Most startups fail. Red9 was one of those, and this is that story.
I want to share a story about three years of my life. Three years trying to create something where there was nothing before, from the ground up, and with a small team of enthusiastic and passionate people. We set out to quantify the athlete and help them perform better. By the end, we realized that our approach was ineffective, and we could not create the company that we wanted.
If you’re a heavy user of OpenSCAD then you’ll eventually get to the point where you have folders full of .scad files, with no idea what they are. Here’s how to make a thumbnailer that will automatically generate a preview image that will display .scad files in Nautilus.
Over the past 6 months I’ve been working on developing an open source robotic sailboat called Pilothouse.
The goal of Pilothouse is to make an open source robotic sailboat that can autonomously navigate and sail itself long distances, and to prove that this can be done using the latest web technology: Node.js.
Pilothouse has a number of awesome features, including:
Robotic sailing, with 100% all natural renewable energy.
WiFi based monitoring with remote GUI.
Full Ubuntu Linux environment onboard.
Advanced sensors, including the latest GPS and MEMS.
Potential for expansion into a fully autonomous ocean going science vessel.
At this time, this project is just starting to get into autonomous control. Here’s the first sail, with autonomous sail control and manual RC rudder.
As part of the Pilothouse project the base station displays all relevant boat state information, sent over WiFi.
The boat transmits the current state over WiFi, which is received by a long range USB WiFi antenna on the laptop. No software besides a web browser is needed.
This project was inspired by my volunteer work with Diane at RoboSail, an awesome project to teach kids programming through robotic sailboats.
