[Noisebridge-discuss] what could we do with one of these babies..

[Alexander]

Maid bot... http://kottke.org/10/04/the-robot-who-considers-towels

On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 11:56, Jonathan Foote <jtfoote at ieee.org> wrote:
> Right -- not disputing it's a nice piece of hardware, and that their
> software terms are open.
>
> But if you write software for it, they stand to benefit, possibly
> substantially more than you. Not that that's a bad deal for a research
> group or a hackerspace, but sharing or even publicizing your work,
> means publicity and sales for them, as few people could build their
> own, and those who could might not even be able to if the hardware
> design is insufficiently open.
>
> While your time and skills may seem like a fine trade for this nice
> piece of kit, if you have the chops to do something useful with it you
> should realize you have a commodity in demand and understand that you
> are giving it away for someone else's corporate benefit. (If you don't
> think this is the case, how much do you think Willow pays their
> engineers?) Not even saying that's a bad thing, just be aware of cui
> bono.
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 11:12 AM, Andy Isaacson <adi at hexapodia.org> wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 08:26:35AM -0700, Jonathan Foote wrote:
>>> In fact, it's not clear how "open" their hardware platform is (can we
>>> get schematics and part sources at cost?)  so "open" may actually be
>>> an abuse of the term...
>>
>> Well, at least their "ROS" source is BSD licensed according to
>> http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/software/ros-platform
>>
>> Holy christ their design includes a lot of expensive parts.
>> http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/robots/technical-specs
>>
>> Two $3000 Xeon servers, two $5000 laser scanners, four
>> probably-multi-thousand-dollar cameras, no make that five cameras ...
>> and we haven't even gotten to the mechanicals, which I'm completely
>> unqualified to price out.
>>
>> Nice work if you can get it!
>>
>> -andy
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