[asterisk-users] OT: TechShop

[John Todd]

At 9:34 AM -0400 2008/8/4, Dean Collins wrote:
>
>This email is off topic. If it offends you then suck it J
>
>But seriously, I know this will interest USA readers (unfortunately 
>for now primarily on the west coast only). How cool is this concept 
><http://techshop.ws/index.html>http://techshop.ws/index.html
>
>
>Cheers,
>Dean

[snip]


So, I'll take a bit off-topic and then go on-topic:

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:

   http://tv.boingboing.net/2008/05/01/techshop-a-community.html

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.

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.)

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.)

JT


-- 
--
John Todd
jtodd at digium.com        +1-256-428-6083
Asterisk Open Source Community Director
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