COMPUTING

Second hand computers

• if you have any equipment you can donate, please do so. Ding and Anne already promised to provide us with their old PCs.
• Lai is setting up a computer drive in Manila, a rather big event where people can exchange their computers for informatics gift certificates

At this point it seems most realistic to use game creation tools instead of a pure coding approach (C++, Java, etc.) There’s a few people that could potentially help with the game design but it’s still very unclear how this will work out: I contacted Carlos from the Philippine Linux community, Nex has a few contacts, and Kent is interested to look into the game himself. If you know any other people please let us know!

Characteristics of the game

• open source, running under Linux
• multiplayer, co-operative
• ecology inspired
• narrative: inspired by local Laguna mythology, 3 classes (humans, nature and spirits), also include texts for background info

Additional technologies

• robot arm: Habs and Kent are looking into the software of the Lynx 6 robot arm
• sensors: start with temperature and humidity, integrate in gameplay
• interface Biomodd with the internet: present the data on the internet through Google Analytics, make Biomodd Twitter (ref. Botanicalls), etc.
  

ECOSYSTEM

We need to make a selection of plants and start growing those in the Biomodd Lab:

• we can verify which plants survived in our miniature exosystem and work with those (with the help of a botanist through King)
• Tomas wants to start growing vines on a miniature canopy structure made out of wires
• Diego gave me this link http://www.stuartxchange.com/Katakataka.html
• Max, a forester and faculty from UPLB gave us some good ideas, Vanni and Kent will draw up a report of our meeting on Sunday
• there’s the idea of growing seedlings of the trees that are used to built biomodd
• there’s Adleta’s suggestion to work with the concept of ‘roots’
• King and I will go to the Garden Show in Los Banos on Tuesday

We need to make a safe and reliable irrigation system. Julius, Habs, Leo and Kent have been working on that.

We need to investigate whether it’s possible to create an active cooling system with plants (and evaporation/condensation), warm air good be blown away from the computers and guided to such a compartment.