August 2006

The beam wiki and its acompanying blog does not have a logo!

This must be changed! Register at the wiki, create a logo and add it to the logo page. At the end of the summer (more probably somewhere during the autumn). I will put up a poll to choose the best logo!

I set up this site since I did not know how to build a Beam robot. There are trillions of descriptions of different robots on the web and lots of details in the yahoo group. Every day a lot of people are posting hints and tips on the yahoo mailing list. The solarbotics.net site is a great ressources - but is not very much maintained. Lots of people publish schematics and pictures of their bots on private home pages. To make it short: It is hard to gather information. But it is hard to find the stuff you need and hard to extract the general principles out of the descriptions (I actually wanted to build a steerable walker). Lots of pages vanished from the internet.

So I decided to set up a wiki to collect and organize all the information that is availlable on the net in one place to create the connections between the different bits of information.
So I invite anybody interested in BEAM Robotics to use this site, join and help to make this blog the best information source for BEAM Robotics on the net.

I hope it ist possible to copy most of the articles from solarbotics.net to this wiki since they are a marvelous starting point but somwhat outdated (I contacted the site maintainer for permission but did not recieva an answer yet - another hint that it is abandoned. I think it should be legally and intentionally ok for anything that is released under a comaptible (aka the same creative commons) license as this wiki)
This blog will announce site news regarding this wiki. This site is a work in progress. Currently I am working on an del.icio.us integration to make link sharing for any BEAM entusiast easier. A second step will be integration of flickr to enable everybody to share his pictures with us!

This site is not meant to render the yahoo group useless. It is a marvelous mailing list with a lot of nice people helping each other. But I would be happy if anybody on the list also incorporates his tips and advices in the wiki. Lets make BEAM building easier!

A last word on legal issues. All pages in the wiki are published under a creative commons license. This means no commercial use and the ability to reuse the content as long as it is also published under a creative commons license. I think this is the most fair way to share all the information. If you have any problem regarding this license feel free to contact me (I want to figure out a way to publish articles under other common source licenses- since that enables me to collect information not licensed with a creative commons license but with some other kind of open source license).