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