumLine around in my head for a while now. The idea is to build a network of drums that, when within range of each other, will automatically start playing a beat dictated by a master drum or drums. I was looking around for an easly library to use to test some variations before buying the basic hardware and came across this page. http://www.media.mit.edu/resenv/classes/MAS961/schedule.html I found the simpulator.py code particularly helpful.
I’ve been tossing around an idea I call DrumLine around in my head for a while now. The idea is to build a network of drums that, when within range of each other, will automatically start playing a beat dictated by a master drum or drums. I was looking around for an easly library to use to test some variations before buying the basic hardware and came across this page. http://www.media.mit.edu/resenv/classes/MAS961/schedule.html I found the simpulator.py code particularly helpful.
