Subject:
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January 2007 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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Mon, 29 Jan 2007 01:01:39 GMT
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Viewed:
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5234 times
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What a terrific meeting we had yesterday! I was really blown away by all the
walking robots people built. There were 7 fully working robots, and many other
prototypes that people brought as well. As usual, every design was different.
Some robots were based on the ways animal walk: everything from a prehistoric
fish just crawling out of the water, to a dog that had everything but a tail
that wagged! Others were purely robotic walkers that had little or no analog in
the real world. And there was even one biped walker, albeit not fully
programmed.
Doug gave an impromptu, but fairly detailed technical discussion about several
ways to get motors, which produce circular motion, to drive a leg, or set of
legs that will do a walking motion. It was very helpful -- if he had given it at
the previous meeting, I'm sure everyone would have brought a working robot!
Pictures of the robots can be found at
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=230333.
After our mini-challenge I gave a brief introduction to NXC, mainly meant for
people who've already been using NQC. (Apologies if this wasn't of interest to
everyone who attended.) During the talk I showed the NXC Wiki help file I've
been creating for myself to be able to figure things out. Many people expressed
an interest in getting a copy of this file for themselves. You can find it at
http://www.sunteleia.com/TiddlyWiki/. It is VERY rough, a bare-bones Wiki file
that I keep updating and correcting as I write more programs, and learn more
about how NXC works. So keep your expectations firmly in check if you choose to
download it. But it does offer the ability to make changes on the fly, add
examples, make corrections, add new topics, whatever, which can be very useful.
If anyone wants to create a BrickWiki version of this, please feel free to do
so! The whole community will benefit!
Our next meeting will be after the March SRS meeting. So instead of the end of
the month, we'll meet on March 17th, at the Renton Technical College. I'll post
more details as we get closer, but just wanted everyone to be aware of the date
change as soon as possible. The mini-challenge for next meeting is to build some
sort of a "demo-bot". Build anything that is interesting for a robot to do, or
which would be cool to watch. These demo-bots will be great to show the SRS
folks (who mostly build non-LEGO robots) what you can do with LEGO Mindstorms,
and also will be great to show at BrickFest PDX in Portland at the end of March.
(Which I encourage everyone to register for, and attend:
http://www.BrickFest.com/)
--
David Schilling
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