BUG Community

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!...

read more

Put them together and what do you get?  A web-controllable office cam.  Try it out for yourself (updated 12/12/2008, 7:32PM):go to http://motherbug1.buglabs.net/Servo and the UI is pretty straight forwardSee?  This was a great collaborative and creative effort on the part of myself, misaacs, and bballantine.  How it works is that there is a BUG App containing a Java Servlet that handles the request at http://motherbug1..../Servo.  The parameter to the servlet is rounded to an integer...

read more

Ilan Moyer stopped by the Test Kitchen for a visit.  With the CAD files he downloaded from BUG he was able to fabricate a base for wheels.  The wheels use DC motors and a motor driver.  They are programmable over serial, but we were trying to get the data through the Samtec connector that day. A truely awesome invention!

read more

If you google for "snails in the kitchen", you'll probably find some recipes for various dishes I'm not likely to eat.  That and tips on how to keep slugs out of your cupboards.At Bug Labs, we don't necessarily think that snails in the kitchen are such a bad thing... depending on the context, of course.Let me clarify:  We recently had a little fun and killed a few minutes building a line tracing robotic snail in...

read more

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,...

read more

The Linux system that runs on the BUG is a derivative of OpenEmbedded.  OpenEmbedded is like BUG Linux's big pappa.  Like all open source projects, OpenEmbedded relies on a community of developers and enthusiasts to move the project forward.  We, of course, through our use of OpenEmbedded, the open source drivers and software we write, our work with open source java on the arm, OSGi, etc. have tried to be good samaritans in the open...

read more

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...

read more

Hey all, I saw this on Gizmodo and think it might be an interesting development direction for the BUG - modules that might not require a constant presence on the BUG can be wirelessly connected - not that huge of a leap, but it can save space on the base for more modules. This QWERTY card is designed to pair with an LG phone and allow full text input without bogging down the form factor...

read more

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...

read more

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...

read more