Icaro Project

Icaro Project is an initiative of fellow ambassador Valentin Basel, with the goal of bringing in a manner transparent to the user the basics of programming (iterations, repetition, recursion, if conditional) applied to a physical context such as a robot or automation system.

To archive this goal, Valentin has develop hardware, with the lowest price,  most common electronic components, and easy to find in his country Argentina (the goal is that the hardware can be replicated in other places cheap and easy), with them he has been able to build a robotic arm and a robot controller with a assus eee 4G machine, the idea was to use an OLPC XO computer but since he could not get one on Argentina he use the more like hardware machine he could find.

In the program area he has develop the firmware, c++ interface and python library, so others can expand his project, but to make it easy to use he develop a plugin for TurtleArt, where Icaro module allow any one with no programming skills to interact and start programming the robot.

We have meet Valentin on IRC and have the opportunity to share a couple days with him in Panama, for the FUDCon where his presentation raise laughter and cheers, he come early to the FUDCon and during that time he show his work to the Universidad Tecnologica de Panama (UTP) and Universidad de Panama (UP) and teach the computer club of UTP on how to code and interact with it, code and improve his work, and also give away some of the electronic controller board he bring with him.

Icaro project is now in use as a pilot in two school in Argentina and to make my friend Valentin happy yesterday I was invited to see the start of Project Icaro at a Tecnologica high school in Panama, as pilot program. It was great to see that UTP and UP will work together on this project. We will follow this program to keep everyone on the loop.

Icaro project is hosted on RPMDEV project and initiative of Guillermo Gomez from Venezuela, Fedora Contributors at RPMDEV will package and help on the documentation of project ICARO, so it will be added in Fedora 16.

Thanks Valentin, hope to see you soon.

All hardware designs and software can be found at: http://rpmdev.proyectofedora.org/projects/icaro/wiki

Follow Icaro Project Blog at: http://www.sistema-icaro.blogspot.com/