[chbot] Meeting Summary - 20 June 2007

[Andrew Errington]

Hi all,

Thank you for those who came last night.  A good turnout and some 
interesting topics to talk about and things to see.

This was the last meeting organised by me.  From now on Richard Jones will 
take over scheduling dates and booking the room.  We are still fortunate to 
be able to use the Science Alive! facilities, so please keep your gold coin 
donations coming in, they are appreciated.

There were three fascinating items on show.  Peter had brought along a 
Nixie tube clock he has built.  Nixie tubes (in case you don't have access 
to Google) are number displays that pre-date 7-segment LEDs.  There are 10 
electrodes shaped like the numerals 0-9 inside a glass tube full of neon 
gas.  By connecting one of the electrodes to a high voltage (oh, say, 180V) 
the electrode will glow (like a neon bulb) and the digit is visible.  Oh, 
and he brought his robot... to supply power to the clock.

Carl brought his 'work in progress' with the Hough algorithm.  It is able 
to detect the axis of a barcode in the field of view of a webcam.  
Actually, it looks for any line in an image, and is now working in real 
time (measured in frames-per-second, not seconds-per-frame).  This will 
form the basis of the robot vision system he is working on.

Finally, Richard brought in his MicroMouse paraphernalia.  We watched a 
video about the MicroMouse competitions in England, and he 
demonstrated the first beginnings of his new mouse simulator written in 
Python alongside the original DOS version.

Oh, and we ate cake.  Special treat because I was leaving.

Best wishes,

Andrew