[chbot] Robotics Group meeting, Monday 17 June 2019, 630pm, 5 Idris Road

[Mark Atherton]

Hello everyone,

Enthusiastic turnout with 20 attendees, and lots of huddles-of 
tech-talk. $28 + 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 products that are likely to be a disposal burden such as 
printers, toner or similar. 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

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

Bevin brought along a soviet mechanical calculator to talk about as well 
as quite a photographic tour of one of his latest mechanical calculator 
repair projects. Challenges include trying to drift out a (possibly cold 
welded) taper pin. All in all, quite a mission…

William brought in a homemade intercom using old telephones. Controller 
is based around an Arduino Nano. Nice recycling project.

Peter Harris talked about switched mode power supplies, more 
specifically a battery management system for a home-made wall-of-power. 
Quite a discussion ensued around how to spread load across ten high 
voltage constant-current sources.

Synco talked about a tiny 64 bit image recognition module. This US$21 
module includes VGA camera, a small LCD display and a CPU module. The 
main rub is that the CPU is RISC-V based running at 800MHz, with masses 
of I/O. The unit is configurable using a small FPGA, and is running a 
port of a micro-python wrapper controlling an embedded image-processing 
package.

Andy Gardner talked about his +-100kV volt meter !