A very well attended meeting with some people coming from as far away as Dunsandel and beyond to be with us. More robots than ever before and some very interesting and thought provoking presentations. The meetings focus was Line Following and all roboteers who showed a robot successfully following a line received a prize of a small chocolate bar.The Gold Coin donations netted $16.90, the donations go to Science Alive and are much appreciated. Here is my recollection of what occurred (sorry I mislaid my notes during the evening). Feel free to email me via the list with additions or corrections. Our next meeting is scheduled for Wed 15th October 2008, I'll be in touch via the mailing list if we can squeeze another meeting in sooner. The meeting focus will be line following and Tabletop Challenge .

John Wynard from Science Alive gave us a run through of the Robocup competition http://www.robocupjunior.org.nz/  and brought along the Rescue mats used in Sundays competition. I'll try to ensure that we have a Robocup course at each subsequent meeting. Not sure how this will be achieved yet (RJ). John is planning to build a soccer playing Robocup Robot and hopes to bring it to our next meeting.

Caroline brought along a rescue robot built by herself and Georgia that was a winner at Sundays competition. Caroline delivered a powerpoint presentation about their robot, and programming choices for the Lego RCX.Their robot ran nicely following some running repairs.Thanks Caroline for all the preparation you did and sharing your experiences with us.

Taylor brought along his RCX based tracked line following robot which ran nicely and earned Taylor a Crunchie bar.

Peter brought a selection of commercial robot kits based on wide range of micro controllers PIC, Stamp, MCS-51, Parallax.  Peter has an agreement with Inex to distribute their products in NZ and will be supporting them fully. You can see the range here http://www.robokits.co.nz They look to be amazing value for money. Contact Peter by email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it if you are interested in purchasing.

Howard Amos showed us a robot built from a magazine series. It had lots of sensors to do more than line following, and followed the Robocup line well.

Charles Manning  showed us an AVR based scratch built robot and mentioned a Lego NXT enhancements that he has published that increases the NXT sample rate. He also mentioned that the NXT interface is published so that low cost sensors can be readily added. See http://lejos.sourceforge.net/ 

Timothy Manning showed us his DSE line follower and showed books on 'C' programming using AVR microprocessors and also showed us a Beam Robot. I've been wanting to see a beam robot up close for sometime.

Hanno brought along his Dancebot (a two wheel inverted pendulum) modified to have the camera facing down. It followed the edge of the Robocup map beautifully by processing the picture from the camera in its Parallax Propeller CPU.

Finally I showed a tiny (non functional) line follower based on toothbrush motors, LM339 IC and a couple of photo transistors. I also showed a line follower entered in the 1997 IEE line following contest, and it still works!

Thanks to all who contributed..

Feel free to register on the kiwibots.org site if you would like to post your own robotics contributions.