27 years ago (or there abouts) as a young lad, I desperately saved to buy a Heathkit Hero Jr. Hero Jr was the little brother of the Hero 1 (which featured in an American TV serious and got me hooked on robotics). By the time I had enough money to phone Maplin and order a Hero Jr they had discontinued them . This was a major blow to my robotic dreams. I managed a few lowly robots after this, religiously purchased the various early robot magazines but never managed to build a robot with all the features of the Hero range.

27 years later, I saw the White Box Robotics 914 PC Bot. It was still in proto-type and they were looking for 'pioneers' to order the first batch. A risk but also an opportunity. I immediately placed my order.

During the following 12 + months I kept the faith and waited patiently, lapping up any little nugget of information on the device. During this time, the EU passed the RoHS directive, the 914 was assembled in Canada  - North American doesn't have similar laws. So even while my 914 was ready for delivery I had to engage the government to find out the detail - could I import my 914 without RoHS certification. After a short delay the response was positive - a personal import was fine.

And now to yesterdays announcement (13th). Heathkit producers of the original Hero 1 and White Box Robotics are in a multi-year strategic agreement under which 'Heathkit will produce, manufacture and distribute an educational version of the robot to be known as the HE-RObot'!!

So full circle, I missed my Hero Jr, got my 914 PC Bot, and now so have Heathkit Wow, the children of our time are going to have some fun.

Read more at Heathkit and White box robotics.

Are you watching the DARPA Grand Challenge progress? If not you should be. This is the cutting edge of autonomous vehicle development. There are plenty of exotic tools and technologies coming into play - although more off the shelf parts are now available compared to the first 2004 Grand Challenge when teams had to fabricate so much more.

The DARPA Grand Challenge has been getting tougher and tougher each year. In 2004 it was completing a 142 mile desert course, 2005, a 132 mile desert course in under 10 hours. In 2007 the autonomous vehicles must now demonstrate that they can drive in the urban environment, integrating with the flow of traffic and avoiding obstacles.

There are many really cool things about the Princeton University Urban Challenge Team, not only have they made it as one of the 36 semi-final teams, not only are they all undergraduates, but they are also using Microsoft Robots Studio as their development and execution platform.

Running across their five dual-core servers, 25 MSRS services are controlling the vehicles sensors, actuators and decision logic. This is the largest public demonstration of the MSRS platform I have seen and demonstrates the awesome potential of MSRS which spans Lego robots to autonomous vehicles leading R&D.

The team have a great website here with two videos of their most recent run.

The challenge semi-final - called the Urban Challenge National Qualification Event (NQE) - takes place at Victorville, California on the 26-31 October 2007.

I'm certainly supporting these guys and will be watching them compete in October. Go Princeton!

My On10 blog is getting a bit rusty so I thought I'd better tell you want I did this weekend. I yomped 52 miles. 'Yomped'? Yeah, British Army term for walking over difficult terrain or with a heavy load. Ok so, the terrain I walked wasn't that difficult and I was only carrying a day pack - but I did cover 52 miles in two days walking for 19 hours in total.

Why? To raise money for a local pre-school.

Why is this relevant to a tech site? Because I wrote a nice little app for my Windows Mobile 6 Smart phone that automated the taking of pictures, geo-tagging them from Bluetooth GPS, posted them to my site and displayed them using Virtual Earth on my blog.

The app worked well, the GPRS/EDGE service worked just as well, and the GPS near perfectly.  Shame the phone batteries weren't made for the task. I had to manually activate the Phone's GPS comms in the end because keeping the Bluetooth channel open sucked the batteries almost dry in the first 4 hours, and my solar powered Free Loader just couldn't source enough power to recharge my phone.

But, the people at home could watch my progress on my site, and I have a great record of my walk.

We're also on route to raise nearly £4000 for the local pre-school, which is well worth my sore and swollen feet.

Three beta announcements today covering Windows Live Writer V2.0 Beta, Windows Live Messenger 8.5 beta and Windows Live Mail beta.

Windows Live Writer has been available since last August as an early beta providing a powerful Windows client for bloggers - but supporting US English only. The Windows Live Writer 2.0 beta includes a stack of new capabilities and improvements based on feedback from the Live discussion forums and support for 8 more languages: UK, Spain, France, Germany, Japanese and Chinese. Taking particular note of support for the Queen's English - so the spell checker now works correctly

Windows Live Writer is a great Windows client tool with its broad blog server support making the writing of blog entries a breeze even if you are offline. You can have many blog server accounts set up and switch to your target one even when half-way through creating an entry.

A quick list of new features:

New Authoring Capabilities

· Inline spell checking

· Table editing

· Ability to add categories

· Page authoring for WordPress and TypePad

· Support for excerpts and extended entries

· Improved hyperlinking and image insertion

· Paste Special

Tables and spell checking

                                         Adding categories

Integration and Compatibility

· SharePoint 2007 support

· New APIs enabling custom extensions by weblog providers

· Automatic synchronization of local and online edits

· Integration with Windows Live Gallery

· Support for Blogger Labels

Page authoring

Plus...

· New look and feel

· Available in 9 languages

· Improved accessibility and keyboard support

· Many other frequently requested enhancements!

Download it here.

Windows Live Messenger 8.5 gets a new look and feel and some more emoticons plus integration with Windows Live OneCare to provide family safety:

You can set it up so that your techno offspring:
1.  Cannot use Messenger --  in the offline world imagine this as not allowing your child to be outside and playing with others unless you are there right beside them at all times.

2.  Can use Messenger with no restrictions and you have the ability to monitor the contact list -- in the offline world imagine this as allowing your child to go to the park across the road and you can see who they are playing with by looking out your window.

3.  Can use Messenger with some restrictions and can only communicate with the contacts that you approve -- in the offline world imagine this as allowing your child to play in the garden where you control who can join in.

Finally, Windows Live Mail beta. Windows Live Mail is the replacement for Outlook Express, Windows Mail and Windows Live Mail desktop providing a superset of features.

Features include:

• Windows Live Hotmail account aggregation.
• Additional account aggregation for POP and IMAP mail accounts
• RSS feed aggregation
• More advanced photo-sharing capabilities
• More advanced search via integration with Desktop Search
• Additional safety (anti-virus scanning, anti-phishing, anti-spam protection across aggregated accounts for customers who do not have an anti-virus product)
• Additional integration with Windows Live services including Spaces

So you have plenty of new stuff to get playing with!

More details here.

Madeleine McCann disappeared on the 3rd May. The latest Police call is for holidaymakers who were at the resort a few weeks before Madeleine disappeared, to upload their holiday pictures that contain strangers to the web site http://www.madeleine.ceopupload.com. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre will use face recognition software to search these pictures for known paedophiles - processing about 1000 an hour.

I'm proud to say that four of my colleagues working with Microsoft Partners Lynx Technology and FastHosts built this website literally over this last weekend. My awesome colleagues are William Coleman, Kevin McDaniel, Paul Murphy and Mark Johnston.

Gentlemen I salute you!

Lets hope this effort contributes to Madeleine's safe return to her loving family.

The XNA UK user group have just launched their first competition! There are three categories one for each of the key skill sets required by modern games: Artist, Musician, Game Dev.

There is a fantastic prize fund of £5000 worth of software and hardware including the latest graphics cards, tablets,  XBOX 360s, and specialised products like Sonar 6 and SoftImage XSI - all of which are built to exploit Windows Vista features. Open to UK residents only.

The theme for this years competition is Ocean Odessey. If you are missing one of the key skill sets you can sign up to the user groups 'lonely hearts' forum to advertise your skills or request the skills you need. All part of the user groups goal of bringing the skills to make great games together.

Garage Games XNA development tools and engine are also available for 30 days free trial if you need that 'drag and drop' games development experience to help you enter!!!

To find out more go here.

Digital Lifestyles also report on the Xbox Soundtracks Competition. Here you can download a game trailer, fit your own musical composition to it and up load it again to the site. The gaming public can then vote for the trailer they like the most. See here for more detail.

This last week I have been following the adventure of four UK teams taking part in the First LEGO League Open European Championship in Bodo, Norway. It wasn't until I was flicking through the in-fight magazine on my SAS flight that I realised Bodo is inside the Arctic Circle! I could have packed more appropriately

However, the competition was hot, boiling with the enthusiasm of the teams and their supporters. As part of the challenge teams have to build a robot based on the LEGO Mindstorms RCX or NXT kit to complete 8 missions, scoring points for completeness and level of autonomous operation.

The event has been a terrific success with 66 teams from 25 countries taking part. Some of the teams have been able to refine their robot so that they can actually complete the missions 100% almost every time. This is some feat to pull off; I've built the eight mission challenges and will be building my own RCX robot to complete them to experience the challenge for myself, and I can tell you to complete the challenges accurately requires serious thought and creative robot design and programming!

The winning team for the robot competition was Compass from China.

The UK was also well presented in the awards with Widcombe Wrobotiers collecting the Innovative Design Award and the Presentation Award. Awesome stuff team!

Best team name had to be the USA's Super Hyper Quantum Kanagroos followed by China's The Son of the Wind.

You can see pictures and my event blog at http://firsthandtechnology.org.uk

You can also see my robot news and projects at http://www.paulfoster.eu

A UK company - BlueSky Positioning - have announced their A-GPS SIM product. This is an assisted GPS product meaning that some level of processing the GPS data is performed off the device, like on a server in the mobile phone operators network. The most amazing thing is that they have the GPS technology including the aerial all shrunk down to fit in a SIM. They claim this means that any legacy GSM and 3G handsets will be able to gain GPS functionality. So no need to upgrade your handset just get a new SIM from your operator.

The product is still in development with a planned July availability for test products. Clearly the device will have to enter mobile operator testing before it will be made available to consumers, but given the combination of low cost effective upgrade to provide the required E-211 and E-911 services plus location based services (LBS) and the off device computing requirement - which presumably will incur mobile operator data rates - means that this is a very attractive way forward for mobile operators. I wish I'd thought of it!