[chbot] CHCH Robotics Group, meeting notes Mon 15th Jan 2018

[Mark Atherton]

Hello everyone,

Enthusiastic turnout with 21 attendees, and lots of huddles-of 
tech-talk. $34 (in gold) collected and transferred into the robotics 
loose-change jar (for later banking).

Quick reminder: equipment donations are welcome for the trading table, 
but no CRT based product, printers, toner or items that are likely to be 
a disposal burden. All sales from the trading table should go into the 
brown box on the wall, and are directly for the benefit of our host 
club, NZART Branch 05.

With thanks on behalf of the group,

Mark Atherton

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

Charles F. brought along some 3D print samples, including a quite 
amazing single-filament-thick helical vase. He talked about his 
experiences using Fusion 360, and two years of using a Chinese laser 
cutter. He handed around quite a few samples, and after some discussion 
discovered that he is the only person present using F-360. Charles was 
very complementary of this design package.

William brought in a hand-crafted 10-15V voltage monitor with bargraph 
display. Nice to see real analogue technology being used.

Mike dropped off a *real* 100W street lamp; construction was quite 
different from the ‘100W’ LED modules on eBay. The commercial unit 
appears to run on around 120VDC at 1A, and is contained within a very 
sturdy aluminium casting. Thanks Mike.

Steven brought in his ‘rotating face’ robot project. His concern is 
about apparent lack of user-attention in human-like user interfaces on 
robots.

Robin talked about his transformer woes, and how to detect a possible 
shorted-turn.

Darren talked about his very low cost digital video recorder project, 
and his experiences.

Mathew talked about some ideas to carry multiple-redundant data over 
2.4GHz using off the shelf WiFi modules.