"It is the family's intention to continue the Surveyor business and Howard's vision. Products are still being built and shipped. Development of new items continues. He was a good friend of many talents."

"Robbie -

Do you have any videos ? I'd love to see the boat in action."

"If you just want to float, there are lots of balloon options. If you want the floater to move around under its own power, you will have a different set of challenges. Figure that 1 cubic meter (35 cu-ft) of helium will lift 1 kilogram (2.2lb)…"

"+1 what Leon said, though it won't be 10 years. Chinese engineers are already demonstrating significant innovation in other industry segments such as telecom and computing. Many engineers who were trained and started their careers in the US are…"

"Gary - probably landing on the runway because it was there. The pilot put the plane down on the center line every time, but the skid plate made a lot of noise."

"It would be cool if you could use HTML 5, though maybe a bit early in the development cycle. We have built some basic robot controller interfaces based on a simple AJAX (Javascript + XML) interface, so the browser acts as the client, and system is…"

"By the way, I tried to download the groundstation code, but their server seems to be down. This requires a git client -
git clone git://pixhawk.ethz.ch/groundstation.git"

"The PicHawk code looks like a great starting point. You should take a close look at their MAVLINK protocol to see whether you might want to support it in ArduPilot. This statement is interesting - "NEWS: MAVLINK will be evolved to be SAE AS-4…"

"My suggestion is to not bother with Python. It's a lot less cross-platform than you should expect, at least in my painful experience of maintaining a Python-based robot control console. QT does look like an interesting choice - there's at least one…"

"Jordi -

You probably already know this, but the issue with the HMC5843 capacitors is ESR, not size. We use the HMC5843 on the SRV-NAV board, and figured out early on that certain capacitors worked while others didn't, but it depended on the…"

"What are you using for a ground plane ? That could be part of the difference between single and double sided boards ?"

"Geoffrey - Very nice. I would love to learn more. We met at the DARPA LANdroids briefing a few years back and I think you have one of our Blackfin board sets."

"Nice to hear the technical details. Their integration of video processing is especially interesting."

"We buy a lot of Matchports and are always on the lookout for lower cost modules with higher throughput (e.g. SPI), so the Redpine module looks interesting. There are USB wifi modules for sub-$10, but they require that you have USB Master or USB OTG…"

"???

That particular video was actually created to pitch the exec producer of a prime-time TV show who wants to incorporate the technology into some story lines, so they were just having fun. The underlying technology is more subtle - they're…"