Woxbot

This video was somewhat hidden in Google Video and I decided to post it here. Any day now the Woxbot will be uploaded to Sourceforge.

I need to gather and post more resources about the Woxbot, including my Masters dissertation in a more proper way, but for now you can check this paper.

Even more robots

A little more about the process designing the little robot in the logo of the IEEE Automaton Weblog.

The sketch in the middle was the one that captured best the overall tone they wanted to set for the blog, a homebrew, clunky, hobbyist-friendly robot. I did the wireframe (left) just as a WIP shot, but it ended up being selected over the final artwork (right, and also here toon shaded). You can see that the "eyes" and the wheels are pretty much the same throughout the process (and maybe the only parts that resemble the initial sketch :) ).

Those were modeled in Wings3D, the most user-friendly and easy to learn 3D modelling package. It's also free and open-source, and is probably the most famous program coded in Erlang, discounting the hardcore mission-critical telephone centrals manufactured by Ericsson.

Who could guess? More robots

More sketches of robots, those were quick studies for the Automaton logo. Both the Automaton guys and I liked the first one more.

My least preferred was the last tank-bot, due to the combat aspect.

More sketches: faces

I almost forgot  to upload these sketches these latest months. But since someone posted a comment in some older posts, I felt an energy boost to keep going :)

Weird character faces, scanned from my developer notebook back in 2000.

Critters

Sketches done on the edges of my developer notebook while programming web-stores back in 2000...

Frango hidropônico

Feita para o concurso de novos cartunistas do Estadão, há muitos anos atrás.

Rejected automaton

Erico Guizzo, a friend of mine who works as a journalist/editor at IEEE Spectrum, has asked me to create a small robot drawing  that  they would use at Automaton Blog. 

You can check Automaton for the final version, this is the alternative  that wasn't selected.

If Erico ever reads this, thanks for the opportunity!

More robots

This incomplete robot above was an attempt to make a robot with a Calvin-like attitude.

The "roving trashcan" above was one more proof that I love robots that have tank-like tracks.

More sketches - robots

Robots are a recurring theme in my random sketches, in parts because at the time I wanted to work with robotics (which I got to do on more than one occasion) and in parts because they have everything to do with cognitive science and even science fiction, themes I appreciate.

This guy was inspired by Star Wars 21B:

And this spider was inspired by the dozens of robotic spiders that are built each year in the world. The latest of which was very impressive.

Some movement here: Sketch series

Well ... it's been more than a year since I last updated this blog.

It was never really my intention to have this blog, but I came across some old drawings and sketches and thought that I could post them here.

Word of caution: those posts are not intended in any way to be taken seriouly at all. This first series specially was done on the edges of my notebook and sometimes on sketch paper while I worked as a web programmer back in 2000... Gee, I'm really old now. Kids that are entering college now were just 9 when I drew this stuff.

Sketches - robots

Tarzan

Neste blog bissexto em que não resolvo nem o idioma que se fala, de vez em quando cabe postar alguma coisa.
Como curiosidade, um stop motion muito simplório que fiz com meus irmãos, com as aventuras do Tarzan:




Um detalhe: o MonkeyJam (http://www.giantscreamingrobotmonkeys.com/monkeyjam/) é muito, muito bom. Realmente ajuda para fazer um stop motion.

After more than an year, my webcam working under Linux

Around a year and a half ago I purchased a super-cheap Q-Tec Webcam 100 USB. I was not supported under Linux (and barely supported even under Windows after all you could never know who really was the manufacturer of the thing).
Originally intended to help me in some ARToolkit and OpenCV explorations under Linux, it ended up supporting video conferences in Skype and MSN in Windows.

Occasionaly I poked around to see if I could wrangle some other driver to make it work. The most promising was this http://gkall.hobby.nl/pac20x.html, but the furthest I could go is making Linux detect the camera was plugged and load the proper modules, but it never worked. One funny thing I learned from that site is that the exact same hardware is embedded inside a microscope for kids called Meade MicrOcular.

Well, following the Xgl hype in this beggining of 2006, I decided to upgrade from the nice Kubuntu Breezy distribution to Dapper Drake just because of superior the eye candy. But when I gave the old webcam a try, it worked flawlessly with the drivers and software supplied with Dapper. By the way, Dapper (with Kubuntu) is a damn good desktop.

Very nice! If things start working like this even for odd hardware in Linux maybe in a couple of years we will all forget how to compile kernel modules. You can check a picture of the webcam image in a OpenCV window made transparent and rendered by Compiz.

Correrias em novembro

Dei uma passada pelo "meu blog". Muitos projetos para terminar logo, bem atrasados. Correria. Falta de tempo até para concatenar frases :)

Blogging in 2005

Na linha do comentário acima: Na verdade eu ainda pretendo ter algum esquema de web-publicações parecidas com um blog, mas antes disso gostaria de retomar a criação de histórias em quadrinhos (retomar é um eufemismo, pois acho que nunca realmente comecei).

Falando em coisas que pretendo fazer, estou em débito com dois projetos no sourceforge:
A câmera virtual
Neste eu preciso subir a última versão com inúmeros bug-fixes e algum suporte a scripting com integração com Beanshell;

Woxbot Arena
Preciso gastar ainda alguns tempo limando uns últimos bugs e criar uma versão pública.

Se quiserem acompanhar meu dia-a-dia na web, tenho deixado meus bookmarks aqui:
http://del.icio.us/mirwox

Fábio

Primeiro post

Realmente não pretendo dar continuade a este blog, apenas consegui uma conta para postar um comentário identificado no blog de um amigo.