Wheels turning again...

Well lookie there. It's been one year exactly to the _day_ since my last post.

I didn't plan that. Really. No, seriously.

I finally tore everything apart about 3-4 months ago. The Lego Interceptor is no more. Figured I'd like to actually use the kit for something. So I sighed and reduced it to it's component bits. Thought I'd never actually rebuild it.

But it's coming back. Sort of.

At last night's BSDG session, I wondered idly (out loud) about doing an NXT session at the next codecamp. You know, a little demo on the mindsqualls api, something nifty for the robot to do. (probably involving computer vision/webcamish things). It was generally agreed upon that it'd be cool.

And we talked about CI. And cruisecontrol.net. And ... and ... lightning struck Mr. Brandsma and he had a vision...

Well, no. Not really. But it could have been. What he actually said was "ooh! Oooh! Do a demo and hook your lego interceptor to the CI build and have it fire randomly at the audience when someone breaks the build!!" Kinda like that orb/lavalamp thing. Only more...interactive.

Awesome idea. (and a real crowd pleaser. Assuming I can get it to fire M&M's or something...)

And then I thought "wait a minute...I can read the rotation values of the motors...what if we did a little Mutt & Jeff demo with two developers checking in code...have the robot in a central location...calibrate it to know where the two sit...and when someone breaks the code it announces it to the world and PELTS THE OFFENDER WITH JELLYBEANS!"

This, I think, is brilliance beyond belief.

Now if we can just build it...