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What we did on Wednesday 15th September 2010 |
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Written by RichardJones
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Tuesday, 21 September 2010 |
Our first Kiwibots meeting following the earthquake took place at the Canterbury Innovation Incubator, 200 Armagh Street on Wed 15th September. Thanks to the folks at CII for taking us in at short notice and especially to Pete who spent a lot of time letting us in. There were about 20 or so in attendance, thanks especially to those who brought things to show. There is good news from Science Alive, their building is re-opening and should be available to us for the next meeting which should be on Wednesday 20th October, 6.30pm, in the Science Alive Seminar Room.
Here is a description of what I saw, please email me with missing items, missing names and details by 12.30pm Saturday and I will add them to the write up before publishing on the Web site and to the Brightsparks site.
Robin brought along a working demo of an AVR butterfly hooked up to three 1 wire temperature sensors and window winder motors driven via a relay board ready for installation in his greenhouse.
Charles had large colour photos of his home built CNC machine and sound reducing box that he used to machine many of the parts for his Dalek that we have seen previously. Also Charles bought along a larges box of small stepper motors.
Kay had his latest adaptation to his walking legs remotely controlled and steerable zimmer frame with a horrid laugh. The legs are now very powerful and lifelike running nicely with an amazingly effective spring in the feet. Even the steering linkage has simple and novel design solutions to awkward change of direction problems. We did wonder if he can walk backwards?
Hanno brought along the latest progress to T-Bots and 12-Blocks now running under Linux and Mac OSX. The port from Windows involved huge amount of work to overcome the real time issues of integrating with each OS. Hanno had a nice demo of a 3 axis accelerometer display hooked up through 12 blocks capturing plots of low frequency seismic activity. The MEMS accelerometer a LIS3LV02DQ was deadbugged onto a Propeller Demo board and has an I2C interface. Hanno also had a print of his new company logo coming out of a web competition that he ran, find it here: http://onerobot.org/
William bought along his huge LED displays functioning nicely as a clock. Sorry I didn't get to meet you William so can't say much more...
I brought along a GPS receiver (a $35US deal extreme sku 19498) hooked up via gpsd server to xgps showing the satellites, navit turn by turn navigation, tangogps map/satellite display and opencpn chart plotting marine navigation software.
I also spent a fair bit of time looking at a Samsung Galaxy S phone which caused me to wonder which phone would be the most mobile platform robot friendly? Certainly the Samsung with its micro USB port could easily bring out friendly IO to an AVR or Parallax board.
Paul Davey brought along an audio amplifier PCB that he had designed, fresh from being etched and drilled in the morning.
Apologies for things I have left out and lack of photos, hopefully we'll be back to normal next time.
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Richard Jones
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