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