Vancouver Robotics Club monthly meeting, January 2013

This month’s meeting of the Vancouver Robotics Club was great! I showed off my Stewart platforms and got to see all kinds of nifty creations.

Aaron made this awesome sumobot from a LEGO mindstorms kit. It doesn’t follow sumobot rules, but who cares? It can out-push anybody there today.

There was also this great string of addressable LEDs. One light per address is exactly what I needed to build my ticker clock. Consider me sold! Even better, this string is run from an arduino connected to a linux box hooked up to a website running html5 sockets. What does all that mean? you can change colors on a web site and the string of lights changes to match. You can even see other people’s changes. Color Fight!

The same inventor made this cone of blinking LEDs. I wish I’d made video so you could see the patterns.

Marius and his two kids showed up with their home made sumobots. So nice! Meet YELLOW MONSTER and FLOWER HUNTER. I told them what I tell anyone: if you get me design files and schematics I’ll sell it in my store and give you 50% of the profits.Edit: They did!

The dad made this incredible Wall-E robot. It has all the range of motion and uses a kinect sensor to SLAM (Simultaneous localization and mapping) it’s way around a room.

As long time readers will know I like building virtual models of my robots before I invest in the real thing. This is the first time I’ve seen someone do the same thing, and it’s very clever. It even simulates the lag from the Kinect

I love the details int the head motions.

The challenge for next month is to build a line following robot. We have 12″ tiles with 3/4″ black lines that snap together to make a course. The challenge is to see which robots can follow the entire line. If more than one succeeds we’ll have a race. One of the newest club members promptly bought a CanDo line following robot. I like his moxy!

Next months’ meeting is Sunday February 10, 2013 at 10:00. See you there!