Portland Area Robotics Society

Regular Meeting Minutes

April 4, 2009, 10:30AM 

Agenda

1. No meeting Room available – Fred is working to get this solved.

2. Welcome – Fred Stevens

3. Show and Tell

Show and Tell

First we found ourselves without a meeting room as we seem to have gotten bumped by some educator event. Fred is following up with the PSU site folks to make sure this doesn't happen again. I just so happened that we also had a good turn out for the meeting and doing a show and tell in the hall way was suboptimal.

Demo of a ~200$ Wall-ee robot which was cool and had a lot of sensors and interesting IR control interface.

Mark Gross showed my bag of parts and talk of my plans for my line maze solver robot. Passed around 2 brush less DC motors (with encoders) a teensy++ MCU board and the Pololu line sensors I'm planning to use. Mark floated the idea of doing a PARTS robot controller based on something like the teensy++ but didn't get a lot of interest.

We saw a toy robot dog with lots of servos and mysterious battery configurations. Fred has one of those dogs at home and said he would send some details on the battery.

Dave Shinsel showed a video of a home robot that navigates his house. It's the only robot I've seen to use many of the robotic route and mapping algorithms locally. We are hoping he'll bring it in to a meeting and give folks some warning he's coming with it.

We had a demo of a solar cell array connected with copper tape from a stained glass window shop.

We had a demo of a robot platform for a Magellan robot based on a RC frame from Tammies hobbies that are on sale cheap. (I forgot the price)

We had an announcement for a Make PDX meeting at the Techshop that is happening. http://calagator.org/events/1250456906 shuttle service from the sunset TC has been offered. (but you need to call WM for details http://opentechspace.org/ ) I may go to just to see what techshop looks like on the inside. So there is a good chance that I could car pool someone too.

Don showed his creepy head. :0 And talked about some Arduino introduction classes that will happen at PNCA in April. A very good way for beginners to get started on soldering up a MCU that you will be able to program that day.