March 10, 2012
Another great meeting with about 30 people!
(thanks to Walter for taking notes)
If you have taken pictures, please forward them to us and we will include them in this report.
Classes/Business/Next Competitions:
1 - Next month – 11:00-12:00 class: Parallax’s Propeller by Stephen
July or Aug class on ROS – Arduino Integration
2 - No competitions for April/May unless LA or Riverside Robotics want to do something – gives you time to prepare for June’s Hallway Contest, September Bipedal Race.
3 - There was talk about having a bipedal competition in September. This could be a simple race from point a to point b as fast as possible staying within particular parameters and feet/torso ratio.
4 - Other competitions might include having a robot find the elevator button and pressing it, quad and tri-pedal robot racing competition
5 - RSSC paid to secure rssc.org (domain name) for the next 9 years and 3 years of website hosting. Thanks Jimmie and Ron for taking care of this - Great job!
6 - Thomas won the monthly I.W.A.H monthly Trophy – Thanks John for the first working addition to the Trophy (solar LED).
7 - Thanks Bill for giving the final EagleCAD class – it was very good and inspired others to design their own boards. You can download the file here : RSSC-Arduino.zip (Caution! 2.94MB)
This Month’s Competition: Thanks to Pololu.com for proving the 1st place prize for this competition. We have more great prizes for the next competitions!
We had our RoboSumo competition with 5 minisumo entries – Mini Rockie (Alex B.) won first place! Congrats again Alex. (is difficult to beat Alex at any competition!).
Show and Tell: (sorry I did not take pictures)
1 – Dr. Bruce, Leaf 2.0 – Dr. Bruce has made some great progress with his Leaf 2.0 project. The robot is coming along with many of the main components mounted already including the very scientifically placed Kinect J sensor.
This is based on http://www.zagrosrobotics.com/shop/category.aspx?catid=1 and http://www.leafproject.org/
2 – Prof. Mason, brought a board he designed after being inspired by Bill’s EagleCAD class – See the always fantastic documentation here: http://profmason.com/
3 – Bill D. – showed his ATX breakout board that he designed himself – Very useful way to get a cost effective and versatile benchtop power supply from your old ATX computer’s power supply. You can read all about it here: http://profmason.com/
4- Walter – brought his new toy bought from the Microsoft Store at the South Coast Plaza – Microsoft Kinect for Windows – did preliminary testing and will do a comparison of both Kinect for Xbox and Windows next meeting.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kinectforwindows/
5- Thomas – Demo of his interesting electric wheelchair joystick controller with manual control via two servos and a VEX remote control/receiver. Very nice way to control an electric remotely or via a computer/microcontroller wheelchair without modifying the joystick. With this you can use the existing motor controllers from the wheelchair. Very nice Thomas! Also demoed a new kit from E-Z Robot http://www.ez-robot.com/Shop/ has voice/vision recognition, motor controller, Bluetooth – lots of potential! Thomas is doing more testing and we hope to see more of this kit in the future. Better pricing for the kit here: http://www.makershed.com/EZ_Robot_Controller_p/mkez1.htm
6 – Anikka from the LA Robotics Meetup Club visited us ( http://www.meetup.com/LARoboticsClub/ ) They meet at USC and various locations in SoCal. Checkout their Arduino classes they are planning – very good and diverse group. Their meetings and level of topics vary so you need to join meetup.com for free to stay informed of their various meetings. Annika invited members of our society to come and possibly play with a real autonomous vehicle that was donated to them from USC. The car was a DARPA Grand Challenge competitor.
7 – Dr. Hessmer http://www.hessmer.org/blog/ presented the new wheels he plans to use for his robot. He talked about http://www.lytro.com/ light field cameras – “capture the color, intensity, and direction of all the light, you can experience the first major light field capability - focusing after the fact. Focus and re-focus, anywhere in the picture. You can refocus your pictures at any time.
And focusing after the fact, means no auto-focus motor. No auto-focus motor means no shutter delay.”
8 – John – brought his RoboMagellan truck and talked about using the AVM Navigator Module used in RoboRealm http://www.roborealm.com/help/AVM_Navigator.php for June’s Hallway Contest. Great software with lots for possibilities.
9 – Tim – showed a nice board http://www.myamicus.co.uk/ a board that uses the MicroChip PIC instead of the ATMEL AVR – nice platform because it has the same pin layout as the Arduino boards so shields might be compatible. Has free compiler. Board is the Amicus 18.
10 – Alex – by this time my brain was fried and just remember that Alex demo his Leaf robot that uses ROS Cores to navigate (following a wall) in the upcoming Hallway Contest -http://www.ros.org/wiki/
Alex, if you have more info please add if you like. Thanks!