FindDay #7
Every Friday I share the five coolest things I’ve found on the web in the last week.
1 - Gobot
https://gobot.io/ 
I’ve been looking for an excuse to do some Go programming for years. A friend on Mastodon pointed out the Gobot project, which is designed to make it easy to use Go to power robots. I’m still in the process of learning enough Go to give this a try, but if I can get up-to-speed, I’m going to test it out when it comes time to add a brain to the Reelbot project. (via U+039B )
2 - Interplanetary File System (IPFS)
https://ipfs.io/ I’ll be honest, I ignored IPFS for a long time because I thought the name was dumb. However, after deciding to move past that and spend some time checking it out, it turns out that it is a lot like what I had in mind for JSFS federation. From a technical perspective, it sets up a local HTTP server which you talk to from your local web browser, etc. and in turn it acts as a gateway to a distributed file sharing network. There’s a lot of applications for such a thing, but the most obvious is that it is a way to publish web pages (and their associated resources) via a network of individual computers vs. using monolithic web servers. This opens up the possibility of returning the Internet to a more autonomous mode of operation. Personally, I’m going to be investing some time in learning about and applying IPFS to my daily operations, and I’ll probably be writing more about how others can join me. This also may mean the end-of-the-line for JSFS. I don’t expect IPFS to match JSFS in terms of performance, but in the long-run it appears to solve the same class of problems I wanted to solve with JSFS, so my energies may be better spent contributing to the development and application of IPFS.
3 - Laser Network
http://blog.svenbrauch.de/2017/02/19/homemade-10-mbits-laser-optical-ethernet-transceiver/ 
Back in the Roaring 90’s I dreamt of setting up a WAN with my neighbors on the west side of Madison powered by lasers, but never got around to it. Partly because back then it was prohibitively expensive, and partly because by the year 2000, most of us had access to broadband Internet at home. However, there’s still reasons to setup a long-range wireless network, and this project is a very nice, clean example of how to do it with lasers. (via Hackaday )
4 - Forth on Microcontrollers
http://hackaday.com/2017/04/19/moving-forth-with-mecrisp-stellaris-and-embello/ 
I’ve been interested in the Forth programming language (and runtime environment) ever since I learned about it being a part of the Canon Cat. It seems like a great fit for microcontrollers, and this post walks you through the process of doing just that. (via Hackaday )
5 - Printable Hydraulic Robots
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EAMCqH31Vo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EAMCqH31Vo By combining multi-material 3D printing and capturing fluid inside the print as its made, engineers from MITCSAIL are able to create complex, working machines that can be 3D printed and put to use with no assembly required.