[chbot] CHCH Robotics Group, meeting notes Mon 19th Mar 2018

[Mark Atherton]

Hello everyone,

Enthusiastic turnout with 26 attendees, and lots of huddles-of 
tech-talk. $38 + 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

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

William absconded with a pile of small monochrome CRT monitors, and a 
wide grin. William -  it’s time to make a video interface for your 
home-made 8-bit CPU J.

Trevor has been investigating BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for 
Network Computing), and gave a talk on his research, along with a demo 
of his PI running as a BOINC computation-unit.

Andrew brought along his robotic platform;  a project which appears to 
have been initiated by an email originating from the Robotics group 
several months ago. The unit is based on Pixhawk hardware, a couple of 
motor-controllers, a couple of electric drill motors, a lead acid 
battery, and a GPS for guidance.

Synco arrived with his solar-powered electric aircraft. He has managed 
to get an air-frame power-density of around 50W/kg, which is pretty 
reasonable, using an old Styrofoam wing-set, with a series of 12 
flexible solar cells. Total available power is in the order of 40W in 
high illumination, and maybe 20W during ‘nominal’ flying conditions. He 
estimates around 15% power margin available upon launch, which is a bit 
close.

Spencer brought along his latest project; a modular PLC based monitoring 
system for wastewater. Major issue to date has been some (very) low cost 
4G antennas, that weren’t quite up to spec.

William talked about his '555 timer-powered windscreen wipers'