[chbot] Robotics Group meeting, 5 Idris Rd, 630pm, Monday 19 June 2023

[Mark Atherton]

Hello everyone,

Good turnout with 22 attendees, and lots of huddles-of tech-talk. $39 + 
change (in gold, and flat-money) collected and transferred into the 
robotics loose-change jar (for later banking).

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, Christchurch 
Amateur Radio Club, NZART Branch 05.

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.

David Closey donated some Apple products which will be auctioned on 
behalf of the Robotics Group. Thank you very much David.

With thanks on behalf of the group,

Mark Atherton

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Mark talked about development of a drop in replacement PCB to upgrade 
the controller in a low cost, high quality flashlight. Project was 
centred around physical PCB design, management of tiny components 
(QFN-28), and low power firmware. Other adventures included a deep-dive 
into the bootloader as well as watchdog mechanisms, neither of which are 
terribly easy to debug.

Bevin talked about production of high reliability, medical grade 
software. This included discussion of various applicable US standards.

Graham talked about powering and mounting power LEDs using 
chemical-milled sheet metal. He also touched on the design of a custom 
drilling fixture, allowing tiny holes to be drilled precisely through 
nuts, and threads.

Andy G talked about a welding course he attended. He also covered EV 
racing issues, and associated safety requirements. Finally a discussion 
about EV conversion of some large agricultural equipment.

Charlie talked about his homemade 3D to 2D image transformation code. 
The demo included wire-frame sample generation and manipulation in 
Python. Well done!

William talked about low resolution TV.