Fedora + soccer = Ronaldo-esque technique

[Jeff Spaleta]

2008/5/22 Paul W. Frields <stickster at gmail.com>:
> Awesome, the Fedora soccer-playing robots are picking up lots of steam!
> Matt Asay is a guy who clearly *gets it* -- notice he points out how any
> "customization" work done by the team, in the form of additional
> software packages they found upstream, they contributed back into
> Fedora.  And thanks to our consistent policy of working with upstream,
> and problems we find or fix can be reported back upstream as well for
> the entire FOSS community.  Now THAT'S teamwork!


Robotics is generally going to be a HUGE  PR win for us.  Its simply
super sexy....its science-fiction meets reality.

With that in mind, I've tasked myself with trying to get the Lego
Mindstorm NXT related open source stuff into our distro so we can be
an open development platform for educators working with the Mindstorm
platform. FYI, US First is moving to Mindstorms based platform for its
Tech Challenge competition. If we can get a Mindstorms developmetn
environment out the door that works with the new 'kit' we have an
excellent talking about with middle and high school educators who are
doing robotics in a classroom setting..educators who will be out in
front in terms of grokking technology...people who could learn to
appreciate our message and then go on to preach it in their workplace.

Here's the problem... like usually..I could easily have misjudged my
ability to get this done on my own. Please, as you talk to people
about this article... and they express any interest in robotics at
all.. please bring up the Robotics SIG... and do mention the fact that
its not just the very specialized robotics we are aiming for.  We do
have the ability to get support for the Lego Mindstorm system. I'm
trying to get the open nxt tools into the distro. If the people you
talk to area Mindstorm NXT owners/fanatics and have done any of the
advanced Mindstorms programming in NXC or even the proprietary robotc,
they are potential contributors who are going to do a hell of a lot
better job than me in the long run at maintaining this stuff.

-jef