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Written by RichardJones
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Thursday, 21 October 2010 |
We had a very select gathering on an evening when a public meeting on earthquakes may have taken its toll on attendance. We discussed the idea of a new robotics challenge, Kelvin suggested something with an environmental impact, refinements and suggestions welcome on our email group. Our next meeting will be on Monday 15th November at 6.30pm (moved to 3rd Monday of each month). This is what we talked about, photos here .
Aiden spoke about a line following robot that he and a friend are developing. Kelvin talked about hands on sessions for electronics and radio construction sessions for young people to be held at the clubroom of the Christchurch Amateur Radio Club. More details to follow. Richard (not me) spoke about his work with large servo motors. Peter talked about life before school designing the carriages in daily use a the Gondola that follow a buried cable. Robin showed us his window opening project with windscreen wiper motor actuator, garage door torsion spring and AVR butterfly controller. Jonathon talked about reusing CD drive motors for a flying project. Paul brought along his helicopter and gave us some flying demos. Hanno brought along a leaking radio controlled submarine from Deal Extreme, his TBOT, and propscope and talked about a book soon to be launched by Parallax that sounds ideal for folks starting out in electronics. A working laser printer and optical mouse found new homes on the free stuff table. Thanks to all who came and shared. See you next time Mon 15th Nov in the Science Alive Seminar Room. |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 26 October 2010 )
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What we did on Wednesday 15th September 2010 |
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Written by RichardJones
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Tuesday, 21 September 2010 |
Our first Kiwibots meeting following the earthquake took place at the Canterbury Innovation Incubator, 200 Armagh Street on Wed 15th September. Thanks to the folks at CII for taking us in at short notice and especially to Pete who spent a lot of time letting us in. There were about 20 or so in attendance, thanks especially to those who brought things to show. There is good news from Science Alive, their building is re-opening and should be available to us for the next meeting which should be on Wednesday 20th October, 6.30pm, in the Science Alive Seminar Room.
Here is a description of what I saw, please email me with missing items, missing names and details by 12.30pm Saturday and I will add them to the write up before publishing on the Web site and to the Brightsparks site.
Robin brought along a working demo of an AVR butterfly hooked up to three 1 wire temperature sensors and window winder motors driven via a relay board ready for installation in his greenhouse.
Charles had large colour photos of his home built CNC machine and sound reducing box that he used to machine many of the parts for his Dalek that we have seen previously. Also Charles bought along a larges box of small stepper motors.
Kay had his latest adaptation to his walking legs remotely controlled and steerable zimmer frame with a horrid laugh. The legs are now very powerful and lifelike running nicely with an amazingly effective spring in the feet. Even the steering linkage has simple and novel design solutions to awkward change of direction problems. We did wonder if he can walk backwards?
Hanno brought along the latest progress to T-Bots and 12-Blocks now running under Linux and Mac OSX. The port from Windows involved huge amount of work to overcome the real time issues of integrating with each OS. Hanno had a nice demo of a 3 axis accelerometer display hooked up through 12 blocks capturing plots of low frequency seismic activity. The MEMS accelerometer a LIS3LV02DQ was deadbugged onto a Propeller Demo board and has an I2C interface. Hanno also had a print of his new company logo coming out of a web competition that he ran, find it here: http://onerobot.org/
William bought along his huge LED displays functioning nicely as a clock. Sorry I didn't get to meet you William so can't say much more...
I brought along a GPS receiver (a $35US deal extreme sku 19498) hooked up via gpsd server to xgps showing the satellites, navit turn by turn navigation, tangogps map/satellite display and opencpn chart plotting marine navigation software.
I also spent a fair bit of time looking at a Samsung Galaxy S phone which caused me to wonder which phone would be the most mobile platform robot friendly? Certainly the Samsung with its micro USB port could easily bring out friendly IO to an AVR or Parallax board.
Paul Davey brought along an audio amplifier PCB that he had designed, fresh from being etched and drilled in the morning.
Apologies for things I have left out and lack of photos, hopefully we'll be back to normal next time.
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Richard Jones |
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Meeting Report Wednesday 21st July 2010 |
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Written by RichardJones
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Monday, 02 August 2010 |
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Seventeen people signed the attendance sheet and the gold coin collection raised $19.90 for Science Alive. It was really nice to see some new faces, and a special thanks is due to those who brought along examples of what they are working on. See the link at the bottom of the page for photos of what we saw. Our next meeting will be on Wednesday 18th August 2010 in the Science Alive Seminar Room at 6.30pm.
Kay Edgecome arrived with a new bird model which he calls a Grey Peckatue. It did a good job of pecking with gusto at anything that closed the reed switch concealed inside a tin can. In keeping with Kays other models this one had wonderfully conceived linkages and shapes made from aluminium and brass, many moving parts, beak, neck, wings and all driven from a repurposed VCR electric motor and gears, beatifully mounted on a wooden plinth. The first photo shows Kay animating the birds wing motion. I wonder what Kay will bring next time?
Paul Davey brought along an AVR micro mounted on PCB with USB and Display interfaces. Part of his coursework at Canterbury Uni. Paul installed the AVR tools on my laptop and got an LED flashing during the evening.
Charles brought along large gears for his half height Dalak made on his home made CNC machine. He also showed Dalek pieces produced by his home constructed vacuum forming machine. When the weather warms up we may get to see Charles workshop. Here is info from Charles on the CAD/CAM software that he uses:
(1) CAD: CAD X11, http://www.graytechsoftware.com/, this is rather an odd package, intended for engineering work but quite powerful. Can import/export .dxf and a number of other formats.
(2) CAM: CAMBAM, http://www.cambam.co.uk/, reads .dxf files and outputs gcode. It's optimised for routers and cnc lathes with commands for 'cut a pocket', 'cut a profile', 'drill a hole' etc. It seems to be in a permanent state of beta but quite nice to work with. I found some add-ins for it for generating spirals etc.
(3) Gears: Gear template generator, http://woodgears.ca/gear_cutting/template.html. A special purpose tool for generating gear wheel profiles.
Hanno recently returned from his world tour showed us progress on the T-Bot and had three of them dancing in unison controlled by a fourth T-Bot relaying commands from his laptop. The laptop was using Hanno's 12 Blocks GUI to control the bots. The TBots are nearing production ready for the classroom. See http://mydancebot.com for more details.
Jimmy brought along a can lifter ready for the Robocup Competition on Sunday 15th August at Selwyn House School. The can lifter is constructed from folded aluminium sheet and has a neat arrangement to close the jaws and lift up the can with a single motorised winch. |
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Last Updated ( Monday, 02 August 2010 )
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