[chbot] Robotics Group meeting, Monday 18 May 2020, 6:30pm, via Google Meet

[Mark Atherton]

Hello everyone,

An evening, hosted by Spencer using Google Meet, via Spencer’s account. 
Thank you for helping out Spencer. There were around 18 participants 
during the evening.

A few teething problems as (just about) everyone poked around at this 
new communications medium, and associated user interface.

Obviously no funds collected, but BR05 exec copied on this report just 
for information.

This was a very interesting, and successful evening. Robin and Bevin 
were brave enough to share screens with the group, which turned out 
quite well.

I had to leave the meeting at 9pm. If anyone has any notes on 
discussions past this time, please post them via our email-reflector.

Mark Atherton

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

The Evening was split into two halves with unprepared talks, and demos 
starting and 6:30, followed by Robin and Bevin’s prepared talks starting 
at 7:30pm.

At 6:30pm, Stuart Brown started off the unprepared talks with a demo of 
the Universal Robotics UR3. This is a multi-axis unit with six joints, 
and is intended as being used as a configurable calibration fixture 
associated with some agricultural equipment.

Andrew Errington talked about some commercial LoRaWAN products he had 
been working with. These units had been purchased from GoWireless in 
Rangiora and included the Ursalink UC1122 ~$100, Mikrotik LoRa 9 kit 
gateway ~$300, and Teltonika cellular modem ~$200. Everything appeared 
to be plug and play.

At 7:30pm, Robin Gilks setup a demonstration of an STM32 productivity 
build environment based on the STM32CubeMX. The presentation started off 
with some history about his first weather station, and how it migrated 
into a home-built system using an ATmega328P, then onto the 
STM32F103C8T6 (the blue-pill board). Toolchain of choice for the STM32 
were: compiler & tools https://xpack.github.io/arm-none-eabi-gcc/ 
<https://xpack.github.io/>, debugger https://xpack.github.io/openocd/, 
and the STM32CubeMX processor initial config generator from the ST web 
site. All of these tools are freely downloadable.

Bevin gave us a brief update on his work with and open-source ventilator 
project, before moving on to his compiler talk. This months topics 
included Macros, Templates, and Inlining. This continues to be a 
fascinating peak-under-the-hood about computer language-translation. 
Thank you for all of your work on this Bevin.

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