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Water Basketball Robot
tisaak writes "Second-year Mechanical Engineering students of the ETH Zurich are required to participate in the so-called "Innovation Project". A subject is assigned each year and 12 teams battle it out to develop a complete product. This year's subject was "Sport and rehabilitation" and "Cleaning". One of the teams managed to build a floating, ball-throwing kind of robot. I think the whole idea is funny and the fact that it has a lot of cables and a processor in it should appeal to the Slashdot public :-) The electronics platform used is called C-Control and is used to control the sensors, the motor and the LCD-Display. The implementation of the game program is nice, considering it is written in a subset of BASIC."
http://www.floyd.ethz.ch/img/swimtest/spiel4_small .png
That image looks like some kind of ritual, is it some kind of new robot religion? It seems like there is not much time left until the robots will rule.
It's starting to seem common to build a robot. On the other hadn, they used BASIC. How could anyone chose the glorious language of basic over something more confusing, and cluttered as C++, or possibly java?
I don't know why, but I read the headline as White Basketball Robot, and all I thought was, "That's silly... everyone knows White Robots Can't Jump."
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
Innovation projects sound like a pretty good idea. Too many science courses, including comp-sci, are excessively theory-oriented. Innovation is the lifeblood of science, not the ability to recite a text-book.
Every course should have something along these lines.
((lambda x ((x))) (lambda x ((x))))
With a processor and a bunch of cables and /. would love it, as long as it ran Linux.
If it ran Windows, they would just love to make fun of it.
It sure got me wet.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Use a variation of the old banana throwing game to get the robot to throw the ball? Man I wish I could remember the name of that game right now. Couldn't get enough of it when I first got my computer ages ago.
what is a subset of BASIC ? "BAS" or "SIC" ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
That's incorrect:
John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz invented BASIC in 1964 for use at Dartmouth College. They made it freely available to everyone who wanted to learn how to program computers. It soon became a world standard. -TrueBasic.com
You're probably thinking of this:
In 1973, Gates entered Harvard University as a freshman, where he lived down the hall from Steve Ballmer, now Microsoft's chief executive officer. While at Harvard, Gates developed a version of the programming language BASIC for the first microcomputer - the MITS Altair. -http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/bio.asp
Bored with karma, be a fan/freak
And I, for one, welcome our new robotic masters.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
the fact that it has a lot of cables and a processor in it should appeal to the Slashdot public
What do you think we are, nerds or something?
The coolest voice ever.
If you were looking for the lowest power microcontroller board available, this would be in the running. I guess it was inexpensive -- always a plus for student projects. (My first computer in 1979 could probably thrash this good, except in size.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
the machines will attack us when we won't allow their basketball team in our olympics. Neo (Wooden Plank, not Reeves) will be our only hope!
Just goes to show what people can do when they are not busy killing each other and fighting over who owns what.
>One of the teams managed to build a floating, ball-throwing kind of robot...it should appeal to the Slashdot public :-)
/. crowd, I get this image of a floating robot that can hurl a pumpkin a mile.
From previous stories that have appealed to the
They choose basic because that is probably the only language that processor can be programmed in.
You don't program such chips with high-level languages like C & C++. Typically you only use assembly language or other machine-level codes.
The basic-like language (not really a subset, btw) was just provided as a convenience to the programmers.
-D
One of the teams managed to build a floating, ball-throwing kind of robot
I imagine they only use floating point calculations
Table-ized A.I.
Not even close.. he helped(?) write a version for the Altair.. but by no means invented it..
Not a bad feat back then, but still, dont over do the credit..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I wonder how well it dribbles? And how good is its dunk shot?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.