11 thoughts on “Online Skill Crane

  1. This is cute and all, but it has to be one of the worst Internet controlled devices that I have ever seen.

    You don’t even have direct control over the claw, you have to type in percentages of movement (which you just arbitrarily guess, as there is no measurement grid on the glass or anything), and then they email you a video of what happened.

    It might as well be controlled by snail mail, I write them a letter with some numbers on it, and they can send me back a description of what happened.

  2. #1 – The reason we went with a percentage system over live control is to handle higher loads at lower bandwidth. The email system was done as it originally tracked users/passcodes and built a social network map. This was turned off, and the email was relied upon to handle a queue of requests. It was easier than doing a http queue system.

    #2 – Bandwidth :-( We currently have a DS1 (T1) line, so we are limited in our ability to offer streaming video. It does not come cheap. To get 10 megabits extended to our place would cost over $2800/month. DSL doesn’t offer great upstream, and cable modem service suffers heavy price increases at commercial locations (It’s located in a “hacker space”).

    The good news is, it processed over 4700 grabs yesterday, and was down part of the day. This weekend I plan to fix a mechanical issue and it should be good to go again.

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