the ascendency of Arduino

Engadget recently posted an embedded Vimeo video consisting of the earliest participants in the Arduino project, talking about how it got started.

Similarly, a search of YouTube with "arduino" as the search term results in over 5,000 hits.

Having had difficulty wrapping my head around the Arduino phenomena, I prefer to let the team tell their own story (2016/May/10: now sourced on YouTube)...

Arduino The Documentary (2010) English HD from gnd on Vimeo.

changes...new blog

RobotsPodcast.com has closed their forum (probably due to a low rate of participation), and has also partnered with Robots.Net, a venerable robotics related website.

Members there are automatically set up with blogs, consequently I have a new one http://robots.net/person/cultibot/, which I anticipate using more than this one henceforth, although I'll probably continue to bring relevant material here as well.

In that vein, the latest episode of RobotsPodcast features Joe Jones of Harvest Automation. Mr. Jones was employee #1 at iRobot, and is the creator of the Roomba, which in the interview he describes as constituting a "beautiful island" because the technology it utilizes is far different from what would be needed for other domestic devices it inspires people to ask for. Mr. Jones believes agriculture offers better opportunities for reuse of technologies developed for an initial use case.