Boards galore to feature at Rome exhibition

The CodeBug nano-board is designed to teach young people the fundamentals of programming.  Designed to resemble an insect with six touch sensitive legs and interactive switches as ears, CodeBug distinguishes itself from other pocket-sized computers through its fun appearance, and easy to use playful user-interface. Thomas Macpherson-Pope, one of the creators of the CodeBug, will be on the stand to demonstrate the uses of the board.

The BeagleBone Black will be demoed on the stand with an innovative Rubiks Cube solver. By replacing the LEGO MINDSTORMS brain with a Beaglebone Black and an EVB cape from Fatcatlab it allows the EV3 Virtual Machine to be run on the higher performance Beaglebone Black platform. The fastest human to solve a Rubiks Cube is Collin Burns in the US with 5.25 seconds. How fast will the BeagleBone Black achieve it?

Facial recognition software is demoed with a Raspberry Pi 2 and MATLAB from MathWorks.  The Raspberry Pi and Pi Camera Board are used to capture and bring images into MATLAB and use functions available in Computer Vision System Toolbox to detect faces.

The Gizmo 2's small size, reasonable power consumption and fast x86_64 processor is a perfect fit for small to moderate size robotics projects that involve large amounts of computation. The demo involves an RC race truck that is powered by a high performance 12 turn brushed DC motor.

Mounted to the hood is a Logitech C920-C USB camera which captures video that is sent in real time to the Gizmo 2. The RC radio system of the car has been replaced with a custom designed control system consisting of the Gizmo 2 running Arch Linux as well as an Arduino Uno.

CadSoft will also be at Maker Faire having recently launched its new Make edition software providing full functionality for commercial use at great value. 

Maker Faire takes place in Rome (October 16-18)