Kansas City Robotics Society

It is time for the last meeting of the year, that means elections.  Voting will not be for only for the office of President and Treasurer but for the future of Kansas City Robotics Society.  Any member can hold office.  This is your chance to decide the direction of KCRS.  Meeting time is Saturday, December 3, at 12:30 pm at Town Hall at Science City.  If Town Hall is unavailable, we will meet in Resouce Lab.

There was many events happening at Science City/Union Station Saturday of the meeting.  The meeting was not at our usual space but in the Resouce Lab.  If you came and could not find the meeting, please send an email to president@kansascityrobotics.org.  Thanks.

Next meeting is Saturday, November 5, in Town Hall at Union Station.  Come and talk with other people who are working robots.  Share ideas and pick up some pointers.  Bring your robot or anything else of interest.  Come and see the progress made on the ORCA robotic marble run. 

A big thanks to Matt, Aaron and son, the Starks and the Turner family for helping work the KCRS booth at Maker Faire. We met many interesting people viewing our robots. There were over 40 potiential members expressing interesting in the club (signing the sign-up sheets). Many more took KCRS business cards. Thanks again to all.

Events for this summer for KCRS to demo:
8/5 – 8/6 Kanrocksas at the Kansas Speedway
8/14 Missouri State Fair
8/19 – 8/20 Parkville Mini Maker Faire

Gregory

(posted by Brian)

Our former President Dave Fase has resigned so that he can address some pressing demands at his work. Pesky day jobs getting in the way of our hobbies!

So elections were held at the meeting and I am happy to announce that our new president is the original club founder Joe Clark! Most of you know him and have seen some of the cool stuff he builds. He has the vision to grow the club and bring us a lot of fun stuff to see and do.

So we welcome Joe.

Well the meetings this year have been superb! We have had several new members join the club. The new members that have joined were parent child teams. You know we have family memberships too! This is perfect. They work as a team to build a robot. As an individual team they are part of a bigger team. Is that double teaming? It has been said in the past that “Two Heads are Better than One”. I never thought of building a two-headed Robot. Hummm.

The new members have already built robots. They are well on their way. We have one young lady and her father that put together an “EGG-BOT”. Have you ever seen a big green egg with 4WD that can do 1 meter per second? We have! A new VEX robot made the meeting as well. Also Mr “G” showed a robot with CV (computer vision) of sorts. It was sporting a rotating sonar unit too. I cant wait to see what well be brought to the April meeting.

You know you need to join the club too. Start having some fun. We have a lot of fun sharing ideas and knowledge. If you do not know how to build a robot, that’s ok because I did not know how to build one either when I joined the club. I have learned a lot about electronics, servos, motor drive systems and programing. All it takes is desire. The desire to learn and have fun.

Come to the April meeting and join in. Don’t let us have all the fun!

Meeting starts at 12:30 and runs untill 2:30 or when ever. SEE YOU, AT THE MEETING.

We will also have a build session April 16th at 10:00 am.

Lower power than Atmel based Arduinos. 16 bit rather than 8 bit. The dev board comes with a USB cable and onboard USB programming. It has a socketed processor letting you use it as a programmer. It has debug lines letting you step through your programs while they are running on the processor. The dev board is breadboard friendly and even comes with a crystal. Clearly the dev board is a loss leader to get you into the microcontroller. But even then none of this is expensive. All about the same at Atmels.

The next KCRS meeting is October 2, 2010 at Science City, Town Hall meeting room, 12:30.  We will have a presentation by Terry Frederick.  Please log onto the forums and help select which topic to discuss.  Look at the Meeting Schedule/October 2, 2010

For those that missed our line following event:

We have had trouble keeping the web site timely with the activities of the club. The Forum was just not really working. I did not want to move to a content management system like Joomla because it requires a lot of design, upkeep and has a rather sharp learning curve. So we are going to try the blog format.

Hopefully this will keep people more informed about the clubs activities.