[chbot] Robotics Group meeting, Monday 18 Nov 2019, 630pm, 5 Idris Road

[Mark Atherton]

Hello everyone,

Couple of new faces this evening; welcome.

Good turnout with 25 attendees, and lots of huddles-of tech-talk. $37 + 
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. Our host club also loves old hard drives, old 
network stuff and any old piles of copper wire you might want to dispose 
of :)

With thanks on behalf of the group,

Mark Atherton

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

Mark talked a little about the frustrations of getting a UDMA-5 ATA 
interface running on an FPGA based bare-metal system. None of the 740+ 
pages of the base standard 'T13 Project 1532D' are easy reading, and 
even required 25 page summary had some ambiguous drawings !

Charles brought in some of his first test pieces and projects fabricated 
using his new Omeo CNC mill. These included some two-part wooden boxes 
with resin-inlay.

William demonstrated his home-made analogue PABX system as well as an 
update on his home-made wrist watch project.

Colin brought in his home-made TXT based temperature and humidity 
monitoring system. Appreciate a list of software-tools you used for this 
project please Col.

Andrew E talked about a newly discovered type of rotary control, a 
'rotary pulse switch'  something like 
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Metal-shaft-rotary-pulse-switch-RS1002SCC0X_447250835.html

Paul brought in a coaxial quad-copter, (X8 configuration), with a Sparky 
2.0 controller. He talked through some of the interesting mind-bends 
associated with placing motors in line with contra-rotating blades, as 
well as controlling YAW etc.

Andy brought in a home-made robot, complete with LIDAR. Unit is built on 
a low cost frame, and uses an ESP32 processor. Lots of interest in this 
project.

Robin talked about his frustrating time DMA-ing Motion JPEG to/from a 
hardware accelerator. He also briefly mentioned that the system has 
about 14 concurrent DMAs rattling around...