[chbot] Robotics Group meeting notes Monday 16 July 2018, 630pm, 5 Idris Road

[Mark Atherton]

Hello everyone,

Enthusiastic turnout with 24 attendees, and lots of huddles-of 
tech-talk. $32 + change (in gold, and flat-money) 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

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

Graham brought in an example of mild-steel and graphite work from his 
home-made spark-eroder project. Most interesting, and glad that progress 
is being made.

Darren arrived with his remote-controlled-cat-chaser. The system 
comprises a small RC car with a TV camera mounted on top feeding 
real-time MPEG video back to a laptop over WiFi. The laptop is running 
openCV, and has been loaded with a Feline-profile. When the unit is 
complete, the project will follow his poor moggie around his house…

Andy arrived with Cleo-the-55kg-great-Dane. First real animal at a 
Robotics meeting, left lots of smiles, and bruises due to her huge, 
waggy tail.

Elliot gave a demo of his integrated energy-monitor project. System 
comprises current-transformers, Arduino, and a raspberry Pi. Comms 
appeared to be mostly MQTT, with a node-RED back-end. Lots of new, 
planned features, including and electric kiln monitor.

Charles brought along his plastic-shredder, and an ingot of reformed, 
solid HDPE reconstituted from 10 or 20 two litre milk bottles.

William talked about his initial efforts to attach a VGA monitor to his 
home made eight bit machine. He has found resources from waveguide.se

Ciarán talked about a hydraulic computer - Moniac (Monetary National 
Income Analogue Computer) designed as an economic simulator.

Quite a pile of donated stuff from the group; thank you all.