Here’s a good rule of thumb: “Don’t update your firmware five minutes before you’re going to fly an autonomous robot ten feet away from a former Vice President of the United States.”
That was one of the afterthoughts of [Chris Anderson] after presenting his Arduino controlled blimp at TED. (I might have to squeeze TED into my con schedule next year.) The project itself is somewhat documented here, with some hi-res photos, parts list, and some firmware. Apparently the blimp was overcome by the A/C in the auditorium, but I still dig it.
8 thoughts on “Arduino Blimp”
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That’s a shame that the AC had to go and ruin it in front of all those high-caliber individuals. Ah well, such is life, I suppose. [philosophical babbling removed]
It looks like a cool blimp, though, even if it did get blown away.
you don’t casually squeeze ted into your schedule unless you have six thousand dollars to spare.
i thought ted was invite only.
I haven’t seriously checked into attending TED, but I like to think that I can usually pull things off if I really want to.
“former” and “vice” kind of make him less important than a flying robot.. my $0.02 though..
You should rename this site the “Arduino/CNC blog”
#6 –
teebs, I think thats MAKE… Lately, hackaday has been my main refuge from arduino project centric MAKE.
There are very few microcontroller projects on MAKE at all these days, but when there is an occasional project, it is either a Arduino project, or accompanied by a comment saying “gee, this would be even more awesome with a arduino”. Given the position of the arduino on the microcontroller food-chain, isn’t that like saying everything is awesome-er in Java?
I was so happy to read in the comments of one post that my fellow geeks felt the same way. Yes, Arduino is great if you absolutely can’t be bothered to spend a day learning to program a real micro, but doesn’t that nullify any past or future-potential geek credentials??
This is in no way a rant against this project, or hackaday for posting it. There is obviously a bunch of work that went into this project besides some Arduino sample code.
Yikes… I enclosed that in /arduino rant tags, but they got eaten…..