Jan
23

The Three Laws

Author: cglusky

Given our current focus on The Flying Thing and the recent OpEd by Peter Singer over at NYT , I thought it important to note an internal ethical debate we have had around the shop.  In short, we are adopting the Three Laws as part of our values statement.  I prefer not to get into a political debate about the use of suAS/drones in combat, so let's just say we do not support any use of our technology (drones or otherwise) that violates the Three Laws: 

Sep
18

Sustainable Living Fair 2011

Author: cglusky

Metanomy is out at the Sustainable Living Fair for the third year in a row.  We have had another good year educating people about our projects.  We also are providing wifi internet access for all interested vendors this year – We have seen 20 guests at one time on the network.  That's about 30 less than what we had guessed, but it's still been another great learning experience.  Thank you to those vendors who have donated to make sure we can continue to provide this service to the fair.  We are still way short of covering our costs for the fair so please give till i

Sep
2

SLF WiFi Service

Author: cglusky

The Sustainable Living Fair is Sept 17-18 this year at Legacy Park in Fort Collins.  Once again Metanomy will be there with our educational booth, as well as providing WiFi service to Fair vendors.  The really exciting part this year is we are finally able to expand our service to all vendors who wish to use our WiFi network.

Apr
18

Flying Thing: New Project and Team Member

Author: cglusky

Metanomy is proud to announce that we will be sponsoring a new and exciting project:  Moses is in Kenya developing a small unmanned system (sUAS) project using open source software and commodity components to support wildlife monitoring.  He is currently doing a great job of designing the project so it makes sense in his context.  We will be supporting him with a bit of hardware, and other bits that can be hard to find in Kenya.  He will be blogging about his experiences here as the project progresses, and here is his inspiring post over at DIYDrones that started it all:

Apr
1

MetaMini in Afghanistan

Author: cglusky

It's been some time since we followed up on the MetaMini, and with all this talk about big government contracts being over-budget, and generally not worth the money, we thought we would check in and see what a few hundred bucks got us.   We gave the MetaMini to one of our good friends, Todd Huffman, back in 2009 so he could take it to Afghanistan to do Good Things.  We never expected the result.

During the 2009 Presidential Election Campaign the MetaMini acted as the SMS server for the Alive in Afghanistan project.

http://aliveinafghanistan.org/

Mar
30

X24 Europe MCopter Aerial Surveys

Author: cglusky

We are making great progress with the MCopter Project and wanted to start posting some of our findings.  We thought that X24 Europe would be a good reason to get some of this info out to those interested.

Info on X24 Europe is here: https://sites.google.com/a/inrelief.org/24/

For our part we decide that we would see how the MCopter would perform given a few simple aerial survey missions:

1) Bridge - take photos and video for infrastructure assessment.  Might also be used as map overlays for people planning routes in/out of impacted areas.

Mar
30

MCopter - Safety First

Author: cglusky

"Safety First" - Yeah right.  If safety was first we wouldn't get much done.  Instead, I would remind you that safety is a byproduct of professionalism.  Put simply, smart is safe.  There are many things about the MCopter Project that are potentially dangerous; here are a few:

1) 12" props spinning at over 6000RPM results in essentially a flying Cuisinart.

2) It weighs five pounds and can fall from the sky without warning if it has a systems failure.

Mar
29

BeakGeek Update and Mini RoadMap

Author: cglusky

BeakGeek was one of our first big projects here at Metanomy - And we are still working on it - We did get a bit sidetracked with the BP Oil Spill and have since archived that site and started back down the original path we had in mind for the project.

Sep
18

Live from the 2010 Sustainable Living Fair

Author: cglusky

OK, I am not sure blogging from the middle of a grassy field is really "Live" but it sounds cool. We are out with the M2N2 supporting the Rocky Mountain Sustainable Living Association' Sustainable Living Fair again this year. We have about eight computers on our network and are supplying some shared cellular based internet so folks can show web sites etc from their booths.

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