Spock wont be worked on in a while. I will be focusing on getting a few products to market by November of 2016.
I had a meeting with my investing partner last friday. He is willing to back the projects and has offered a very considerable amount of money to do so. His father owns a very large company in india who already has contracts with Chinese manufacturing houses and India based support firms. We will leverage this to help us get the ball rolling when we start production and after the products get to market. I should have funding for a prototype by the end of the week.
An artist friend, who I met because of EZ-AI is working on the concept artwork. I thank him deeply for his willingness to do the artwork as I can't draw for anything. Once complete I will pass this on to the mechanical engineer (a friend of my wifes). I will use his equipment that he has available to him (6 axis CNC, Really advanced CAD tools, fluid flow calculation software for Injection mold modeling, resistance calculating software based on the model and weight, Electrical engineering software for calculating current flow and resistance of electronics and extremely high end skills at product design and documentation necessary for taking a product to market). He works for a major company who makes a lot of industrial equipment so his expertise will be very valuable. He will make the 3D models and CAD drawings of every component from the artwork provided and from the list of items that I have chosen for this product. He also has the pull of the large company he works for to get CAD drawings and detailed schematics for everything that I will be using. This will help a huge deal.
The goal is to get the prototypes complete by December of this year, and get the parts being manufactured and ready for assembly by July. From there, we will hire in people to build the final products. The nice thing is that I don't have to rely on a kickstarter to get things going. Pieces are falling into place and it is very exciting.
My son will be finished with College in December of this year. He will be helping me to write the software for the robot through the next November to fine tune the software for release. There are quite a few things that are going to be added, which will eventually find their way into EZ-AI.
I have some questions out to other people/companies about using their products with my products. This will help to determine which way I take some things. Voice recognition will be a very important part of this project. I will be using a tablet or really light weight computers. Because of this, voice processing would be nice if it were done off the computer and this is where Watson or DNS Cloud will be a huge help. It is really amazing all of the tools that are available to make insane products now. It will only get better from here.
I will be making a trip to EZ-Robot in August or September. I will present the products concepts to them for a couple of reasons. DJ, I wont be asking for money so no worries there
. I want to build a business relationship with them because the products will be using the EZ-B V4 controllers and some other components. It is a good idea to share this with EZ-Robot because their products are driving mine, and for them to understand what I am doing is very important to me. I am not saying that this product would drive them in any direction, only that it is good for them to understand what someone is doing besides what can be stated on a public forum. Richard, I will let you know when I will be at EZ-Robot. I would love to meet you and anyone else on this community in the real world.
With all of that, poor Spock is going to take a break from development. Who knows, by the time I get back to him, they may have legs out for him.
I will be getting that Ultimaker 2 that I have been talking about shortly and will be able to tell if it lives up to the hype or not. I will be working on this project a lot in my spare time, so I wont be hanging out in the community as much. I will be dropping in from time to time to see what's going on with everyone else's projects. I always enjoy reading about other people's ideas.
Boris, with the USB board we can just plug and go (using their software) and we would instantly see how good the device is. Doing it the UART way means we have to build the interface first before we can evaluate anything. I am happy to pay for the USB (evaluation board) if we can find one in stock anywhere.
Tony
It depends on if you are going to be buying one or buying 1000. If you are buying one to use in a single project, I would say that there would be much less head scratching with the expensive board. It should be pretty easy to write some code in C# or some other PC based dev language to get the data from the usb.
If you are marketing a product like Tony and I are, it is much better to get the cheaper one and figure out how to make it work correctly with our particular devices.
Ok,
@david: so my problem is i can´t programmed in C#. I only can use stuff from other people.... ;-(
@toymaker: i see in mouser.de there are 8 in stock (with Converter Board)
Boris
PS: And i see 3 Board (without Converter) sold in the last hour ;-)
who bought them ;-)
Boris, It looks like there is a reason to learn a new and very valuable skill
I don't know if their software will do much more than display the information from the board. I think that you will need to either wait until someone has interfaced with it for the EZ-B, Arduino or PIC and see if they will be willing to share what they have done. I wont know which path I will go down until I get the board in my hands and have some time to play with it.
Boris, they have 8 on order which (I think) means they have no stock and are awaiting for them to come in. The UART boards are in stock though.
Tony
Hi Tony,
anything news from the B5T HVC Board.
Do you get one?
Boris
I have the production board and the documents necessary to write something to communicate to it. Tony had me pickup a dev board also. It looks like it is about 2 weeks out from delivery. We will be able to see how it works with this board to see if it is worth messing with or not. I dont want to plug up the prod board until the proof from the dev board is complete. After it has been proven that it is worth the work, I will start writing.
My project will be dependant on Windows 10 which is supposed to start releasing tomorrow. I haven't written any code or modified any code yet because of this.
Hi Dave!
Nice to hear from you again!
Yeahh Windows 10 comes in Germany tomorrow @ 6:00 in the morning.
So only 10 hours waiting.
I will install the new Version to my InMoov Notebook. I hope it will be better in Speech Reco.
I hope you are able to find out a connection between this Board and EZB4
And i hope also the board is usefull, because the features for face reco are really cool.
The Story with DNS, i think so, we can put on ice.
Maybe the Win 10 will solve the problem.
Boris