Wow, it’s a good time to be a robot:

[William Cox]‘s coverage of RoboNexus 2005 continues over at GoRobotics.net. He’s been uploading a ton of video from the show. The Roomba hacking kit that was supposed to be released in July will hopefully be out next month. Of note is that it will include an AVR microcontroller dongle that will plug into the serial port. The dongle will have a USB interface for reprogramming. I hope they give full specs so you can plug whatever controller you want into the serial port.

[Nano2x] and Team 1039 (FIRST Robotics) are currently representing at Robothon in Seattle. They’ll be updating their website as the weekend progresses.

The DARPA Grand Challenge 2005 continues. As we write this three vehicles have already completed the 132 mile course. Glad to see things are going better than last year.

IBM developerWorks has had a great series of articles on wireless robotics: one, two, and three. [Richard]

Restoring Robby the robot [J. Peterson]

Here are some links for our human readers:

[Mikey Sklar] replaced the pockets in his jeans with conductive fabric to block RFID reading. He’s got a video of the process on his site. This project was made for a workshop at Swap-O-Ramma-Ramma in New York tomorrow. Which is probably the easiest way to get your hands on some fabric without a special order.

[benito] pointed out a site dedicated to guerrilla drive-ins. [via]

Place free calls without using up your SkypeOut minutes. [Kenny]

I’m sure you’ve heard that Microsoft is annoyed that it can’t play Sony’s DRM. The Wikipedia article needs expansion.

UPDATE: Sweet, fan mail! Unfortunately, you don’t get to see it in its ALL-CAPS glory.

The tip line