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

[Charles Manning]

WRT phones for robotics.

Well clearly it must be an Android phone :-).

Although there are exceptions, USB on phones tend to be device only
and thus can only communicate with a USB host (PC etc). That really
limits their usefulness in connecting to cheapie micros etc.

The easiest connectivity out of most phones is Bluetooth. This just
looks like a regular serial port. Youtube shows various projects where
a Mindstorms is used as a mobile base being controlled by an
application on a phone.

On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 10:02 AM, Richard Jones <rjtp at ihug.co.nz> wrote:
> 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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