[chbot] Christchurch Robotics Meeting Report Wednesday 16th April 2008

[Richard Jones]

Christchurch Robotics Meeting Report Wednesday 16th April 2008

The second meeting of the year attracted about 20 people (sorry I forgot to
count and only 9 signed in). There was a nice age range from 12 upwards,
some new faces and some coming by recommendation. The gold coin collection
netted $15, thanks for your donations, they go to Science Alive and are
very much appreciated. With folks saying they will be along next time we
seem to be growing our number of regulars. 

Attending Robots and Topics

Mike Pearce kindly donated lots of spare components to the group and many
boxes were trawled through and parts taken away for building into robots.
There is still heaps left so I’ll bring what is left to the next meeting.
Thanks Mike for your generosity.

We had a talk from 12 year old Tayler Stuart about the Lego RCX walking
Robot that he built and brought along. Thanks for bringing it along Tayler
and we hope to see you and your family again.

Carl brought along a propeller ADC circuit with 3 ADCs almost running on a
single board. The ADC uses the propeller chip in Sigma-Delta mode and just
four passive components. We didn’t fix it on the night but hopefully
we’ll get it going soon, either with shorter leads or maybe a software
fix.

I (Richard Jones) brought along the propeller proto board built onto a two
wheel plus two castor platform with motor driver for micro mouse maze
solving. I gave an introduction to micromouse based on info from Peter
Harrison site here: http://micromouse.cannock.ac.uk/ and showed the Python
micromouse simulation running on Mac OSX.

Andrew McDougal has very kindly returned the Parallax Propeller proto board
that he won a couple of meetings back. It is available to the first person
to reply on condition that it returns built into a robot or doing something
of relevance to robotics.

Also I have a couple of Microsoft optical mice with faulty buttons
available for robot building. Just email me via the list if you would like
one. These are the single chip sensor mice that do USB and PS2. I don’t
think you can use this chip to get the picture or quadrature signals like
you could with the early optical mice.

A wooden robot was also bright along but I didn’t get to meet him until
he was going through the door.

Thanks to everyone for coming and for joining in the lively discussions. 

Our next meeting is on Wednesday 18th June 2008 when we will have our usual
show and tell format followed by a talk from Hanno about interfacing to
devices that he has on the Dancebot (accelerometer, gyro, compass, tv
camera etc). Do check out our site http://www.kiwibots.org just in case of
any late changes or additions.