MIT's next annual 6.270 robot contest is
being held Wednesday, January 30, 2013 starting at 7pm ET (4pm
PT).

The live competition can be viewed at 
[link] <[link]>

From Ryan, our Facilities Liaison:

We ran into a space conflict and will need to move this month's meeting to
1300 Charleston. Same road but closer to Shoreline. We will be in the cafe
there so I hope it isn't too different for us.

Sorry for the short notice.

The website has been updated with the new location.

I am convening a team out of the Hacker Dojo that is building a group
designed Robot. We are building a differential drive floor robot, we expect
the robot to have 2 front drive wheels and 2 rear casters. The intent is
for the robot to be able to handle >>50lbs of payload, and be able to
easily navigate anywhere that is ADA compliant (light outdoor use is

If anybody wanted to see how it actually flies, there's a video here:

[link]

There was a discussion about sizing FETs at Wednesday's SIG meeting. A
statement something like "my motor driver uses 20A and these FETs are rated
for 30A" was made, which led to a whole discussion of FET sizing, and how
datasheet numbers for FET current are completely fictional for real world
current capacity. Here is the tutorial that I promised to send a link to:

Have anyone been working with the Brook Stone Rover 2.0? Who has hacked the
Rover 2.0?

Behalf Of robotMaker
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2013 3:50 PM
To: hbrobotics@googlegroups.com

This might not be exactly what you're looking for, but it's free and of
course it's a 3D cad tool. It's fun and easy to learn. Download it to your

The Speaker for January is Andra Keay, Managing Director of Silicon Valley Robotics.

Title: "Robotics is the next big thing in Silicon Valley"

2011 brought the National Robotics Initiative and a resurgence in robot sales, both industrial and service. 2012 brought the announcements of more robotic manufacturing reshoring to Silicon Valley and new accelerators and investment funds for robotics. Silicon Valley has the largest concentration of robotics companies and robotics research facilities in the US, in the middle of a thriving innovation ecosystem. Silicon Valley Robotics is a 501(c)6 business league or professional association representing the interests of individuals, startups, companies and organizations

As an experiment, I've set up a build farm on my personal desktop to run
ROS builds for ARM. At the moment, I'm building ROS Groovy for Ubuntu
Oneiric and Precise. I've only been able to build catkin packages at
this point, but it's enough for me to run the basics on my Pandaboard.

If anyone else is interested, my buildfarm status page is here:

I need to create a small enclosure and some small parts and I see Techshop
has a 3D printing service. They told me all I have to do is give them an
STL file. Can someone recommend CAD/CAM software I could use to make my
enclosure?

Bill W.

My brother Jon (j...@huv.com) is in Mountain View this week and would like
to drop in on the meeting.

If somebody is driving in from Mountain View that he can get a ride from,
or if somebody can make trains/bus recommendations, that would be great.

--
Dave Hylands
Shuswap, BC, Canada
[link]