Our next meeting will be March 6, 2010 at Science City.
This will be the second of our hands-on meetings using the Arduino. Last meeting Vince showed us how to load the development software and how to load programs onto the Arduino. This month we will demonstrate how to capture information from line sensors and how to drive a motor controller. These will be the essential skills to develop a line-following robot using an Arduino. If you have an Arduino please bring it along with a laptop. If you don’t have an Arduino you might consider purchasing one. The demonstration will use the new Arduino Duemilanove, and the Ardumoto motor shield from Sparkfun. The discussion should be applicable to other Arduino’s and motor shields.
We will have a build session sometime between the March and April meetings. The build session will be a special meeting for members that want to work on their line-following robots in a group environment.
We need a volunteer for our April presentation. Please consider sharing your knowledge.
See you next meeting.
January 14, 2010 at 5:53 pm |
The H.M.S. Beagle in Parkville Missouri is now carrying the Arduino. If you haven’t been out to the H.M.S. Beagle, it is a great store dedicated to all things Scientific. Well worth a visit, and a local place to pick up an Arduino.
February 4, 2010 at 7:23 pm |
I’ll be bringing a Duemilanova and protoshield someone can borrow if they need one temporarily. I’ll also have at least one laptop people can use while at Science City (it has to come home with me though) and I might be able to scrounge a second if I get the time.
February 7, 2010 at 1:02 am |
I thought it was a pretty good meeting today. The presentation was good, the bulletin points were covered well with only a couple 15-minute tangents… not bad for us.
So my real motive is… (I was talking to a couple others who are in a similar boat too) there are a couple guys I wanted to get contact information so I could talk to them later, but I ran out of time & oppportunity before these folks split. I’m easily distracted.
If anybody knows of whom I speak and at least knows their name, please let me know as anything would be helpful at this point.
As for me, I was talking to a gent about his CNC machine. He sounded like he could use some help getting it to work better. Something with it has gone awry. I’m not bad at diagnosing and fixing stuff like that and I definitely know how it feels when machines go bad. So I’d like to have the guy call me or something and I’d be glad to have a look at it and see if it can be made whole again. I’m guessing it’s a simple fix and it just needs to be discovered.
We were also discussing… oh who was it…. Ted Nugent? no. Alice Cooper?… no not that either.
Oh yea. It was Pat Metheny.. One of the attendees has a pretty close connection to him (relative to the rest of us for sure). It’s likely Mr. Metheny is busy enough not to want to jaw with us hobbyists about the orchestrion technology he’s using, but I don’t know – maybe he’d really be into talking about it. We could do an interview for the KCRS blog if he’d be into it. I know I’d really enjoy stealing a few minutes of his time away. Having misspent my early adulthood doing the college gig with music, then later to get into this robotics thing, I’d really get charged up about the opportunity to talk to him if there was a chance. It’s worth taking a stab I think.
So anyway, I’d really like to twist an arm if it would do any good and ask if the gentleman who has the inside track who I spoke of earlier to contact me or Terry so one of us could step up and take that stab.
And just to repeat myself again, if anybody else reading this feels something familiar about my description despite my meager ability to do it, and knows names or contact information for either one of these fellers, please contact me. I’d appreciate it.
vinito64@yahoo.com
(a.k.a. “the other Vince”)