AusRobotics

Check it out: Ausrobotics v2 Beta (Preview Extreme Edition Plus!)

Please log in and have a look at the interface. All of your current credentials should work.

I would appreciate any feedback on whether you can post journal entries and to the forums successfully. Also if you see any blatant security holes let me know!

Off the top of my head, this is what is remaining:

1. Update the migration script to import existing forum posts (currently it imports forum posts as new blog posts) 
2. Fix up the url structure (Important for SEO!
3. Add some of the other pages if I get time
4. Stop procrastinating and cut the damn thing over

Also give me a yell in the comments if it doesn't work in your browser. Going off the stats for this site it should but if any of you particularly like using Netscape 1.2 then, well in that case you are out of luck but let me know anyway. :)

Hi guys, great to see all of the activity on the site over the last couple of weeks. It looks like some cool projects are in the pipeline!

This is just a quick heads up to let everyone know what is going down/up/around the place:

Ausrobotics v2

Still going... You can view it here for testing purposes. I am planning on using phpbb3 for the forums which should be a lot nicer than drupal's built in stuff. It doesn't work nicely in IE5.5 or 6.0 at the moment........... If those browsers would just die that would be great. 

Blog posts in moderation

I noticed a couple of posts in moderation and have pushed them to the front page. If your posts don't go straight to the front (they should be default now) then please leave a comment somewhere and I'll sort it out asap.

Murray has updated his blog with a post about the arrival of some acrylic panels for his Quadruped4 project.

 It was easy to miss in the feeds so I thought I would post it explicitly for everyone's enjoyment :)

The project looks like it is coming together and shows that Pololu is a valid alternative for getting stuff laser cut even from Australia. If you have experience with getting plastic or metal cut with any companies let me know in the comments as I might need to get some stuff done (someday).

Welcome back fellow roboteers and hello to 2008! :) I hope you all had a good Christmas and New Years, I have been trekking in Nepal over the last couple of weeks or so so that is why I have been quiet (silent more like it).

Anyway, I am planning a lot of improvements to the AusRobotics site this year to improve usability and hopefully generate more interest and more of a community feel. Discounting spammers we already have 20+ users and climbing. This year we can easily break 100!

I have a feeling that 2008 is going to be a great year for robotics.
Something about the fact that 8 is 2^3 maybe? Maybe not... :) Perhaps it's the fact that the rest of the world seems to have finally realised that robots are awesome and are getting into the game. Only another 50 years and people won't gape incredulously at me when I tell them what my hobbies are... One day hehe... :)

I have posted a new forum entry to get feedback on how you would like to improve the site etc. Let me know if you had any great ideas while sitting around drinking during the holidays! I know I had a heap :)

ash

The DARPA Urban Grand Challenge took place this weekend with Stanford's VW taking first place honours. Unlike the last Grand Challenge where the cars had to -simply- drive a hundred K's or so through the desert on their own, the Urban Challenge requires the robots to navigate a section of a city while obeying normal traffic rules.

Needless to say a lot of them managed to crash a lot :)

• An excellent amount of pics and info about the event and the challenges involved (Jawfish.net)
• Stanford, CMU robots cross the finish line (CNET News)
  
• Robots drop fast in driverless car race (CNET News)
  
• Video of a crash during qualification

Hi everyone. :)

I have only just noticed that anonymous forum posts were not being published by default (The result being that they were invisible to most people).

I have published all of the ones that I came across but if you are a shy lurker (nothing wrong with that hehe) and don't wish to sign up before you publish a reply then that is the reason it didn't show up.  :)

To fix the problem you can simply sign up for an account or wait a random amount of time until I notice and publish it manually.

In other news, my new Arduino Diecimilia arrived yesterday and is totally rad-pants. Expect a post about it soon!