Ashish Patel

This week Eclipse 3.1 was released and the Eclipse Foundation reached 100 members. The 3.x version stream of Eclipse has been the most popular edition of Eclipse to-date, and in my opinion, it brings a lot of advancements to a universal tooling platform.

For those not aware, I have been working with Eclipse before version 2.0. I started out reporting bugs and developing J2EE applications. Last year I worked on a commercial IBM product from which I was able to being bug reporting and drive requirements to what is now known as TPTP (or Hyades). During my last semester of Computer Engineering, at the University of Alberta, I worked on creating embedded debugging capbilities for the Motorola HC12 family. Recently, I’ve been exploring the Eclipse Rich Client Platform.

I have to start off by clarifying one important thing. When I mention Eclipse to people they only are aware of it as being an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that is used for Java programming. News flash people, yes it’s an IDE, but more importantly its a “universal tools platform“. What does this mean in plain english? For software developers and businesses it provides a foundation or framework for building applications that includes a visual component, such as the standard widget toolkit (SWT). You can build any application using the Eclipse Platform. There have been things from biological sciences applications, news aggregators, e-mail clients, all the way to stock management solutions created using the Eclipse Project.

Some people harp on the fact that its written and executes on Java. However, when you show someone who’s used tradition Java UI’s, EMACS, and/or Visual Studio people are really surprised at the performance of Eclipse. Eclipse uses SWT for its UI rendering, and I believe IBM has done significant work to optimize the UI. So its actually a great thing is that its Java underneath because you can get cross-platform support on any application you create. Now-a-days its important for this since Linux and Apple’s OS are widely popular and available.

What do you need to making your own Eclipse powered application? From a technical standpoint, you need pull the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) and develop your own plugins that provides the business rules and logic for your application. These plugins get placed into the RCP and when the RCP loads your plugins do too.

Anyways, back to the point…Eclipse 3.1 is released. I’ve taken it for a test drive already and found some visual changes (such as icons and splash screens) and numerous bug fixes that were apparent in version 3.0 and 3.0.1. To my knowledge, there isn’t any new major features in this release (as denoted by the 3.1 version number its just patching and minor adjustments for what is to come down the pipe).

The ever so anticipated interview between Team Podbot and MAKE magazine was released today. Its great to see the publicity that the robot got in the past few days, and hey my name was on this article!

Mack D. Male and Dickson Wong – are the two guys that brought the robot to Gnomedex. Andrew Ng and Ashish Patel – the two guys that worked with them on the project in Edmonton, AB, Canada.

This article has some good pictures of the Podbot, even under the hatch. You can see the part of the robot I worked on. Here is a quick synopsis of how it works from a technical stand point:

The on-board tablet pc is a Toshiba Portege M200, and the controller tablet we’re using is a Compaq TC1000. The Podbot has a USB hub inside that connects the webcam, ground effects (neon lights) and the serial connector (that connects to the circuit board for controlling the motors). The two back wheels have a servo motor for each, and are powered by a 6V lead-acid battery. The circuit board is powered by a 5V battery and was built from scratch. The Podbot is controlled over wifi, and the communication protocol we’re using is SOAP messaging implemented by Microsoft’s Web Services Enhancements 2.0. Everything is written in C# and .NET.

You may have heard of some buzz words lately: “Blogging” and “Podcasting”. Although they are simple concepts they can be very addictive

Anyways, my good friends Mack Male and Dickson Wong are going to Gnomedex 5.0 in Seattle this week. The have been working with Podcasting for a while at www.blogosphereradio.com. A few months ago they came up with an idea to make podcasting more mobile! In doing so, they wanted to create a robot to display at the Gnomedex 5.0 conference to help in podcasting and promote some of their software tools.

I worked on the robot with the two of them and Andrew Ng. I build the embedded system, Andrew did the mechanical work, and Mack and Dickson worked on the tablet to tablet software and podcasting tools. Below are some pictures of the robot..yes i’m leaking them! haha No one but the four of us and Tod Maffin (CBC Radio) has seen it. There is a big buzz going on right now on many blogs of people anticipating the release of the robot at the conference…some excited…some skeptical.

The robot in my words is HOT! It handles like an RC car but has the capabilities to podcast over a wireless network! (I’m such a geek). Its got ground effects and metallic trims (…it looks like we took it to China town and supped it up)!

The Podbot has been getting quite a bit of publicity lately at Gnomedex 5.0. Check out the related links below for articles.