Dave Snowdon

I'm running a BFO session at Devoxx UK on 26th March: "Is NAO your robotic overlord?"

On 9th February I took part in the February Hack The Tower event organised by John Stevenson (@jr0cket). John runs this event as a sort of one-day hackathon for the London Java, Scala, Clojure & Salesforce developer communities and one of its compelling features is the diverse mix of developers who attend.

I haven't posted anything about NAO for a while, which is a shame since it's a great platform and I've been having a lot of fun with it. More details (such as there are) on my NAO project page.

Over the last year or so a group of UK based NAO developers has started to meet semi-regularly and back in March we decided to run our own hackathon based on the NAO. We hoped to get registered NAO developers and other coders together for a weekend of hacking code on the NAO.

The project I'm currently planning on using my RaspberryPi for is a robotics project to entertain my children. As part of that I need to be able to control DC motors from the RaspberryPi

The aim of this project is to entertain both myself and my children by converting a radio-controlled K9 toy into an autonomous robot under the control of a RaspberryPi. I chose the RaspberryPi because of it's low power requirements, low cost and small form factor (there is very little space inside the toy).

I have the following loosely defined set of goals

• Anything that the toy could do via radio control, it should be able to do under the control of the 'Pi

I just upgraded the head of my NAO robot to a NAO next gen head. The old head needs to go back to Aldebaran, but before that I could not resist having a little fun. Ghene Snowdon took my initial shots and edited them in photoshop to create the images below.

Since I got my NAO I have not had time to do as much coding as I would have liked. I decided to give myself a simple project in order to get myself started and try out some programming in Choreographe and learn a bit about the NAOqi runtime. I don't know why I decided to try and get NAO to pretend to hypnotise people.

After some discussion on Aldebaran Robotics Developer program's forum a few of the UK developers decided to meetup in London. We were lucky enough to be joined by Jerome Monceaux, the architect of the NAO platform and Akim, the developer program community manager who came over from Paris to spend the day with us.

After introducing ourselves, the first order of business was a little surgery on Tim's NAO to replace some stripped screws on the battery compartment.

My wife (a portrait and wedding photographer) thought the NAO was so cute she insisted on a portrait session:

http://www.gsnowdon.com/daily-picture-meet-our-new-baby/

I've justs got hold of a NAO from Aldebaran robotics. I'll be using this project to keep track of my progress,