What an awesome, incredibly researched article and a noble mission. Inspirational stuff.
I am starting to use the programming "classes" I have had sitting on some site for years now that I have spare time, perhaps I can one day put such knowledge to good use.
I have always wanted to try my hand at building robots but just so that I could battle them. ( ._.)
@lauralemons
You might be surprised just how approachable robotics can be. The toughest thing is the difficulty that the Compute Cartridge is designed to address: The operating system. These cartridges will be entirely Linux-Mainline compliant out the door, meaning that people who put software on them will not need to deal with the incredible hurdles that developers face today.
Furthermore, hells yeah to you for learning to code. Believe it or not, I'm still learning myself. I've got more of a sysadmin background. Programming is challenging and satisfying, and truly a difficult thing to learn :). Maybe one of those.... easy to do, very difficult to do well kinds of things....
Interesting. I do tend to like a challenge and get really absorbed in tech stuff. Like I keep all my old broken computers so I can tinker and fix them and I enjoy getting viruses off of computers. Though I don't generally get viruses these days I have helped people remove some nasty ones. I alsoused to get super absorbed in to website design as a teen, and then got pretty into 3d modeling as an adult. So, I think programming is really right up my alley and possibly even robotics in the future. I just never previously had the time to invest.
You post has definitely inspired me though. :D
I am following you now to read about technology and maybe help you decide on your lunch some day.
If you're feeling up to it, a really great starting point is running linux on your main computer. Linux is interesting from a number of standpoints:
Another interesting linux excercise is certainly flashing old Android smartphones. You can update their software in myriad interesting ways. I have a little tinkering going on, working to get full Linux (not android) onto an a33 tablet. Hopefully I can get a distributable ROM put together for it :).
I dont know if I would want to commit to linux until I have another laptop. I do use it on my thinkpad that I use to create my coloring books and digital art with. So, I am familiar with linux somewhat.
If you have a 2nd machine with linux, good enough! What distro do you use?