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. 

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.

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.