Oct 13, 2007
These minutes are also available in PDF format.
Classroom
Well, this was the meeting scheduled for the great Hallway Contest. The classroom session was cancelled to give time for the contestants to fine tune their robots.
Class for November will be on working with abs plastics.
Business meeting
Upcoming contests will include:
November: No contest
December: the annual Talent contest
January: A can pickup and retrieval contest was proposed by Prof. Martin Mason of Mount San Antonio college. See draft rules
We have decided not to replace the SDRS mail list with a forum, but to create a new mail list for RSSC. This has not been done yet. Our webmaster was not here to report on progress.
The Great Hallway contest!
Please read more about the hallway contest here.
Show and Tell
Ron Rose showed a car compass which is available from Harbor Freight for $7. It provides a readout of 8 magnetic directions (N, NE, E etc) He has taken it apart and observed two coils mounted on the circuit board similar to those seen on more expensive compasses such as the SRF04. Can it be hacked?
Don Fears reminded us that there is a rather large hardware store with a lot of industrial and hard-to-find items with several locations nearby. See mcfadden-dale.com
John Davis showed his modified Hummer RC car which is now autonomous with bumper sensors and range sensors.
David Steffen showed another RC car which he is modifying. He has built his own pc board design using expresspcb. It includes an ATMega32 processor, an ARM9 embedded processor with Linux, Flash drive and WIFI. It uses Sharp IR range sensors and David intends to add sonar sensors also. It can be run from a remote computer and he is working on adding a webcam.
Martin Mason showed a mini RC car which is controlled by an IR remote.
Steven Gentner continued to amaze us with new functions provided by his RoboRealm software (free at roborealm.com). Today he showed a webcam mounted on a VEX kit put together as a pan and tilt control. With the additional feature of being able to shoot rubber bands, he was able to place the green target and RoboRealm would aim the camera (and rubber band shooter) straight at it and hit it.
Steven told us that he would be showing his RoboRealm software in the exhibit hall of the RoboDevelopment convention is San Jose on October 25 & 26. The following picture shows him explaining its capabilities to an interested crowd.