My final year at Uni is well underway and therefore the Final Year Project must also be on its way.

This year my project is individual, and entitled Project Origin (named, if you must know, over the book forced upon underlings by Stargate’s Ori). Cryptic indeed.

In terms of actually doing things, check out the dedicated project website for more information. Here’s an excerpt from the Overview:

Project Origin aims to implement a robot system that uses the Xbox Kinect device as its primary sensing mechanism.

The Xbox Kinect is a cheap and highly effective sensor, integrating a RGB camera, depth perception system, and 4-device microphone array. While a lot of amateur and some academic work has put the Kinect to use, it remains to be seen whether the Kinect is the device to take robotics which aim to interact with our environment to the next level in terms of both sensing complexity and cost effectiveness.

This afternoon, our robot project was supposed to have a demo. What actually happened was that we talked about it, switched it all on, and then it never moved. The demo was scrubbed, and fortunately this year did not count for any marks – otherwise we would have ended up getting very low numbers.

So why did a project which had been working so well fail so brutally? It was not a failing of the robot, nor really a failing of any one team member (although the fact I got the configuration wrong and failed to realise in time was the cause of the issue). I’m going to attribute this one to bad planning and last minute work.

So you may have seen TweetMeme went a little Joggler-crazy last week, with a grand total of 6 turning up in our office (although not all at the same time).

This is because Dom turned up one day, said they were on offer for £50, showed us all the software and hardware hacks, and we were all completely sold!

I’d like to tell you about all the hacks we’ve managed so far a little later on. But for now, here are some unboxing shots and the default OS in action.

Some of you may remember my project from several months ago called Clustr. Essentially it offers a way of accessing your Huddle.net workspaces from your iPhone or mobile phone.

Today I’m pleased to be able to give you a sneak preview of what’s coming next for Clustr.

As Huddle has evolved, we’re looking to give you even more ways to get the most out of your investment into the platform. First, Clustr gave you a way to get to your workspaces wherever you were. Now, Clustr Mobile is just one part of the solution.

OAuth is an often confusing protocol, that can be very difficult to get started with and nigh-on impossible to debug.

With that in mind, I set out to learn more about OAuth, why it’s there, how it works, and what you can do with it.

Of course the best way to do this is to actually get developing. So I got my PHP out, fired up my favourite IDE, and got started.

Here’s what I learnt, from the beginning, and it will hopefully save anyone else getting started with OAuth a bit of time and a lot of confusion.