Portland Area Robotics Society

Regular Meeting Minutes

Oct 6, 2007, 10:30AM

Agenda:

1. Welcome and Announcements

2. Presentations:

a. Propeller Experiences %G�–%@ Steve Davee

b. PARTS Executive Elections %G�–%@ Roger Ray

3. News Reports

a. Show-and-tell

Announcements

1. The 2-year term of club officers is about to end. We are seeking nominations and volunteers for:

a. President

b. Vice-President

c. Secretary

d. Treasurer

2. We need to get started on PDXBot 2008. Anyone interested in leading the planning and organization should contact Roger Ray.

Presentations

• Propeller Experiences %G�–%@ Steve Davee
• Why care about the Propeller in the first place? Steve played videos from other Propeller enthusiasts.
• Graphics and data overlays on video with GPS, accelerometer and compass
• Proportional Integral Derivative motion control. This algorithm is available as a downloadable object from Parallax.
• Hexapod motion control with edge detection.
• Differential Odometry
• BOE-Bot BASIC %G�–%@ The Propeller implements a self-contained computer that lets the user to write code in BASIC and execute it on the robot, without an external programmer.
• Simultaneous generation of Graphics and sound streams. Algorithms exists for sound specialization %G�–%@ making sound appear to come from a chosen direction.
• The ’¡ÈHYDRA’¡É video game development system.
• Propeller maintains a library of open-source program objects for propeller.
• For example there are dozens of objects for sensors %G�–%@ i.e. compases, cameras, quadrature encoders, etc.
• Speech and sound
• The demo board includes a microphone and audio output. This demo board can implement a basic audio spectrum analyzer with video output.
• PARTS Executive Officer elections
• PARTS officers serve for 2 year terms, and the current term expires at the end of this year. Officers are elected at the December meetings. We are seeking nominations for all club officer positions (except the past-president position, which is always occupied by the outgoing president).
• The duties for officers are opportunities to expand the visibility of PARTS
• Meetings %G�–%@ our monthly educational forum
• Growing membership
• Website administration %G�–%@ the most accessible presence of the club.
• PDXBot - Our annual public event
• Community Outreach %G�–%@ growing the community of robot enthusiasts.
• Make nominations:
• Email to roger@anastasia.com, with ’¡Èsuggest’¡É in subject.
• Self-nominations are encouraged.