Syntrino Robot Controller

While Syntro is a truly general purpose infrastructure, it is actually ideally suited to robotics, both teleoperated and autonomous, especially where it is necessary to coordinate the actions of multiple robots with other systems. To encourage its use for robotic applications, we are developing some examples to show it can be used. The screen shot is from the SyntrinoRobotController app. Using this app, any Arduino/Syntrino based robot with a camera can be controlled from a remote PC running Windows, Linux or Mac OS. The robot being controlled is the SyntrinoBot, a simple test robot but one that is actually very fast and fun to drive! More details of the actual hardware and a video are here.

Announcing Syntrino: Syntro + Arduino

There’s no question that the Arduino has to be the most popular platform for all kinds of small projects in very diverse fields. It’s low-cost and easy to use and so accessible for a large number of people. Once enabled with Ethernet (either with a shield or with an onboard Ethernet interface), the Arduino becomes a great way to connect all kinds of “things” to a network. Given the ubiquitous nature of the Arduino and the ubiquitous computing capabilities of the Syntro Lightweight Compute Cloud, it’s only natural that we’d want to provide support for the Arduino and make it really easy to integrate with a Syntro cloud. We are calling this software Syntrino.

We’re hoping to have Syntrino as part of the first open source release of Syntro. It will include the SyntrinoLib library that will handle all of the Syntro-related networking and present an easy to use API to the top level sketch. In addition, there’ll be a demo application to show just how easy it is to write sketches that can leverage the power of a Syntro cloud.

Syntro Pipeline Stream Filter Demonstration

One of the really cool features of Syntro is that it’s possible to pick up a stream from a Syntro cloud, do some fancy processing on it and then make it available to other Syntro apps. The screen shot shows this in action. An app called SyntroVideoFilter is picking up a couple of video streams, performing a Canny edge detect function on both and then passing the results back as two new video streams. The viewer displays the raw and processed streams side by side. In a real application, SyntroStore could be storing any or all of these video streams for later review via the SyntroCFS Cloud File Storage system. The very nice thing is that, even with OpenCV code, there are only about 40 lines of code that had to be written for the client class.

Syntro Working on Mac OS X

The screenshot shows SyntroControl running on an iMac with Mac OS X 10.7. Thanks to Qt, getting it running on the iMac was pretty painless! The remaining apps will follow very quickly now. This will bring Mac OS X up to a fully supported platform along with Linux (currently being tested on Ubuntu) and Windows.