Newsgroups: comp.robotics
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From: mwd@cray.com (Mark Dalton)
Subject: Northern New Mexico Robotics: Notes
Message-ID: <1995Jul10.143348.18586@walter.cray.com>
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Date: 10 Jul 95 14:33:47 CDT

The Los Alamos/Northern New Mexico Robotics Group met Saturday June 24th
at the Mesa Public Library.

At the beginning people met each other, there were a number of new people.
Ian brought the solor rollers, photovores and a legged walker on a Remote
Control.  His walker was very a wonderful design, where he could have his
walker flip over and continue walking.  It was build from 2 servos that
he had from a R/C plane.  Ian is 12 years old and is working on a circuit
to get his walker, walking autonomously.

Matt Moses, talked about his newest design of a walker.

Mark Tilden ran a video and talked about some of the designs and a little
on how they work.  He also talked about how/where to get parts, and what
he found useful.  He helped tear apart a old portable 2 cassette stereo,
and suggested the dishwasher with calgenite as a wonderful cleaner for
dirty electronics (like the VCR used as a brownie-muffin melter/warmer).
Parts such as the motors, microphone, plastic as a body, small rollers for
wheels, control panels as frames/covers, recharge/head-phone jacks, etc.
Also the easy way (under adult supervision) way of emptying a IC board,
that is by turning on the oven, and holding the board with a vice-grip
about 6" from the heating element until you here the solder start to pop,
then take it and immediately hitting it in the stainless steel sink.

Mark T. also talked about how to build a recharge unit on your robot,
so that you don't have to stress the robot by pulling batteries out.
(By using a 6VDC @100ma wall connect, then getting a plug, like those
 available at radio shack for about $1.75, and using a 47 Ohm 1/2 watt
resistor and a optional LED - letting you know it is charging.

Also there is a WWW page for "Solarbotics" which are kits for the
basic BEAM design with excellent instructions for those just starting
out.  From this solar roller design, we move kids to photovores, then
to walking robots.  These are currently all CPU free.  You can see
example of some of the designs on these pages.
	http://www.cuug.ab.ca:8001/~hrynkiwd/index.html
(BEAM - Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics and Mechanics)

Next time July 29th, we plan to teach people to build thier first
robots.  

Mark
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Mark Dalton       CH3-S-CH2 H                      H      O       H
Cray Research,Inc.      |   |                      |       \      |
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mwd@cray.com                |       |  ||   ||     |       //     |
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URL = http://lenti.med.umn.edu/~mwd/mwd.html

