Its just great to have a proper camera again. My whole outlook on life is altogether more interested, arty and observant.

Hi all,

 

Welcome to my Windows Live space

 

Just for fun I'll be keeping you up to date with my latest hobby project - my household robot. Built on a PC-914 PC-bot by White Box Robotics (WBR) it is going to be the coolest technology addition to my house since my Windows Media Centre and my Westwood ride-on lawn tractor!

 

I'm still waiting for WBR to deliver my PC-bot, I'm in the first batch ever and this special pioneer batch being the first is taking a little while to ship (like over a year late now - but keep the faith!!! it's going to be cool).

 

I'm going to get Windows Vista running on it just so the media centre functionality is available to me. Some of the cool things I want to do with my robot is enable it to respond to questions like - 'When is Dr Who repeated?' and 'Is there a Grand Designs on tonight?'. All the voice recognition and the speech synthesis is easy peasy because of the .Net framework 3.0 including new class libraries of functionality - so it could not be any easier or any more accessbile - so COOL!

 

I'll also be using Microsoft's Robotics Studio to build out the basic command and control system for the robot.

 

And yes you guess right - I work for Microsoft and I think Microsoft is so cool! Not perfect - but oh so cool!

 

so, if you're interested in seeing how I get on, stay connected to this blog. I'll be updating it as soon as my PC-Bot arrives.