Web controlled robotic arm with Pi

A web controlled robotic arm based on the Raspberry Pi.

There is a daemon running in the background called web_arm.py, which sets up a FIFO (arm.fifo) to receive commands.  The cgi-bin is xy.py which receives x,y coordinates from a click on an image, then the cgi-bin sends the coordinates to the fifo.  web_arm performs inverse kinematics and drives the servo controller over the serial port, and the servos drive the arm.

Full code on GitHub.

Desktop GUI for AWS Ubuntu

This seemed harder to Google for than you'd think.

Imagine you want a desktop on Ubuntu Linux on an AWS EC2 instance, and you'd like to access it from OS X.  The sanest thing is to follow these instructions on installing kubuntu-desktop and tightvnc on the Ubuntu instance [with more info here], and the "Screen Sharing" app built into OS X.  Access the Ubuntu instance with "[ip address]:590[x]" where [x] is the X display number that tightvnc attaches to, generally 1 (so it would be "[ip address]:5901").  Don't forget to set up a security group to allow the VNC port(s).