Pinguino

Pin-goo-ee-no, Ping-wee-no, I'm not sure how to pronounce it. But this is a project that been developing since 2008, with the purpose of designing an Arduino that can be built on the cheap by anyone at home. It mostly supports Arduino code, and this is getting improved on. As for other hardware, for the next release they they are working on supporting Zigbee, OTG and CDC, which makes it a hell of a lot easier to plug things in and get them working. Also whats interesting is that they are working on getting Android support, so effectively turning this into an ADK board as well.

What caught my eye though is that the guy who developed it, Jean-Pierre Mandon, is a teacher at the robotic lab at the Aix en Provence School of Art in Southern France. Why an art school needs a robotics lab I'm not yet sure, but initially this project was meant as a tool for his students. This guy might be useful to talk to.

Ultimately, it looks like they are saying this board exists to build more features into the existing Arduino platform, while making it more widely compatible and cheaper to make. I think its worth giving this a look at, at least after the next version.

More info and an interesting interview at MAKE and the original site here.

Open Source Learning

I have always had an interested in the Open Source movement, including things like Creative Commons and the public domain. In my opinion, knowledge and culture should be free and accessible to everyone. It is very damaging to restrict these fundamental elements of our society from people - it is the dissemination of culture and knowledge through the ages which makes us the people we are today.

So this video below (been watching a lot today) is interesting as it talks about an Open Source Learning initiative. In it, Richard Baraniuk talks through Connexions, an online, open source education system which is written collaboratively; edited, mixed and built upon by many people. It could be described as a wikipedia for teaching, but controlled more vigorously by trusted and knowledgeable vetters. Below is a pretty diagram of the system from their site.

The idea is to collaboratively combine knowledge from a huge range of subject areas and provide a modular teaching environment. Making it modular makes it easier for information to be added and updated.

Baraniuk describes it like "Allowing books in the library to talk to each other."