Building an Affordable Education Robot

A while back I heard about the affordable education robot. I thought it was a very interesting approach and I wanted to build one and see if I could get my daughter interested in it. I tried to buy one but my search for it turned out nothing, so I contacted Justinjustin, who is listed as the contact on the bottom of the page about getting my hands on one. Unfortunately, back then the only way to build one was basically to build it from scratch, but Justinjustin said they were talking to manufacturers and that a kit might be available at some point. However, when I asked, all that was available were the plans and diagrams. Now this was all in line with the philosophy of the project of building an open an affordable robot for education, so it endeared me even more to the project. However, it meant that I would have to print out the PCB and assemble the robot from the very basic components. I was hoping to get around to doing this at some point this year but I think I have too many projects and so something had to give.

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Quartz.Net 3.0

I went poking around the Quartz.Net repository while trying to answer some related questions on StackOverflow. I noticed that there is now a quartznet-3 branch present (although it’s apparently been there for a couple of months). I pulled the branch but I was unable to build it. It was interesting to see that some things have changed, so you should expect to hear more about those in the form of blog posts.

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Running Windows 10 IoT on a Raspberry Pi

I’ve been working with Raspberry Pi hardware for a while now, but mostly using the tools that are more common in the space. That means that my devices have all been running Raspbian as the OS and that the programs I’ve written for them have all been written in Python. Now that the official release of Windows 10 for IoT is out, I thought I’d give it a whirl and talk about my experience.

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Setting up Visual Studio Online and Hipchat Integration

While searching for a way to add TFS integration to Hipchat, I came across a bunch of posts that were not particularly useful. In my particular case, I was looking to integrate Visual Studio Online’s TFS with Hipchat, so using a separate service to manage this integration seemed like unnecessary pain. So, I poked around a little in the Visual Studio Online portal and found that it is indeed quite easy to set this up. Here are the steps I followed, more as a reminder to myself for the next time I want to do this, but hopefully it will help others as well.

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