Attendance was good, considering that the tempratue outside was -8 degrees, and ice roads!
Click the photos to see a bigger version of the photo.

The Robo-Magellan group had a bit more to show on the robot.  Dave has mounted some of the boards.  Some test programs show some basic robot capabilities and motion.  There's still more boards to mount.  A Lot more wiring to do.  Way more programing and testing!  Cool to see it moving.  The most puzzling aspects is its surging motion.  Still to be determined if its caused by the Back EMF motor controls or if its some interaction in hardware.

Being there's been some discussion about the Gray Scale tail wheel Angle indicator... Here are some work bench photos from some time back.  Not shown is the IR reflective sensor that looks at the disk edge.  The Gray Scale is simply a strip of paper taped on with a all black to all white gradual shading transition.  From early tests on Buzz it looks like the Gray Scale will have to be adjusted some to get a better full rotation resolution.  Note also that the disk also serves as a commutation armature for transmitting power and data from the tail wheel odometer slot opto sensor.

Kim showed her progress on reducing the shaking problem of her Biped robot.  Also she has a nifty accelerometer that going to help in stability.

Joe showed his robot arm kit he plans to automate.

There were a bunch of SpyBots at the meeting.  Interesting talk and demos with them.

Ed has made new parallelograms for the gripper, to make it open wider.  This will help reduce the pointing precision need .
The code for the Grabber bot is also being rewritten to make it more modular, and workable.