Monthly Meeting Recap – 8/12/12
Robot Show & Tell:
- Mike Dvorsky brought a few items he recently acquired from EPBuddy.com which has a terrific selection of batteries, battery chargers, parallel charger adapters, battery testers, connectors, and more. Mike specifically brought one of his parallel charging boards, a Servo Tester, and a battery tester which shows charge level, voltage, and more for various battery chemistries including li-poly.
- Dan Toborowski showed some pictures from the Mars Science Laboratory (a.k.a. Curiosity) which successfully landed on Mars early the morning of 8/6. All of these pictures and more can be found on the official NASA page here.
- Peter Campbell brought the sensor mast from Wheel-E which was damaged during the recent RoboMagellan competition. Peter repaired the mast by removing the thread section that broke off and machined larger 5/16-18 threads to replace the original 1/4-20 threading. He accomplished this using his Sherline lathe. This will hopefully provide better strength to resist failure from future impacts and other applied forces.
- Newcomer Carl Leibel talked about a project he’s working on to make an electric golf cart follow him autonomously on the golf course. Carl asked for advice on how to best accomplish the autonomous tracking and identification system. The group discussed many options including vision, infrared sensors, ultrasonics, Xbee, and more. We all look forward to hearing about Carl’s progress on this exciting project!
Event Recap:
- 2012 ChiBots SRS RoboMagellan Competiton – August 4th
- Wheel-E completed the entire course for the first time and won 2nd place!
- Pictures and video have been posted to the site here
- And here are some pictures posted by ChiBots
Upcoming Events:
- ChiBots Fall Competition – Date TDB – C&A Robot Factory, Libertyville, IL
- Mecha-Mayhem 2012 / iHobby Expo 2012 – October 13th – Cleveland, OH
Presentation:
- Josh gave a quick primer on Linux, the different types of available distributions, and it’s core functions.
Club Business:
- CIRC Group Event – Riverfront Segway Tour
- Look for a follow-up email to determine number of attendees and possible dates
- Community Event Opportunities:
- Boy Scout Illini Jamboree – September 15th – Champaign, IL
- CIRC will not be participating this year
- Boy Scout Illini Jamboree – September 15th – Champaign, IL
- Online Club Library Listing
- Mike and Josh are still working on this. We hope to have a full inventory list available on the site soon.
- 2012 RoboMagellan
- The team discussed the recent competiton and what we will be focusing on to prepare Wheel-E for next year’s event.
August 13, 2012 at 7:05 pm | Monthly Meeting Recaps | No comment
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