A proposal

I finally came up with something to propose, I'm not entirely satisfied with what I went with or with what I wrote, but it may work. Here is what I currently wrote:

LEGO Mindstorms for the One Laptop Per Child Project

I propose developing software that allows LEGO Mindstorms to work with the laptops created through the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC or XO) project. LEGO Mindstorms is a programmable robotics kit released by LEGO. Currently, Mindstorms is only programmable through NXT, software developed by LEGO that only runs on Windows and Macs. This project is aimed at the end-users of the OLPC, primarily children and teachers, so it would remain relatively simple to program and use. Currently there is no software or on going development for LEGO Mindstorms and OLPC although it has been suggested on the OLPC website wiki that a low cost version of LEGO Mindstorms system be built around the XO.
LEGO has various libraries and Software Development Kits (SDK) available on their Mindstorms website. There has also been some work done to make NXT UNIX compatible. The OLPC itself is UNIX compatible; it uses components from Red Hat’s Fedora Core 6 version of the Linux Operating system, so that may ease the development cycle. The biggest challenge for this project would be trying to get the Mindstorms hardware to communicate with the OLPC, however, if the Bluetooth and hardware libraries written by LEGO are thorough enough, it may prove to be simple.

The last line is probably the most telling. If the libraries are well written and easy to add into an implementation then the project will (hopefully) go smoothly. But then one still has to worry how the XO laptop can handle something like this. Well I guess I will soon find out as I am now tasked with doing some in depth research on all of this for the big proposal due Monday.

Another idea I wish I could have proposed was working with sensor networks. Apparently Prof. Bridges has equipment that can take remote measurements. I wanted to do something like this but I didn't have a solid ideas at the time the proposal was due. However, typical for me, the ideas have poured into my head immediately after turning in the proposal up there. Although it's too late to actually submit this idea, I still would like to throw it out there for anyone to read.

The project I thought of was to use a sensor network around the UNM campus to determine how much second hand smoke was in and around the buildings. For the past year or so, there has been a lot of debate about smoking on campus and how close people should smoke to a building. While, I am neutral on the issue, a system detecting second hand smoke, and possibly other types of hazardous gases, will help people make the proper decisions.

The main aspect of the program would be to gather and produce data. Then it would be presented in a beneficial way to the end user. A large portion of the time to develop the system would be spent on a graphical user interface to present this data.

In hindsight, I like this idea a lot more. It would have been a lot better for me since one of the graduate schools I'm looking at, has a program with monitoring ice flows using sensor networks. But, now that I've already turned in the LEGO thing, I'll stick with that and see what the other people have done.