We are planning a workshop in Kathmandu end of October - November on various open source hardware challenges related to rural Nepal, DIYbio, energy & sustainability issues... Typical is this one: how to support handicrafts with electronics - micro and cottage industries in Nepal. There are some very cool and very useful machines that if hacked properly would make a big difference... they are talking about things machines to turn fibers into twine and such.

Maybe we should plan some small delegation from Prague?

If anyone wants to come, send us an e-mail....

In the meantime maybe someone has an answer: a team from Karkhana won the Kathmandu edition of the NASA Space App challenge (http://spaceappschallenge.org/challenge/lego-rovers/ challenge and built a arduino based bot that allows for real time adjustment of automation rules (through a c# front end).

QUESTION: For the arduino gurus on this list. One BIG challenge that we could not tackle during the 48 hours (but want to do now), is allow for multisensor rules. For e.g. right now you can say "If obstacle is less than 20 cm then go left, then go forward for 10 sec and stop" but we want to be able to permit chained rules e.g. "if obstacle is less than 20 cm AND you are on a black surface then go left". We have a pretty good rule execution engine could be modified to handle chaining... what we don't have a good data structure to store multiple rules on... so if you have any ideas of approaches we should explore, drop me a line - Sakar