During a long and labourious night after a COSI meeting, Akanksha was browsing ThinkGeek and saw the Tuxdroid. Knowing that it would be an excellent addition to the COSI labs, she contacted Jeanna Matthews who convinced the department to buy one!
The cool thing about the Tuxdroid is that it is an open source robot in the shape of a penguin. It already has an API built for it, providing an easy method of building programs to interact with the robot.
The hopes of having one of these in the labs would be to give us information about updated posts on Planet, new emails to the mailing list, server room status, and serving us soda. Tux made its COSI debut with a lightning talk, in the video below:
A customized "HelloWorld" gadget for the Tuxdroid was created (in Python). Attempts were made at a more 'advanced' gadget, "spin the Tux", however for some reason it never worked. Further investigation is necessary.
Summary of Project
Goals Achieved:
- Figured out how to communicate with the Tuxdroid through the web interface
- Used the functionality of the tuxsh (tux shell) to have the Tuxdroid give a lightning talk
- Created a Hello World gadget!
Future Goals:
- Create new gadgets
- Create a community portal of libraries where other users can submit and share their gadgets
- Integrate Tuxdroid with the COSI network status