Robotics Society of Southern CA Meeting 3-9-13

CSULB Engineering department building, 302

Minutes : Doug

Class : Talking to SPI Hardware with Arduino, by Bill

Bill went through a powerpoint overview of the SPI protocol, and then began an example showing how to use an external EEPROM chip over SPI with an Arduino. One of the things that Bill cautioned is that you read the data sheet and also understand which mode the chip is using. He also cautioned that you should not use a solderless breadboard at frequencies over 1 MHz... he has seen lots of time and money wasted in the past (by others) trying to troubleshoot such an issue.

All of the files... presentation, schematics, data sheet, and Arduino code... are right here.

One useful thing for debugging or visualizing what is going on during SPI communication is a logic analyzer. The MSO-19 ($250) was brought up, as well as the ArduinoLab ($40).

Business Meeting

Contest Prizes

Walter has been sending requests for product donations to give out as prizes for our competitions.  He has received a great response from Pololu and Parallax.

Walter is donating a few Robot Builder's Bonanza, 4th Edition books and some TI MSP430 kits give out as prizes also. Phil also donated some nice pairs of calipers.

Upcoming Classes (11:00 – 12:00)

Upcoming Competitions:

Pick up a Can Contest

Wow, what a great turnout! Check it out here!

Show and Tell

Tim

Tim showed some projects that we was working on for producing sound effects. These boards were using A Plus IC's.

Sergei

Sergei discussed with the group some ideas about a self-balancing robot. Specifically, he discussed using Arduino to control motors with PID. Instead of loading the Arduino with the PID task, his plan was to add two LM629 chips to run the PID loop, which would free up the Arduino for higher level tasks without introducing latency.

Thomas

Thomas showed an interesting new take on the alarm clock.. the Clockie!! For those that struggle to wake up when the alarm goes off, Clockie is for you. The Clockie is a battery operated alarm clock, with wheels. The first time you hit snooze, it will give you some more rest. On the second alarm, Clockie will drive off of whatever it is sitting on and beginning driving around the room, forcing you get out of bed, find it, and then turn it off. You can find it online at Amazon, or other retailers.

Martin

Martin showed how easy it is to program motions for the Robotis walking robot (or any Robotis servo product) using the new CM-900 controller. He said that it took him about an hour to create a "pose player" that will take a set of poses, along with time intervals between, and interpolate those into a series of smooth frames. The CM-900 uses the Arduino IDE style environment, and is very easy to use. He showed how easy it was to pose the robot, capture the pose information, and then put that into the pose player for high speed development of planned robot motions.