[chbot] Wed 20th August Meeting Report

[Richard Jones]

A very well attended meeting with some people coming from as far away as
Dunsandel and beyond to be with us. More robots than ever before and some
very interesting and thought provoking presentations. The meetings focus
was Line Following and all roboteers who showed a robot successfully
following a line received a prize of a small chocolate bar.The Gold Coin
donations netted $16.90, the donations go to Science Alive and are much
appreciated. Here is my recollection of what occurred. Feel free to email
me via the list with additions or corrections. Our next meeting is
scheduled for Wed 15th October 2008, I'll be in touch via the mailing list
if we can squeeze another meeting in sooner. The meeting focus will be line
following and Tabletop Challenge .

John Wynard from Science Alive gave us a run through of the Robocup
competition http://www.robocupjunior.org.nz/  and brought along the Rescue
mats used in Sundays competition. I'll try to ensure that we have a Robocup
course at each subsequent meeting. Not sure how this will be achieved yet
(RJ). John is planning to build a soccer playing Robocup Robot and hopes to
bring it to our next meeting.

Caroline brought along a rescue robot built by herself and Olivia that was
a winner at Sundays competition. Caroline delivered a powerpoint
presentation about their robot, and programming choices for the Lego
RCX.Their robot ran nicely following some running repairs.Thanks Caroline
for all the preparation you did and sharing your experiences with us.

Taylor brought along his RCX based tracked line following robot which ran
nicely and earned Taylor a Crunchie bar.

Peter brought a selection of commercial robot kits based on wide range of
micro controllers PIC, Stamp, MCS-51, Parallax.  Peter has an agreement
with Inex to distribute their products in NZ and will be supporting them
fully. You can see the range here http://www.inexglobal.com They look to be
amazing value for money. Contact Peter by email peterl at zicrotek.co.nzThis
e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript
enabled to view it if you are interested in purchasing.

Howard Amos showed us a robot built from a magazine series. It had lots of
sensors to do more than line following, and followed the Robocup line well.

Charles Manning  showed us an AVR based scratch built robot and mentioned a
Lego NXT enhancements that he has published that increases the NXT sample
rate. He also mentioned that the NXT interface is published so that low
cost sensors can be readily added. See http://lejos.sourceforge.net/ 

Charles son showed us his DSE line follower and showed books on 'C'
programming using AVR microprocessors and also showed us a Beam Robot.I've
been wanting to see one of those up close for sometime.

Hanno brought along his Dancebot (a two wheel inverted pendulum) modified
to have the camera facing down. It followed the edge of the Robocup map
beautifully by processing the picture from the camera in its Parallax
Propeller CPU.

Finally I showed a tiny (non functional) line follower based on toothbrush
motors, LM339 IC and a couple of photo transistors. I also showed a line
follower entered in the 1997 IEE line following contest, and it still
works!

Thanks to all who contributed. Photos to follow.

Feel free to register on the kiwibots.org site if you would like to post
your own robotics contributions.