Subject:
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January 2003 SMART Meeting Notes
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.org.us.smart
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Date:
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Sun, 26 Jan 2003 04:24:33 GMT
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Viewed:
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2242 times
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Today's meeting was the 2nd anniversary of SMART. A quick show of hands
revealed that between half and two thirds of the people attending today's
meeting have been attending for two years! We also have a lot of new people
coming in -- while today's meeting was not as overflowing as a few of the
past meetings were, there were still a few new people.
We had two challenges at today's meeting. The mini-challenge was to find a
2"x2" token on a table. This must either have been a tough challenge or
people were very busy this month because only two people brought robots,
though there were others who had ideas on how to solve it. If anyone wants
to try again next meeting, I'll bring the black square :-)
Next we voted for what our next mini-challenge should be. We're now giving
extra votes to anyone that brings a robot for one of the challenges, or as a
special demo to encourage more people to participate in this way. The
winning challenge was to build a rope-climbing robot. I'll post rules in a
few days, but essentially the idea is to start at least a foot from your
rope, drive towards it, and start climbing it. You need to lift yourself at
least a foot off the ground. The rope, which you will need to supply
yourselves, will be tied to a 2x4, placed across two tables.
We had our first attempt at our Grand Challenge this meeting as well. This
will be an on going event for the next few meetings. The task is to build a
racer that competes with other racers on a figure-8 track. There were also
only two robots for this challenge, though a lot of people are still working
on theirs. Just to review the important rules a bit (though see
http://news.lugnet.com/org/us/smart/?n=142 for the full rules, as well as
how to request an ID for your robot), when a racer enters the intersection
(painted gray) they need to broadcast their ID. The RCXs should be pointing
forward for this to work properly. Also, the race will be started with a
remote by pressing the P1 button to start program #1. So make sure your
program is loaded in that slot. Racers won't know whether they are going
clockwise or counterclockwise around the first half-lap until just before
the race, so if your robot needs to know, have a switch, or a configure
program to run ahead of time. Take a look at the pictures (url below) to see
what the arena looks like.
At the meeting Gus did a presentation on Lego Geometry. This was very
interesting, there were a lot of new building techniques that came out of
it, specifically some new ideas about how to do SNOT (Studs Not On Top)
building. Thank you Gus!
Finally I showed a small demo of an RCX Drag Racing course that will be used
at BricksWest in a few weeks. After the meeting someone suggested that we
use this as our mini-challenge for May. If that sounds okay, then you can
already start building your Drag Racer now! (Lots of time, if you want it!)
I've uploaded pictures of this meeting to
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=32248, probably they'll be
available to view in the next day or so.
Thanks for everyone who showed up, and I hope to see you all at the next
meeting, (March 29th) with a rope climber, and hopefully we'll have a few
more Grand Challenge robots as well!
--
David Schilling
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