Seventeen people signed the attendance sheet and the gold coin collection raised $19.90 for Science Alive. It was really nice to see some new faces, and a special thanks is due to those who brought along examples of what they are working on. See the link at the bottom of the page for photos of what we saw. Our next meeting will be on Wednesday 18th August 2010 in the Science Alive Seminar Room at 6.30pm.

Kay Edgecome arrived with a new bird model which he calls a Grey Peckatue. It did a good job of pecking with gusto at anything that closed the reed switch concealed inside a tin can. In keeping with Kays other models this one had wonderfully conceived linkages and shapes made from aluminium and brass, many moving parts, beak, neck, wings and all driven from a repurposed VCR electric motor and gears, beatifully mounted on a wooden plinth. The first photo shows Kay animating the birds wing motion. I wonder what Kay will bring next time?

Paul Davey brought along an AVR micro mounted on PCB with USB and Display interfaces. Part of his coursework at Canterbury Uni. Paul installed the AVR tools on my laptop and got an LED flashing during the evening.

Charles brought along large gears for his half height Dalak made on his home made CNC machine. He also showed Dalek pieces produced by his home constructed vacuum forming machine. When the weather warms up we may get to see Charles workshop. Here is info from Charles on the CAD/CAM software that he uses:
(1) CAD: CAD X11, http://www.graytechsoftware.com/, this is rather an odd package, intended for engineering work but quite powerful. Can import/export .dxf and a number of other formats.
(2) CAM: CAMBAM, http://www.cambam.co.uk/, reads .dxf files and outputs gcode. It's optimised for routers and cnc lathes with commands for 'cut a pocket', 'cut a profile', 'drill a hole' etc. It seems to be in a permanent state of beta but quite nice to work with. I found some add-ins for it for generating spirals etc.
(3) Gears: Gear template generator,  http://woodgears.ca/gear_cutting/template.html. A special purpose tool for generating gear wheel profiles.

Hanno recently returned from his world tour showed us progress on the T-Bot and had three of them dancing in unison controlled by a fourth T-Bot relaying commands from his laptop. The laptop was using Hanno's 12 Blocks GUI to control the bots. The TBots are nearing production ready for the classroom. See http://mydancebot.com for more details.

Jimmy brought along a can lifter ready for the Robocup Competition on Sunday 15th August at Selwyn House School. The can lifter is constructed from folded aluminium sheet and has a neat arrangement to close the jaws and lift up the can with a single motorised winch.

Chch Robotics 21 July 2010

Sixteen people attended and the collection raised $17 for which Science Alive will be very gratefully received. Our next meeting will be on Wednesday 21st July 2010 in the Science Alive Seminar Room. I have a fancy screwdriver that was left in the room, and King has misplaced a laptop power lead. Please get in touch via the mailing list if you can help get these back to their owners.

Mark suggested we move to monthly meetings and a majority thought this was a good idea. Science Alive have agreed and the room is available for the remainder of the year, so we now meet on the 3rd Wednesday of every month.

Kay showed us incredible jointed moving models of dragon, cat, trebuchet, and a remote controlled model Roman Galley. Constructed from scratch many using his home made electric scroll saw, and intricate carving. Must be seen to be appreciated.

Peter brought along the MKII lawn mower prototype electronics and a huge motor platform on which they run. Now based on ATMega328, state machines drawn in Dia and auto generated code, FET Motor control, with HM6532 compass module. The platform wiggled across the room nicely on a set bearing. Peter also mentioned that it is very good at turning towards large metal filing cabinets. I think it should be called Luke as it uses the force.

Robin spoke about his 32 channel automatic watering system hosted on a Linksys WRT54G wireless router running openwrt. The system is web controlled using json objects delivered to a browser that overlays control rectangles over a satellite image of the property for the gui control interface. The web server uses open source http://code.google.com/p/mongoose/ which readily integrates the control function calls. The same json file delivered to the browser is also used in the server to associate the 1 wire IC addresses with the active areas on the gui. The water solenoid valves are controlled using 70c triacs, driven by 1 wire chips that interface to the wrt54 via a serial to 1 wire converter avoiding the need to write kernel drivers. A current transformer protects the well pump by shutting down the system if the water solenoids are not drawing the appropriate power demanded by the system.

Sachin presented his work using genetic algorithms. He showed a demonstration of a genetic algorithm approach to generating a photographic image using ascii art. Then a demo of using genetic algorithms to evolve a player for the  open source game Tenix. Each solution was iteratively refined using a fitness score, mutations were found to be counter productive above 0.5%. Eventually Sachin wants to teach his crab hexapod to learn how to move using the  genetic algorithm approach. Sachin has posted his open source projects on Google code here: http://code.google.com/p/neural-network-classes/ and here http://code.google.com/p/tennix/

Charles brought along his half size Dalek to be used at a wedding in February. Charles spoke about the journey towards making the Dalek involving glues and PVA not setting when sandwiched between polystyrene, completing his CNC machine, a vacuum forming jig that we saw last time, and different paint and shape choices. The Dalek is looking very impressive.

Thanks to all those who came and especially those who presented their work.

Our next meeting will be on Wednesday 21st July at 6.30pm.

Chch Robotics 16 June 2010

Sixteen people attended on our first meeting this year without daylight
saving. The gold coin collection raised $22.90 for Science Alive.

 Synco opened with a talk about problems with CAA approvals for GPS
boomerang and his new powered plane with choices for autonomous and remote
control to work around flight restrictions and address new markets. He also
brought along servos adapted for 180 degree operation with additional
resistors at the ends of the feedback potentiometer. The servos were driving
a laser for test purposes but ultimately are intended to drive a tracking
aerial. Hooked into the xplane flight simulator to track a simulated plane
position the pointer looked very convincing with a neat swivel at times to
overcome the lack of 360 degree rotation. See http://gpsboomerang.com

 Timothy showed us the beginning of a football robot simulation written in
python as part of the journey toward Junior Robocup football. The simulation
accepts a mouse entered track and displays a graphic that turns in the
direction of travel. Bravely Timothy also showed us the source code and
walked us through its operation. http://github.com/tfhmanning/Robotic_Python

 Hanno gave us a preview of his new robot development called TBot destined
for schools. It has dual geared motor drive with rototion sensors on large
wheels, 5 line following sensors, zigbee, bluetooth, usb, speaker,
microphone, tri colour LED with a target price of $50 US. It interfaces to
the 12 blocks programming environment and is based on the Parallax
Propeller. The robot will recharge its batteries through the USB cable.
Holes in the top plate accept many extensions such as Meccano, Lego and Vex.
Further details on http://hannoware.com <http://honnoware.com/> as they
become available.

 Timothy took to the floor again and showed further developments on his
tethered under water robot (ROV) made from electric motors, brass
propellers, drain pipe directional tubes and polystyrene to achieve neutral
buoyancy. Timothy showed a video of an ROV conducting a set of tasks for a
competition in the US.

 Charles brought along a vacuum forming jig for making model Dalek parts and
had a number of different materials that he had vacuum formed.

 Kay showed us his walking legs now with an energetic gait and steerable
zimmer frame that walked rapidly across the car park.

 Thanks to all who came and especially those who brought things to show. Our
next meeting is planned for Wednesday 16th June 2010. See http://kiwibots.org for
final date and directions.

Late breaking news: Expect an impromtu meeting with Chris Hamling from http://vexrobotics.co.nz/ regarding a new national robotic competition.

Richard Jones

We had a good turn out. The gold coin collection raised $23.20 for Science
Alive which was much appreciated. Thanks to all who came, and to those who
brought items to show and share. For those who could not make it here is an
account of what we got up to. Feel free send errors, omissions, additions
and suggestions for next session to our mailing list. Neville (Science
Alive CEO) visited briefly and mentioned that our members would be welcome
to contribute robot exhibits to a forthcoming robot exhibition at Science
Alive. More details as they become available.
Here is a link to pictures of some of the robots attending the event: 
http://picasaweb.google.com/rjchchnz/ChchRobotics2009October?feat=directlink

We started with the challenge to locate and push drink cans off the table.
Hayley came along with a Lego robot with an innovative pusher linked to a
table edge detector using a touch sensor. It performed really well and
Hayley gave us a good description of the software that drives it. 

Peter brought along the Roomba vacuum cleaner which did an eccentric but
effective job of pushing off all the cans. Peter also had his lawn mower on
display tethered by an electric field indoors, but also doing a good job of
cutting the grass verge outside while navigating away from obstacles like
walls.

I brought along a Lego robot with can lifter ready for next sessions
challenge to locate cans and lift them off the table. Next time I'll bring
it along with the software and charged batteries!

Simon showed a great video of a cup catching robot programmed as part of
the mechatronics degree coursework.
http://www.mechatronics.canterbury.ac.nz

Jimmy spoke about V-USB (formerly AVR-USB) and derived projects that can be
used amongst other things as a USB boot loader
http://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/index.html

Sanchin and Jimmy talked briefly about progress on the hexapod.

I showed the ATmega328 kits, Ladyada usb programmer housed in an old usb
mouse and a bootloader serial interface. Most of the kits were collected
and hopefully we will see some of these kits built into robots in future
sessions. I propose to hold a construction evening at Chch Creative Space
on Wednesday 4th November 7pm. I expect the primary goal of this session
will be to assist with surface mount components and program bootloaders for
those who want them. Bring you own tools and a tray or mat to protect the
tables. Phil says pizza boxes work well. Construction details on http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~rjtp 

Phil mentioned that Chch Creative Space will be closed for Kiwi PyCon 2009,
on November 7 - 8 http://nz.pycon.org/

Hanno spoke about 12 bricks and his forthcoming book to be published in
February. More details at http://mydancebot.com/

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 15th December just before Christmas, I
suggest we bring along some special eats to celebrate. Robot themed even
better!

Richard
 
Chch Robotics 2009 October