How's it going?

[Jeff Sampson]

I haven't seen much traffic on the Iowa Robotics email list lately.

Is everybody busy? Or has everybody given up already?

Anybody have projects they are working on?

--
Jeff Sampson
http://tcrobots.org/members/jsamp.htm

[Randy M. Dumse]

Jeff Sampson said: Thursday, September 17, 2009 2:30 PM

> Anybody have projects they are working on?

Well, I have little visibility into the group from Texas, but if
anybody is looking for a project...

I'd suggest looking into the University of Northern Iowa Annual
Mini-Sumo Ship-In contest. Every year I teach a robot class or
two remotely at UNI. In the spring, we bring our students to
complete with anybody who wants to, world wide. We webcast the
video from the contest, and the whole world watches. (Literally,
we've had viewers from Japan, Italy, Argentina, you name it.)
Then we archive the video so it can be watched for years to
come.

Although it's a small beginning, Iowa does have an international
reputation for robotics, through this contest. It would be
wonderful if an Iowa club and the members would embrace the idea
and get behind this, hopefully entering bots. (Not to say we
wouldn't like to see Minnesota and Illinois enthusiasts here
too!)

Rick Brooks from Indiana has won the competition several times
now, and it would be great if he had some real competition. I
think Dave Hylands from Canada won the first.

Building a Mini-Sumo is not that hard. On the low end, Junun.org
sells a kit (for less than $100) we base our students robots on.
The level of competition really isn't outrageous, and a step up
from those kits with additional sensors or replacement motors
can make one very competitive.

So, I hope I'm planting a seed of an idea. Mini-Sumo is great
fun. As an Iowa farm boy grown up (you all know where Floyd is?
Grade school), I can say, it's a really nice place to get into
robots, and with some application, open for quite a bit of
growth without huge expense.

Randy

[kristau]

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 2:30 PM, Jeff Sampson <jsam...@pobox.com> wrote:
> Is everybody busy? Or has everybody given up already?

Busy. I missed the last meeting. I've a bucket of interesting parts
from an ex-laser printer to bring. Hopefully I'll bring them to the
next meeting?

--
Tired programmer
Coding late into the night
The core dump follows

[Dan Hockey]

I've been trying to learn how to control servos with my bs2. I also
found some one on the hero owners forum that wrote some code to use a
Hero1 with the MS robotics studio, but I haven't had any luck with
getting it to work the way they had it working. Maybe I need to reboot
this weekend and try again tomorrow;-).