Slashdot Review – Produced by SDR News

Day 1 of CES did not start off well – a monumental traffic jam took us over and hour and a half to make the trip – normally twenty minutes – from the Monte Carlo to the Sands Convention Center.

It’s a great strategy to start with the smaller and more innovative companies at the Sands Convention Center for TPN coverage for two reasons: First, it’s more fun – smaller companies have smaller PR budgets and are hungry for media exposure. Plus in a smaller company where just BEING at CES is a roll of the dice, you never know what you will find, just around the corner, that will reward your search for new and cool products and conversation.

The first stop. though was a name with great name recognition among the SDR News audience – iRobot – the home of Roomba, Scooba and now the iRobot Create platform.

There has been a large user community hacking iRobot products, and the decision to introduce a produce directly for the needs of the hacking community , and provide open tools and libraries for both Windows and Linux resulted in a product that justified spending time on both the SDR audio feed, and the TPN video.

The Create iRobot system will offer a great deal of flexibility and will be a geek favorite. This application involves the use of a hamster placed inside of the trackball to guide the robot depending upon which way and how fast the hamster runs. (For animal protester reasons, no hamsters were used at CES . Where do you find a union hamster ?