Minutes from the February 2010

Connecticut Robotics Society Meeting:

The meeting started at 1pm

22 in attendance

First up was Bill & his FLL (First Lego League) team demo. The kids had to build an autonomous robot to navigate a course to perform “missions” thereby earning points. Their robot could do 25-30 tasks in 2.5 minutes. Great job team!

Next we had our Line Following Contest. Here are the competitors and their stats:

Michael	Lego NXT tracked robot doing edge following	Time – 32 seconds
Mark	Lego RCX robot sporting 3 sensors	Time – 25 seconds
The FLL Team	Lego NXT wheeled robot using 2 color sensors	Time – 65 seconds
Jim	Solarbotics Sumovore	Time – 28 seconds
Jeff	Pololu Line Follower	Time – 15 seconds

Jeff took first place for speed and all the robots did a great job on accuracy – Great job to all who participated!

Next Jake showed a very amusing U-Tube video from IBM Fellow John Cohn entitled “Engineering Paradise”.

We then had a Zip Drive & Book giveaway.

There was a Lego brick sorter to show off. Mike’s robot was based on the Parallax Propeller chip which sports 8 independent “cogs” which can be programmed to run truly simultaneous tasks. The robot was well machined and performed great – Thanks Mike!

Next we saw Jeff’s Pololu maze running U-Tube video.

Jake then discussed with the group a Microchip discount offer that was extended to the CRS.

John introduced the group to his latest toy – a Texas Instruments ARM-based microprocessor board.

Finally Jake demo’ed to the group his Brainwave Analyzer that he purchased on the Web. The device was a Bluetooth enabled headset that used advanced DSP to pick up a person’s Alpha & Theta waves and send the data to a PC. By concentrating one could make a software ball rise and fall. Nearly everyone got a chance to try it out and we all had a lot of fun – thanks, Jake!

  -- Great job to all.

The meeting adjourned about 4:00pm.