<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN">
<html><head><style type="text/css"><!--
blockquote, dl, ul, ol, li { padding-top: 0 ; padding-bottom: 0 }
--></style><title>Re: [asterisk-users] OT:
TechShop</title></head><body>
<div>At 9:34 AM -0400 2008/8/4, Dean Collins wrote:</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Arial" size="-1"
color="#000080">This email is off topic. If it offends you then suck
it</font><font face="Wingdings" size="-1" color="#000080">
J</font><font face="Arial" size="-1" color="#000080"><br>
<br>
But seriously, I know this will interest USA readers (unfortunately
for now primarily on the west coast only). How cool is this
concept</font> <a href="http://techshop.ws/index.html"><font
face="Arial"
size="-1">http://techshop.ws/index.html</font></a></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Arial" size="-1"
color="#000080"> </font></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Arial" size="-1"
color="#000080"><br>
Cheers,</font></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Arial" size="-1"
color="#000080">Dean</font></blockquote>
<div><br></div>
<div>[snip]</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<div>So, I'll take a bit off-topic and then go on-topic:</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>I am a big fan of TechShop (I worked in the Bay Area before
coming to work for Digium) and in fact I arranged this video interview
there one or two months ago:</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>
http://tv.boingboing.net/2008/05/01/techshop-a-community.html</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Lots of great stuff going on there, and they're opening in a
number of different cities "real soon now." It's the
cheapest thing going, relatively speaking, and the community of people
using the facility is very much an "open-source"
environment.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>I tried talking them (management) into going with Asterisk as
their PBX, but Jim wanted to completely outsource those functions to
local DSL providers (which, based on probability and luck, are
probably Asterisk anyway.) </div>
<div><br></div>
<div>This is a great place for people to get involved in making
physical hardware that interacts with web and voice interfaces.
When the Portland OR TechShop opens, I'll probably do a session on
"voice control of your robot" or a similar topic since
Asterisk is very accessible to people building stuff that responds to
external stimuli. Asterisk plus the Lumenvox speech recognition
platform (or even just DTMF) is a quick and dirty way to get audio
control into a robotic platform that has multiple "channels"
of listening for commands. Asterisk is being used more as an
application framework in that case, but it's simple and there are lots
of people pre-building the methods and documents on how it's done (see
Dave Troy's DTMF-controlled Roomba or the oft-cited botanicalls.com
site.)</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>JT</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<x-sigsep><pre>--
</pre></x-sigsep>
<div>--<br>
John Todd<br>
jtodd@digium.com
+1-256-428-6083<br>
Asterisk Open Source Community Director</div>
</body>
</html>