MICHAEL BALCOS

PROJECTS

Last update: December 4, 2024 (Manila time)

You can see below the personal projects I had worked and/or am working on.

Philippine History Resources (https://phhistory.org)

Last update: December 4, 2024

I am currently migrating this from Mediawiki to an automatically generated static HTML website. The autogenerator is given the name Handog, and is currently in beta status. Please report any errors/bugs you may see.

This website mirrors or links to multimedia resources (pictures, videos, electronic books, and audio files) that may be relevant to the history and/or current affairs of the Philippines. These multimedia resources are freely available in the internet. Mirroring of these files are done when permission is provided, or when it is legal to do so. Linking is primarily done when material is copyrighted, but freely available in the internet.

I maintain this as a personal hobby. For comments/suggestions/complaints, you can e-mail me at balcosmike[a]gmail.com.

MALAYA BURNER

Last update: November 13, 2011

This was the Malaya Burner in Bluepoint's Software Freedom Day (SFD) celebration in September, 2011

Malaya Burner was developed by Michael Balcos as a project for Malaya Digital. It is a low cost alternative to the Freedom Toaster, and it's conception was formed out of discussions with some people in the Open Source movement in Metro Manila, the Philippines. The code it uses is written in Perl and C. The lower cost is made possible by using a small, monochrome, and text based LCD matrix for output, and a simple numeric keypad for input. The numeric keypad has certain keys physically disabled, and has the '-' key assigned for the 'Cancel' function.

LAKBAY-1

Last update: November 13, 2011

Lakbay-1 is Michael Balcos' experiment at using Free / Open Source Software (FOSS) development tools and applications for the operation of this custom-built mobile robot. It was presented in Bluepoint's SFD 2008 celebration. The hardware components were acquired from local sources. Among the features it has are stepper motors and tracks for mobility, wireless control, standard AA batteries, and a GCC compiled application for remote computer control of the robot. The mentioned application uses the ncurses library for it's text based interface. The robot has been presented in events with a wired camera mounted since the budget won't permit a wireless camera. Future plans include using Arduino and one of its wireless communications add-ons for controlling the mobile robot remotely. With Arduino being a micro-controller, the next plan may be to let the mobile robot make pre-programmed actions by itself.