[chbot] What we did on Wednesday 15th September 2010

[Richard Jones]

Our first Kiwibots meeting following the earthquake took place at the
Canterbury Innovation Incubator, 200 Armagh Street on Wed 15th September.
Thanks to the folks at CII for taking us in at short notice and especially
to Pete who spent a lot of time letting us in. There were about 20 or so in
attendance, thanks especially to those who brought things to show. There is
good news from Science Alive, their building is re-opening and should be
available to us for the next meeting which should be on Wednesday 20th
October, 6.30pm, in the Science Alive Seminar Room.

Here is a description of what I saw, please email me with missing items,
missing names and details by 12.30pm Saturday and I will add them to the
write up before publishing on the Web site and to the Brightsparks site.

Robin brought along a working demo of an AVR butterfly hooked up to three 1
wire temperature sensors and window winder motors driven via a relay board
ready for installation in his greenhouse.

Charles had large colour photos of his home built CNC machine and sound
reducing box that he used to machine many of the parts for his Dalek that we
have seen previously. Also Charles bought along a larges box of small
stepper motors.

Kay had his latest adaptation to his walking legs remotely controlled and
steerable zimmer frame with a horrid laugh. The legs are now very powerful
and lifelike running nicely with an amazingly effective spring in the feet.
Even the steering linkage has simple and novel design solutions to awkward
change of direction problems. We did wonder if he can walk backwards?

Hanno brought along the latest progress to T-Bots and 12-Blocks now running
under Linux and Mac OSX. The port from Windows involved huge amount of work
to overcome the real time issues of integrating with each OS. Hanno had a
nice demo of a 3 axis accelerometer display hooked up through 12 blocks
capturing plots of low frequency seismic activity. The MEMS accelerometer a
LIS3LV02DQ was deadbugged onto a Propeller Demo board and has an I2C
interface. Hanno also had a print of his new company logo coming out of a
web competition that he ran, find it here: http://onerobot.org/

William bought along his huge LED displays functioning nicely as a clock.
Sorry I didn't get to meet you William so can't say much more...

I brought along a GPS receiver (a $35US deal extreme sku 19498) hooked up
via gpsd server to xgps showing the satellites, navit turn by turn
navigation, tangogps map/satellite display and opencpn chart plotting marine
navigation software.

I also spent a fair bit of time looking at a Samsung Galaxy S phone which
caused me to wonder which phone would be the most mobile platform robot
friendly? Certainly the Samsung with its micro USB port could easily bring
out friendly IO to an AVR or Parallax board.

Paul Davey brought along an audio amplifier PCB that he had designed, fresh
from being etched and drilled in the morning.

Apologies for things I have left out and lack of photos, hopefully we'll be
back to normal next time.

-- 
Richard Jones
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