Meeting Report Tuesday 16th June 2009

We had a small gathering on a dark, cold and wet winter night. The gold coin collection raised $12 for Science Alive which was much appreciated. Thanks to all who braved the cold, and a special thanks to Gail at Science Alive who left the heating on for us, and to those who brought items to show and share. Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 18th August at 6.30pm. Suggestions for topic welcome. 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 and I'll add them to the http://kiwibots.org edition.

I brought along the new micromouse, with lathe cut wheels, single axle, rotation sensors and motor drive hooked up to the AVR with one forward looking optical wall sensor. Quite a bit further to go, I expect to have it running around a maze soon.

Hanno showed us Parallax Propeller based products, his IO dream kit, propscope, viewport, sections from his new book, and a rebuilt balancing robot. Hanno raffled a couple of propeller prototyping kits. We would love to see these back working next time.

Peter showed some strong ex garage door opener motors running on a 12v PSU and large wheels ready for fitting to the robot lawnmower. Peter also brought along his electric bicycle which we may get to try when the weather is a little more in our favour.

Morris showed us some motors and wheels from printers running round the floor tethered to a PC PSU, an Asus wireless router with USB connection and a USB serial port ripe for robotic applications and $5-$10 servos and a servo tester.

John came along with the Robocup rescue tiles and football at our request, sadly no takers came to use them. The Robocup competition for primary & secondary age students is Sunday 9th August. Details here: http://www.sciencealive.co.nz/robotics/RoboCup%202009%20Chch%20Newsletter.pdf

Katana showed us a rescue grab mechanism from http://www.robokits.co.nz/ which did a very nice job of picking up a small Robocup rescue can.

Jimmy brought along his ATTiny2313 for which he built a programmer and had LEDs flashing nicely from 'C' code using the winavr/gcc tool chain.

Quite a small turn out by recent standards with some new faces but some very thought provoking demos and ideas came up.