... and only 29 days left until the event!
 
RoboGames Event Schedule and Rules 
[link]
 
Enjoy,
Camp

March 28, 2013    7pm     CMU Silicon Valley  Building 23 
Room 118

Smart SPHERES: Android-powered, free-flying space robots

Occasionally, while rummaging through the rubble pile that is my garage I find mystery components like those poorly pictured in the attachments. I think this is a quadrature optical encoder, but can't find any web reference to them. I also don't remember how I got them, but I think it might have been at a HBRC meeting.

IEEE will be publishing a series of weekly tutorials showing Evan
Ackerman getting his Turtlebot 2 up and running with ROS. Hopefully,
some of this will be useful to those with Turtlebot 1 and those of us
who are interested in ROS on other robots.

Details:
[link]

We've moved the SIG meeting to Hacker Dojo due to not being able to be
guaranteed room at Techshop. The feeling is that it's better to have a
consistent location than try to keep moving or either the location
and/or time.

However, to make this work, we need a pool of Hacker Dojo members to

Wednesday, Mar 20, is the date for our SIG meeting this month at the
Hacker Dojo. The meeting will start at 7:00 pm. SIG is an informal
meeting where we just meet and mingle to show off and talk robots. You
don't need to be a member of either HBRC or Hacker Dojo to attend.

Hacker Dojo is at 599 Fairchild Dr, Mountain View, CA 94043. Upon

Perhaps some of you are free to help? I can especially use some Robot
Inspectors for Thursday April 4th. See below. ~Elise

****************************** *******

I'm writing to ask for your help with the Silicon Valley Regional FIRST
Robotics Competition for high school age kids April 3rd-6th at the San Jose

Hello all,
Does anyone have any suggestions on improving GPS accuracy/fix?
I have already enabled WAAS, but that does not seem to do much. At 9 sattelites I get about 10-15 feet
accuracy (most of the time).

Also, for some reason, when I tested the GPS at the Menlo Park Tech Shop, I got 11 satellites inside of the building! While at my house in Sunnyvale I can't even get a 10 sattelite fix outside. I wonder how its going to be in San Mateo at Robogames...

Congratulations, Tony! Nice mention of coffee-fetching PR2.
 
Robots: Tomorrow's technology is still tomorrow
[link]
 
Enjoy,
Camp

We have two speakers for our upcomming meeting.

1. Elad Inbar: "Apps for robots and cloud robotics, and how to
engage high schoolers in STEM using Robot Apps"

[link] a boutique firm dedicated to teaching STEM topics using robotics platforms."

2. Jesse Monroy of Anybots

Anybots, a Virtual Presence company locate in Santa Clara, will

1. Be sure to disconnect all cables for your microcontrollers before throwing them into a shopping bag. Trying to re-solder a torn off micro USB surface mounted socket is difficult and might be impossible if you can't even find the torn off socket.

2. Check to see which Arduino chip you are using. Though the ATmega328 and 168 look identical, the programmer will balk at you if you get mixed up. A jewelers loupe or small electron microscope are useful for reading the number of the chip.

We are making progress with the project. I've been working on the navigation team. Patrick's ros_arduino_bridge can work on an RPi, and further more can be controlled from a remote wireless device.

[link]

I've got Mike's neato_node running on my laptop in groovy, but haven't got rviz to show me a cloud yet. My next step is to see if I can get the neato_node to work on the RPi. Does anyone know if a ros_workspace and a catkin_ws can coexist peacefully? It seems I can run one or the other but not both at the same time on my Unbuntu 11.10 and AMD-64 laptop.

I'm trying to get a simple Python program running under ROS (& Turtlebot).

Ubuntu 10.04 and Diamondback.

Following the ROS tutorials, I created a package:

roscreate-pkg my_py std_msgs rospy roscpp

I added a launch folder with a py.launch file and a nodes folder with a
node.py file.

I ran rosmake

I am trying to find o-ring belts for my Nanosumo robot. Researching online,
it seems urethane is the best material for belts. However, I have been
unsuccessful finding urethane o-rings around an inch I.D. What would be
really great is a kit, so I could get the perfect size and not have to make
a approximation when I order. Can anyone give me advice on where to get

I met this guy in the Internet of Things meetup. He has an interesting
product that may give people ideas. He makes cubes that can be used to
create musical compositions.

[link]

Bill W.

Has anyone done this and is there a good explanation of what the process is?

I tired to follow the tutorial, without much success

After I get the wstool, wstool init barfs at me.

BTW - making some progress at Ubiquity Robotics:

[link]

It is the same message no matter how I try to start it.

Either:

roslaunch neato_node bringup.launch

or

rosrun neato_node neato.py _port:=/dev/ttyUSB0

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/alan/groovy_workspace/n eato_robot/neato_node/nodes/ne ato.py",
line 44, in <module>

Folks,

The February meeting video has been uploaded starring David Crawley and
the Ubiquity Robotics Team. (Also includes Show & Tell and
Announcements as usual.)

[link]

--patrick

Has anyone got the ROS Neato node working in Groovy?

I have it working in feurte OK. But in groovy it is giving me a missing driver declaration. I've traced it to the

neato_node/node/neato.py file - here line 44 says neato_driver.neato_driver. And ROS tells me this file cannot be found.

I am trying to get a Nanosumo robot ready in time for Robogames. Is anyone
else competing in Robogames?

Bill W.