Saturday - March 3, 2001

Location: Portland State University Portland Center for Advanced Technology in room 28

At 10:30 am Daryl called the meeting to order and we proceeded to go around the room talking/displaying/sharing robotic topics.

• Daryl demonstrated a servo motor board that he constructed to show how a servomotors uses pulse width to control the position of the servo motor shaft. He shared with us the latest copy of Robot Science & Technology http://www.robotmag.com He then demonstrated his wedge shaped mini-sumo (Goliath) to every ones delight. (It is going to be hard to beat!!!!!) Daryl showed both models of the PARTS mini sumo.
• Dana talked about use of stepper motors and shared a stepper motor tutorial. http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/step/ He also showed off his new metal fire fighting robot body that his son made for him.
• Hal talked about his plans for a battle bot.
• Pete brought in both the PARTS mini-sumo kit and the PARTS infrared sensor kit. He also showed some new metal working tools he acquired form Micromark http://www.micromark.com He shared some DC gear head motors he got from C & S Sales.
• Brett shared his work with middle school students on building circuit boards to be used on their mini-sumo robots.
• Mick shared with us his PIC 16F877 auto loader board. The board can be obtained from the Dontronics web site. http://www.dontronics.com/rfarmer.html
• Larry brought in four mini-sumo contest rings. The materials were donated from Henstiens Custom Cabinets in Clackamas Oregon.
• Ron (from the Seattle Robotic Society) brought in some SRS Robothon posters http://www.seattlerobotics.org The SRS holds their meetings on the third Saturday of each month a the Renton VoTech Center - you can get directions from the web site.
• John demonstrated a small robot the uses stepper motors that are controlled by a Stamp II chip.
• Bruce showed some pictures of his six wheel battle bot he is making.
• Warren brought in a three-wheeled robot frame that he planning to develop.
• Mark demonstrated an ultrasonic range sensor he acquired. He also talked about Maxwell (his animatronics upper body robot) and the entire field of animatronics.
• Steven shared his work on an artificial pancreas.
• John talked about his progress with carbon fiber wheels.
• Justin talked about his work on sensor telemetry of an electric car he is helping to build.
• Eric demonstrated a tethered mini-sumo that he got from Daryl.
• Stu reported that he is still working on his battle bot design.
• Dale & Jana brought in surplus equipment they wanted to dispose of.

At approximately 12:30 pm we adjourned our meeting and went for Pizza!!!!!