About The Club

From HBRC WIki

The Homebrew Robotics Club is an off shoot of the famous Homebrew Computer Club.

The club has been meeting continuously on the last Wednesday of the month, eleven months a year since the first part of 1984. Organized as an independent club by Dick Prather (who worked for Alza Corporation), Dick was president from 1984 until the mid 1994 when he handed over the presidency to Chuck McManis. During the hey day of the dot com bubble finding a regular place to meet was an issue and the club met in Palo Alto at a Sun Microsystems facility, the Cupertino public library, and then at Castro Middle School. In 2005 Chuck turned over the presidency to Wayne Gramlich to carry it through its third decade. (No there isn't an official presidential term of 10 years but it has worked out that way so far). The current meeting location is on the Carnegie-Mellon West campus in Mountain View at Moffet Airfield.

HBRC is very loosely organized and has minimum number of officers. The current officers are:

• Wayne Gramlich (President)

• William Benson (Secretary/Treasurer/Web Master)

• Prof. Edward Katz (Facilities Liason)

• Rose Mills (Program Chair)

• Camp Peavy (Challenges)

• Michael Cipriano (Wiki)

• Chuck Rice (E-mail)

These offices are filled by volunteers stepping forward and offering to take on the task. The officer terms are until they quit or die. There are no club bi-laws.

Since Carnegie-Mellon West is graciously providing meeting facilities for free, there are no longer any dues collected by the treasurer. Thus, there is no official membership roster. The club is open to robot enthusiasts of all ages.

The club meets at 7:30pm on the last Wednesday of every month except December . There is typically either a presentation or a robot challenge, followed by show and tell, followed by "random access" (i.e. people visiting.) At CMU-West, "random access" is herded out into the parking lot at around 10:00pm, where it tends to continue for another hour or so during the warmer months.

In addition to the main club meeting, there is another smaller club meeting called the SIG (Special Interest Group) which meets on the Wednesday one week before the main meeting. There is no agenda for this meeting, just bring and talk about robots. The club has a web page that provides information about the topics of forth coming meetings.

This club prides itself on the number of members that actually build working robots. People have shown up knowing nothing and within a few months acquired enough skill to build a working robot.