May 12, 2012
Thomas M.
Class : Arduino C Programming 101
Thomas gave an overview of the Arduino microcontroller, which has become very popular due to its low cost and ease of use. He covered basics of the Arduino, programming structures, and interfacing with LEDs, servos, and making sounds, as well as others.
The slides will be posted here once available.
Links:
For much more information, see the Arduino website : Arduino website
Business Meeting
Old / New Business
Treasury Report : The check for website has been deposited and we still have a good balance of funds for future projects and prizes.
Mini-Sumo Competition : RSSC and Riverside Robotics Society (RRS) have been invited to attend and/or compete in a mini-sumo contest to be held in San Diego, at Noon Saturday June 2, 2012 at ITT Technical Institute, San Diego. For more details see this flyer.
IWAH Trophy : No winner this month. We look forward to giving this prize away soon!
Announcements / Reminders
LA Robotics Club : This club has many meetings on a variety of topics. You are strongly encouraged to check out their website (or join!) and see what events may be coming up in your area ( link )
Riverside Robot Expo : This year it will be on November 3rd (tentative?). Please contact Thomas if you have anything that you would like to show. Also, any contacts that you have in academia or industry who are involved with robotics, we would love for you to try to get them involved!
Upcoming Classes (11:00 – 12:00)
| Month | Class | Presenter |
| June 9 | Botluck : Group discussion of projects (no class) | Thomas |
| July 14 (tentative) | Class on ROS & Arduino (tentative topic) | Rainer |
Upcoming Competetions:
June - Hallway contest
Choose your method of dead reckoning, wall following, odometry, etc. No landmarks may be added to the hallway. Alex will update with additional rules in the future.
October - Bipedal robot competition
Bipedal competition, due to lack of formalization, and many working on their hallway competition entries, has been moved back to October. Guidelines may be based on RoboGames (http://robogames.net/rules/biped.php) or perhaps a freestyle competition.
December - Annual Robot Talent Show
Show and Tell
Peter
Peter discussed briefly about the LA Robotics Club. They frequently (sometimes weekly) have open lab time with a large group working on Arduino projects. They will also be starting a Torrance chapter soon. For more info visit http://www.meetup.com/LARoboticsClub/.
Walter
Walter showed a robot base / body made out of a shop vac, that has a dual wheel drive underneath, complete with encoders and nice big motors. Very creative!
Gary
Gary discussed his design and showed some pictures of his Fester 2 robot. From the pictures, I can see this robot is too large to bring in to the meeting, at least not without a great deal of work.
Fester 2 is aptly named due to the ghastly bald anatomic head at the top. It will be programmed with ROS, and will be run on two i7 automobile type computers (one for Ubuntu and one for Windows) and has two crustcrawler arms, a neato vacuum laser scanner, a kinect sensor, and a variety of other parts. And now that it is built, it's time to start programming.
Steve
Steve visited the group from Colorado, where he moved to a few years ago. Steve is the mastermind behind the RoboRealm computer vision software.
Steve discussed some of the things that he had in the works, such as porting RoboRealm to a web-accessible embedded platform, such as the BeagleBone.
He also showed off an interesting robot that runs off of a netbook and a camera, using only the netbook battery and USB to operate! The body consists of snap together plastic plates that can be disassembled for easy transport during a flight, which he finds extremely useful. Check it out here. ( http://www.xaxxon.com/oculus )
He also discussed some FIRST robotics stuff that he is involved in. For more detail check out http://www.roborealm.com/tutorials/first/index.php
John
John showed briefly the IronMan robot hack that he was working on. He found it contains an interesting mechanism that makes the robot walk when voltage is applied in one polarity, but the arms move when voltage is applied in the opposite polarity. He then demoed the legs walking around, without the torso.
Ron
Ron discussed a servo board autopsy, and gave some interesting insight into what went wrong with the board (and to be clear, this was not something he designed). Most interesting was that the board theoretically should run over 10 amps of current. However, the current runs through a 2mm wide trace covered with solder mask. Ron pointed out that PCB trace, especially of this size, will act as a fuse at that current, and was evident from the large, black, crusty deposit where the trace once existed.
The point that Ron was trying to make, is that we should all take caution to design PCB's more intelligently.
Tim
Tim showed a 6 DOF IMU interface that he was working on, along with the software to render it into 3D orientation on screen. This will be used in a mobility project that he is working on.