[chbot] CHCH Robotics Group, meeting notes Mon 18th Dec 2017

[Mark Atherton]

Hello everyone,

Good turnout with 23 attendees, and lots of huddles-of tech-talk, for 
this Christmas extravaganza. $23 collected and transferred to BR05 
account. Donation for electric car charging accidentally ended up in the 
BR05 brown box.

The recently prompted email regarding equipment donations to the trading 
table has resulted in quite a pile of ‘new’ equipment. Just to 
reiterate; yes donations are welcome, but not CRT, printers or toner.

With thanks on behalf of the group,

Mark Atherton

==============

Henry Allison arrived before 7pm (amazing), this is a first. Welcome Henry !

Stephen Irons turned up with a pile of goodies for the trading table, 
thank you.

Andy Gardner arrived dressed as a Viking,. He has his ham ticket, and 
apparently will be working on his Norse-Code next...

Mark A gave a quick demo of real-time digital video generation using a 
custom FPGA board. Video output was colour bars + bouncy ball + 
callsign. Video system has been written in Verilog, and has a small 32 
bit soft-processor (NIOS II) which talks to the outside world using 
ASYNC over USB. Video output was a 270Mb/s (SD)SDI data stream feeding 
an SDI to HDMI convertor, and 19" LCD monitor. System occupies around 
11% of a 15k LE Altera Cyclone IV part.

Robin Gilks has made progress with a (very) low cost wireless / IoT 
system based on the ESP32. He gave an extended demo of his project. Main 
points were that when using the (free) mongoose development environment, 
90% of the 'nitty gritty' is already done for you. Features include : 
OTA update of firmware with rollback, built in flash encryption, 
multiple hardware platforms, prototyping in javascript, and production 
in C. This was a stunning demo; we need to consider a branch-group 
meeting for this project.

Peter Ellis brought along a 3D printed 12-degrees-of-freedom spider. 
Quite a lot of plastic, perseverance, and work in this project. Unit 
dances, crawls, and scares the life out of near by small animals.

Ben brought in his home-made electric assisted skateboard (friends 
apparently call it the board of death). Watched him ride home on it, 
most impressive.

Winston mentioned that rigid 20x20 extrusion is available; see him for 
further details.