Feb 10, 2007
Classroom
Jeff Dunker continued his presentation on “Handling Uncertainty” for the 11 am classroom session. He covered various filtering and estimating techiniques including Kalman filtering.
Business meeting
We discussed club badges further. Ken Matassa said that badges cost a setup fee of about $8 plus about $6 per badge. Hence, they are rather expensive unless we get a big order together. As a temporary measure, and for visitors to the meeting, Alex Brown brought in a box of temporary name badges. Bruce requested that everyone wear one so we could remember names.
Bruce noted that our shared use of the San Diego Robotics Society mail list was causing some confusion since meeting notices and other items weren’t always clear as to which robot club the note was intended. He suggested that we start our own mail list to avoid this confusion. Pete Cresswell said he could take care of this.
Bruce asked for a show of appreciation for Don Fears who, for years, has been responsible for getting our meeting room opened and set up each month. He even brings donuts !
Our efforts to become an official non-profit corporation are finally coming to fruition. We are turning in a document to the state listing our officers and other business information. The contests for the year had their dates changed a bit. The latest is:
Line following contest today
Wall following contest in May
Find the wall socket contest for June
We discussed the rules for the wall socket contest a bit and Jim Ubersetzig will update them in the mail list files area.
Classroom sessions were also rescheduled:
- March: Genetic programming
- April: Vision software esp. Roborealm
- May: PICAXE
Ralph Mills was visiting our meeting. He is looking for mentors to assist in helping Orange County schools to compete in the VEX Robotics league.
Line following contest
Here you can find a report on the line following contest.
Show and tell
Shane Weddell from the San Diego Robotics Society showed his robot, Roberto. He talked about its video panel, camera, nano-itx board, battery pack and his plans for getting its arms moving. He is using a Sabretooth H-bridge which he recently got working. But, it didn’t work today, of course ;-)
James presented “Berbot”, a commercial toy R2D2 lookalike with voice control and a wireless remote. He also had one which he had dissected for our enjoyment.
Terrence Everett had his new robot, Jester, which is based on a modified Roomba. He has installed a mini-ITX board and a rather fancy D- Link 6620G wireless internet camera which can be panned and tilted with internet commands. While his modifications are not operative yet, he showed that the Roomba base provides the recharge
Thomas Messerschmidt showed his new Roomba which he got for just $150 with recharging system. He plans to also modify it to add more capabilities.
