That’s right! The Robot Games are returning to the Western Canadian Robotics Society May 15th 2010! What will you be bringing to the competition this year?

With robots, it is always misleading as to the number of choices you have in your design, both electrically and physically. As Brutus has mentioned before, the ATMEL chips on an ARDUINO board are very popular amongst hobbyists as the core of their robot. My personal preference has been the PIC microcontrollers, made by MicroChip. What is your preference?

I got this email recently, and I thought I would share it verbatim, as I don’t think I could capture his passion.

In recognition of the 20th anniversary of BEAM,  I will be announcing a new contest that will be sponsored in part by G-Prime.   No spoilers yet, however.  Read below and get tinkering though – news forthcoming!

Hello Mark,

Thank you for your reply. Sorry I haven’t been able to get back to you quickly, work has been taking up all my time lately. Anyway I thought I’d send you a few pictures of some bots I built with recycled materials and components. The first bot I ever built probably has the most recycled parts on it probably because I was a student at the time .

You can check out some pics on flickr and post them on your blog if you’d like.

You can also check out some of my youtube vids as well, if you want to see my Rocket pummer and Shadow guide robot in action (2 separate videos) .

Recently my colleague and friend, Chris, has started up a not-for-profit group (called United Greenworks) that recycles old consumer electronics and other materials. The main goal of the group is to reduce the amount of re-usable electronic/mechanical components & other building materials that are filling up our landfills or that are going to foreign countries as e-waste. The group has been very successful in Grande Prairie on a small scale thus far and as a result Chris (who is also a robot builder) and I (and others) have been salvaging an abundance of very useful motors, chips, solenoids, wires, connectors, sensors, power supplies and switches out of old PC’s, printers, audio equipment, and Photocopiers. Photocopiers are the holy grail for us robot guys, just one has everything you need to make a bunch of bots for years to come. We have 6 photocopiers coming to us and it seems like just the beginning.

Chris and I are both passionate about the environment, electronics, and building robots and would love to show people and share with people how to reuse old electronics for new projects such as robotics. We would also like to share some of the free parts we are accumulating with other robot enthusiasts. I myself am a big fan of BEAM bots and the whole junkbot/solar concept and would love to see a category at the Western Canadian Robot Games that incorporated this area of robotics.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration Mark! Oh and thanks for the Sparkfun Freeday post, it’s nice to see others frequent that blog, Chris and I aren’t the only ones.

Regards,

Jeremie (aka skater_j10)

Good little video, courtesy of Trossen.

http://bit.ly/7BPVkW

This video demonstrates learning by example in an artificial neural network that controls the motion of a mobile robot. The robot uses four sonar sensors and three IR sensors to detect the ranges to nearby objects. A wireless controller is used to initially remote control the robot past some test objects while the robot records the sensor readings and motor control signals. This data is then used to train a 2×7 artificial neural network (2 motors and 7 sensors). Once the network is trained, it is used to control the robot without intervention from the operator.

Interested in setting up the Arduino IDE to work on Ubuntu 9.10?

Head over to codetorment for a step by step guide for Ubuntu 9.10 32bit edition.

Last Saturday we had a special edition of our weekly meet up. We asked our members to bring some of their robotic creations, and that was totally awesome. I’m proud to say that WCRS we have skilled and creative robot builders.  We are looking forward to challenge our robot builders in our next annual RobotGames .

Thanks everyone who made the show and tell event a success.

Botone, Created by Terry, was driving around nicely, using an Arduino, a ping sensor & 3 servos

A robotbuilder proundly showing an autonomus roverbot that he built and programmed

A new locally made product, from G-Prime, a very handy power supply board for robots,

Mini-sumo wrestlers upgraded with a laser cut sheet metal chassis kit

An arduino powered rover, built around an acrylic chassis

Kids are so quick learners, and Lego Minstorm is perfect to get started

Dave is telling how his BEAM walker robot is working

there was a lot of action and projects of all kinds on display

Curious to see how we use all that new space ?
We are using it every Saturday morning, as we host a buildfest/meetup where WCRS members and guests can meet and have discussions.
Not only that,  we are introducing new enthusiasts  to robotics as well.  This includes, for example- soldering lessons, Lego Mindstorm  programming/debugging, and discussions about new components and technology available on the market for hobbyist robot builders.
We are proud of the recent meetup we had.  It was busy and fun, and a lot of skills and knowledge were shared between members and newcomers.

Come and Join us!

Crowd all along the new bench

Folks having fun soldering electronic components

young new robot builders in action

Collin was showing us the brain for his new robot, a powerfulll 1 board computer, powered by high performance lithium batteries

Mindstorms NXT Lego in action