[chbot] Robotics Group meeting, 5 Idris Rd, 630pm, Monday 15 Jan 2024 report

[Mark Atherton]

Hello everyone,

Good turnout with 22 attendees, and lots of huddles-of tech-talk. $23 + 
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.

With thanks on behalf of the group,

Mark Atherton

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Mark talked about an FPGA design of a glass (plastic?) teletype based on 
an LCD/PS2 keyboard. The PS2 keyboard interface poses some issues 
associated with clock noise causing desynchronization between TX and RX. 
Feature-creep dictated that the FPGA could also subsume the associated 
6800 CPU, so the complexity of a micro-coded implementation was discussed.

Robin Gilks talked about his ultrasonic wind speed measurement project. 
A new STM32 processor with high speed ADCs, DACs, and hardware floating 
point should provide a useful development platform.

Rudy Talked about PAL vectorscopes. As well as video, he also 
demonstrated audio graphics-drawing from YouTube.

Bevin continued his musings about encryption, and public-key generation 
using trivial maths.

Interesting YouTube content:

Polish Government purchased many $M of trains, all with built in 
mechanism so they fail at 1M km. Polish hackers were invited to 
investigate. Geo-fencing included to exclude competitive service 
businesses (!). 37C3 - Breaking DRM in Polish trains 
youtube.com/watch?v=XrlrbfGZo2k

Brain Robotics Interface project initiated by Australian Army. 
youtube.com/watch?v=hs8hjdoSKNQ this does not appear to be a joke.

Mitxela's design of an illuminated jewelry scaffold ear piercing. LED 
array on flex PCB inside a 16GA hyperdermic needle with end-mounted CPU 
youtube.com/watch?v=T3evnh9lT9k