27 years ago (or there abouts) as a young lad, I desperately saved to buy a Heathkit Hero Jr. Hero Jr was the little brother of the Hero 1 (which featured in an American TV serious and got me hooked on robotics). By the time I had enough money to phone Maplin and order a Hero Jr they had discontinued them :-(. This was a major blow to my robotic dreams. I managed a few lowly robots after this, religiously purchased the various early robot magazines but never managed to build a robot with all the features of the Hero range.

27 years later, I saw the White Box Robotics 914 PC Bot. It was still in proto-type and they were looking for 'pioneers' to order the first batch. A risk but also an opportunity. I immediately placed my order.

During the following 12 + months I kept the faith and waited patiently, lapping up any little nugget of information on the device. During this time, the EU passed the RoHS directive, the 914 was assembled in Canada  - North American doesn't have similar laws. So even while my 914 was ready for delivery I had to engage the government to find out the detail - could I import my 914 without RoHS certification. After a short delay the response was positive - a personal import was fine.

And now to yesterdays announcement (13th). Heathkit producers of the original Hero 1 and White Box Robotics are in a multi-year strategic agreement under which 'Heathkit will produce, manufacture and distribute an educational version of the robot to be known as the HE-RObot'!!

So full circle, I missed my Hero Jr, got my 914 PC Bot, and now so have Heathkit :-) Wow, the children of our time are going to have some fun.

Read more at Heathkit and White box robotics.

We had a great night over in Nottingham at the Bluu bar as part of the Nottingham's GameCity07 festival of gaming. George, Nick and the gang from Rare had done a top job finding the venue and equipping it with over 12 - networked - Xbox 360/Elites for a night of competition gaming -  transforming it into the 'Free Play Lounge'.

As soon as we opened the floor we were packed out! It was splendid to see plenty of girls attending too - gaming is not just for blokes you know! Well done to Clare who won herself an Xbox Elite.

Kit and Jam from the UK Fragdolls also joined us for the event and competed in the Perfect Dark Zero team competition.

Shout outs to the three amigos (you know who you are!), Trent Uni Computing Society and the Paladin thief catchers of Derby University!

 
Congratulations to the Microsoft UK Cross Channel Charity swim team. Six brave individuals from Microsoft UK had been training hard for a cross channel swim (Dover to Calais) to raise money for the Thames Valley and Chiltern Air Ambulance Trust.

Well, while I was sleeping in Seattle the intrepid team have successfully completed the swim!

The channel is approx. 18 nautical miles wide but with the swimmers having to go with the current the actual distance swam will be longer. If you look at the map I don't think they could have made it much longer!!

The swimmers were tracked in real-time using a solution by ALPHA MICRO Systems who stepped up to support the team. You can review the team's swim at http://www.amslivetrac.com/ Using Microsoft Virtual Earth to display the action, the Alpha Micro solution accurately captured the time and geographic data plus photos which were delivered to flickr.

Well done to the team and to Alpha Micro Systems for their support. If you haven't yet pledged support for these amazing people, now is the time to do so!

Are you watching the DARPA Grand Challenge progress? If not you should be. This is the cutting edge of autonomous vehicle development. There are plenty of exotic tools and technologies coming into play - although more off the shelf parts are now available compared to the first 2004 Grand Challenge when teams had to fabricate so much more.

The DARPA Grand Challenge has been getting tougher and tougher each year. In 2004 it was completing a 142 mile desert course, 2005, a 132 mile desert course in under 10 hours. In 2007 the autonomous vehicles must now demonstrate that they can drive in the urban environment, integrating with the flow of traffic and avoiding obstacles.

There are many really cool things about the Princeton University Urban Challenge Team, not only have they made it as one of the 36 semi-final teams, not only are they all undergraduates, but they are also using Microsoft Robots Studio as their development and execution platform.

Running across their five dual-core servers, 25 MSRS services are controlling the vehicles sensors, actuators and decision logic. This is the largest public demonstration of the MSRS platform I have seen and demonstrates the awesome potential of MSRS which spans Lego robots to autonomous vehicles leading R&D.

The team have a great website here with two videos of their most recent run.

The challenge semi-final - called the Urban Challenge National Qualification Event (NQE) - takes place at Victorville, California on the 26-31 October 2007.

I'm certainly supporting these guys and will be watching them compete in October. Go Princeton!

My On10 blog is getting a bit rusty so I thought I'd better tell you want I did this weekend. I yomped 52 miles. 'Yomped'? Yeah, British Army term for walking over difficult terrain or with a heavy load. Ok so, the terrain I walked wasn't that difficult and I was only carrying a day pack - but I did cover 52 miles in two days walking for 19 hours in total.

Why? To raise money for a local pre-school.

Why is this relevant to a tech site? Because I wrote a nice little app for my Windows Mobile 6 Smart phone that automated the taking of pictures, geo-tagging them from Bluetooth GPS, posted them to my site and displayed them using Virtual Earth on my blog.

The app worked well, the GPRS/EDGE service worked just as well, and the GPS near perfectly.  Shame the phone batteries weren't made for the task. I had to manually activate the Phone's GPS comms in the end because keeping the Bluetooth channel open sucked the batteries almost dry in the first 4 hours, and my solar powered Free Loader just couldn't source enough power to recharge my phone.

But, the people at home could watch my progress on my site, and I have a great record of my walk.

We're also on route to raise nearly £4000 for the local pre-school, which is well worth my sore and swollen feet.