Fred.....

When I said personal crap... I meant personal crap here at home. We own two other homes that we rent out. One of them is rented to my wife's nephew. He and his wife lost custody of their three children and we took them in to keep them from going to a foster home. We have been raising them for several years now. I have a twenty year old daughter of my own. So this is like starting all over again.

Her nephew is thirty (+) years old and has never had a job. His wife worked two jobs... he spent the money. His wife finally left him and he has not paid the rent for the last six months. We are in the process of kicking him out. He has refused to move. The Sheriff will be escorting him out on Tuesday.

He and his younger brother have been the cause of countless police arrivals and violent arguments. I'm sick of it.

To much drama here at home and at work! Its hard for me to focus on building my robot. Sometimes just want to give up.

Sorry...to vent like that..let's get back to talking robots before I go nuts.

Oh i thought you meant the crap on this posting about arguing,i stop mine

I love your idea about pololu beacon it looks very good,one item good is that the camera can be used for faces and objects ,and common easy sensors is used for navigation,

plus the camera will be hard to find the homebase in a large room ,cant do 360 deg

on the pololu beacon design if you read the info it updates the info very fast

BUT then on using camera to find GLYPHS are looking at a little cost,pexiglass,lights and then make the image ,it may be cheaper a little

SO like any design there are good points and bad points

I can understand drama at home. My mother is a control freak who starts crap to control everyone and my brother is a drama queen. My dads normally at work, and is away for months at a time. So yeah, I know what you mean, if you need someone to vent on, by all means Email me.

You know, there is a RC copter with an installed camera on it for 50 bucks. This was my original idea, to have a flying robot scan the house, and this would also help other robots. I pitched this idea to Rick already and he said that it would be possible, but there would be a lot of programming to go into it, correct me if I said something that wasn't to what you told me. I know the Drone is EZ-B interfaced, but that's quite the sum of cash.

ERREUL do you have a link to that RC copter i am a ROBOHOLIC i buy a lot of robots and circuits

Actually I do, let me do some digging.

Okay, if you go on YouTube, and go to a channel called RCManiaDotCom (It will be under channels search, maybe different spelling.) And I'm sure you'll be happy.

As Erreul mentioned, mapping the room via a "flying robot" and camera was touched on but it would require more work than I personally would think is justifiable.

You could always use "other software" which is not compatible with ARC, there are solutions out there, the Kinect scene have done some cool stuff for 3d mapping using a ground based robot to drive around, collect the data and import it all in to a 3D software package.

But for a system like that to work the two software applications (the "other" software and ARC) would need to talk to each other. ARC to send movement data to the map and the map to say "hold on a minute, there's something there, stop and adjust your course".

The other issue with that method is the map would need constantly updating if you live in a "dynamic house" like most of us do.

Also, with regards to the Kinect that was mentioned the main issue there is the size, weight and power consumption of it, plus the cost, plus the major issue of a lack of video drivers for Windows 7 (for just normal video, the SDK is fine but using as a camera... well, mine is not recognised as a video device). Surely there are better options than the Kinect?