Dave Snowdon

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/blog/work/portrait/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,

The goal of this project was to construct a low-cost expandable robot platform that Aurorans members can build on without a lot of hardware. Danny and I reckoned that most technology enthusiasts would have a laptop and using a laptop gives the advantage of a familiar environment for for use and development of the software for the robot. Besides the laptop and some standard rechargeable batteries the components required for version 1 are:

I'm a member of the Aurorans group ( meetup.com page, ning site). Danny Staple and myself were tasked with putting together a robot that would be simple enough to assemble by interested newbies to robotics (although I hardly qualify as an expert myself). Danny & I agreed on some basic hardware and set to work. Danny's version, the Eee bot, is documented here. This page documents my version of the robot, Chairbot.

This page describes my attempts to build and program a hexapod (6-legged) robot. For more information, see the updates below.

I’ve been fascinated by robotics for a long while but have not done very much - mostly because I like programming a lot more than I like hacking hardware. However, in 2006 I decided to have a go at building a hexapod (6-legged robot) using parts from lynxmotion.com. I got all enthusiastic for a while and then moving from Antibes to London and staring a new job led to me putting the project to one side for over 18 months.