Philip and I attended the Dallas Personal Robotics Group monthly meeting on Saturday.

They started out with a demonstration of the Segway. Yeah, it's a marvel of modern engineering and everything, but wouldn't it have been better if they put it on four wheels? Then you wouldn't need massively complex computation and gyroscopes and whatnot to balance it, and it might actually cost half as much. You might have to use the handbar for throttle then, but you have to use it for steering anyway. At $5K a pop, I just don't think this thing is going to be practical for the general public, though for postal workers or warehouse employees, I can see the utility.

Next they talked about their community warehouse, where club members meeting every Tuesday night to test out robots and do more hands-on stuff. I'd like to actually attend one of these, though the Saturday meeting was still interesting.

Finally, they showed how to hack a hobbyist servo. Most such servos have a range of motion of 180degrees, and they're used for things like controlling the flaps on radio-controlled airplanes. But the robot guy showed us how to crack one open and hack it for a full range of motion, in case we might want to use them for wheel control. I won't be doing this myself anytime soon, but I know who to go to in case I need to.

A large part of the weekend was spent working on our neural net project, discussing symmetry, population genetics, and other stuff. I've registered a domain name for our project website, and hopefully at some point in the near future we'll have something up for people to visit and learn about what we're doing.