[asterisk-users] OT: TechShop

[Steve Totaro]

On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 1:30 PM, John Todd <jtodd at digium.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
> 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

Bah, all the commercials.......