I met Hanno Sander in 2008 at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, CA. At the time, Hanno was at the Parallax booth demonstrating a Propeller-based, two-wheeled balancing robot. Several months later, we published an article he wrote about the project in issue March 2009. Today, Hanno runs HannoWare and works with school systems to improve youth education by focusing technological innovation in classrooms.
Hanno Sander at Work
The March issue of Circuit Cellar, which will hit newsstands soon, features an in-depth interview with Hanno. It’s an inspirational story for experienced and novice roboticists alike.
Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
HannoWare is my attempt to share my hobbies with others while keeping my kids fed and wife happy. It started with me simply selling software online but is now a business developing and selling software, hardware, and courseware directly and through distributors. I get a kick out of collaborating with top engineers on our projects and love hearing from customers about their success.
Our first product was the ViewPort development environment for the Parallax Propeller, which features both traditional tools like line-by-line stepping and breakpoints as well as real-time graphs of variables and pin I/O states to help developers debug their firmware. ViewPort has been used for applications ranging from creating a hobby Turing machine to calibrating a resolver for a 6-MW motor. 12Blocks is a visual programming language for hobby microcontrollers.
The drag-n-drop style of programming with customizable blocks makes it ideal for novice programmers. Like ViewPort, 12Blocks uses rich graphics to help programmers understand what’s going on inside the processor.
The ability to view and edit the underlying sourcecode simplifies transition to text languages like BASIC and C when appropriate. TBot is the result of an Internetonly collaboration with Chad George, a very talented roboticist. Our goal for the robot was to excel at typical robot challenges in its stock configuration while also allowing users to customize the platform to their needs. A full set of sensors and actuators accomplish the former while the metal frame, expansion ports, and software libraries satisfy the latter.
Click here to read the entire interview.
