BUG Community

The Challenge: Use BUG in a meaningful way... today  The Proposal: Make BUG a wireless music server everyone can collaboratively add music to, create playlists with, and use.  First: We white board the idea, add in possible functionality, then sketch the concept. Ideas: Use Jack Server BUGmpd connect to JACK Hook up the Traffic Light in a meaningful way Bot Bundle “Gong” Functionality   So now we have a quick outline of what we want...

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When we first started working on getting Android on BUG with Tarent last year, my right brain was happy and excited.  I love learning new things.  And after all, Android is a fun, creative new platform for application development.  But my left brain had some doubts.  How will BMI and other unique hardware BUG features work?  What about our existing APIs and applications?  How can we maintain two seperate software platforms?But recently my left brain has...

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BUGduino prototypes have arrived at our office! Behold all its prototypable glory: When our most excellent EE, Dave Riess, started at Bug he was looking for an easier way to drive motors through the BUGbase. Driving motors with BUG took an additional microcontroller, such as an Arduino strapped to a breadboard and ziptied to a BUG for handling Pulse Width Modulation (PWM). With some help from the community members who use both Arduino and BUG,...

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Cliff Eddens, of Cornell Medical Center, and Krystoff and Matt of Medtronic taught an incredible course on BIOelectricity in the Test Kitchen.  Above Peter Semmelhack, CEO at BUG, made his own heart rate motitor with a few chips on a breadboard and wired himself up.  Peter is becoming an old hat at making heart rate monitors - he's also made one with BUG. Thanks to Htink for organizing the event!The board layout:Our two fearless engineers!...

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 We're working some spicy new features for our next release of BUG software.  To lessen the burden on our overworked QA team, we have been building a test rig that let's connect 4 BUGs up to a master BUG.  With serial I/O, hardware reset, and some modified SAMTEC cables to allow for module removal, most software test scenarios can be modeled.  The BUGs are controlled over GPIOs and serial exposed on the Von Hippel module. ...

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Here's some photos from recent classes in the Test Kitchen. Many designs were made with conductive thread and LEDs at the soft circuits class.We had a sucessful Linux Install Fest, it was exciting to see so many people installing Linux!  About 20 people installed different distros of Linux and most of them first time Linux users.There was also an impromptu BUG lesson, as some instructors of FIRST robotics brought their BUG to play with:MAKE:NYC hosted...

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We get lots of bubble wrap in with our shipments here at Bug Labs and yesterday when we realized we had a metric-ridiculous-ton of bubble wrap we considered some options.  Throwing it in the garbage seemed wasteful and very bad for the earth, it's not recyclable, but it is indeed reusable.  We called up the Makerbot boys and they'll be taking the bubble wrap off our hands and reusing it for their shipping. A win...

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Thanks to all who came to the Soft Circuits class and Urban Farming classes!

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We have new BUGnet updates that include quite handy tools for developers.  Code Search http://buglabs.net/codesearch This allows you to search against public BUG apps and browse projects in your browser. We're using Xapian search engine and acts_as_xapian Rails plugin. On top of that we added lots of client-side goodness to make your browsing experience more pleasant. Xapian supports basic search operators and we added custom ones like user and file. Are you curious how jconnolly...

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Now that R1.4 has finally left the roost, I'd like to thank two community contributers that really helped this release shine; Guillaume Legris and Chris Wade.Guillaume's work in MidPath is used in the BUG Audio module to provide player functionality in Java and OSGi applications.  Some work was required to adapt the library to our hardware and PhoneME.  Overall we are happy with the MidPath sound API and are glad that such a project exists! ...

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