Dear Humans,Our home is in danger. The net annual greenhouse gas emissions is 55 Gigatons. That is 55,000,000,000,000 Metric Kilograms. Yes, 55 1012 Kg!All these trillions of emissions should be turned down to 0, if we want to avoid catastrophic global warming. This is why TED launched #JoinTheCountDown worldwide movement. The goal is to first identify compelling responses to this challenge. Then, we all should unite to activate the ideas into reality. The video below by Christiana Figueres and Chris Anderson ...

A common misconception is that robots need advanced AI algorithms to have fluid interactions with people. Another myth is that robots need to have some special shape to be engaging.There's actually a better, simpler, and more elegant way! Secrets of Engaging Interactive Robots Guy Hoffman from Cornell University introduced a solution that requires 2 complementary ingredients. They were introduced in his awesome talk at TEDx Jaffa entitled: "Robots with Soul" (see Video 1 below).The first secret comes from acting and ...

I started 3D printing in fall 2016. Overtime, I made many objects. Some are based on my design. But, many others are based on STL files downloaded from some sites such as Thingiverse and MyMiniFactory. Previous Next Previous Next The feature image of this post uses an icon made by Pixelmeetup from www.flaticon.com ...

3D printing allows to make unique cool DIY gifts of all colors. The video below presents a sample of items that I did printed and offered to family and friends. Some are useful, and other are just fun. All are usable and quick to print.You can find more on 3D printed objects that are useful, or just for fun in my 3D printing dedicated section.https://youtu.be/N1xOVoQOtX8 ...

I gave a short presentation at the ESUG 2019 Smalltalk conference that was held this year in Cologne, Germany. In this talk, I made a summary of main PharoJS changes and improvements done during the last 12 months. This includes a more robust test framework to run and test Javascript  code generated from Pharo code. When running such tests, PharoJS does open a web browser, and control the execution of the JS code as shown in the video below. You ...

My friend Eric and I both noticed that on each shower, we have to wait few minutes until water is hot enough. During all this time water is pouring directly to the drain. We agreed that we need to do something about it.Before taking action, I thought that I need first to measure how much water is actually wasted by my family (4 people). So, I did a little experiment presented in the video below. The process is simple ...

Johann Dichtl successfully defended his PhD, that I've co-supervised with Luc Fabresse and Guillaume Lozenguez. The defense took place this tuesday July 2nd, 2019 morning. The jury members were: Prof. Ouiddad Labbani from Université de Limoges, Dr. Mikal Ziane, HdR, from Université Paris Descartes, and Dr. Laetitia Matignon from Université Claude Bernard, Lyon 1.Title"On 2D SLAM for Large Indoor Spaces: A Polygon-based Solution"SummaryIndoor SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) and exploration are important topics in robotics. Most solutions today work with ...

One of my motivations to 3D printing is home repair and improvement. In this small project, I decided to use polypanels to make a flexible, yet robust hook for a sponge holder in my kitchen. Starting from polypanel snaps provided freely available online (Thanks Devin). STL design files are freely available on my thingiverse page ...

Lightweight Observer is an alternative to Announcement, the default Pharo  implementation of the Observer Design Pattern. I started developing Lightweight Observer because I needed a small framework, with an implementation that can be easily converted to Javascript using PharoJS. I also wanted to be straight forward to use. I had in mind beginners such as my students who often struggle when faced with many concepts and entities. This is why by default, the Lightweight Observer generates code behind the scene ...

In this selection of simple week-end projects, we target our furry friends. We provide a selection of three cool DIY projects using Arduino boards. Cats will love these electronic toys. They will cost you only few bucks, for hours of fun and laughter with your pet. Checkout the videos. They are hilarious!The first project is basically a ball hide and seek game. You hide some balls around and the cat has to go fetch them (see Video 1). Once a ...