March 30, 2002.
The meeting was held at SciTrek and began at 10 AM.

Officers present:
Frank Borowiec
Richard Bodor
Paul Burrell
Bob Baxter

Attendees:
20 attendees

Intro
Frank made introductions.

Club Business:

Treasurer's report - there was no treasurer's report this month.

Rally report - there will be a debriefing scheduled to try and go over the
last robot rally. Anyone with feedback for the robot rally should tell
either an officer or one of the committee members. Also, we have an
opportunity to be involved in the Atlanta Hobby day in August in Centennial
Park. We will have a 20 x 10 booth including a tent and we want to have a
competition and several robots there. Anyone interested in manning the booth
should contact Frank or Richard or one of the club officers.

Ron Drew gave directions to Automation Direct - the location of our next
meeting on Saturday April 27, from 10 to noon. Ron has offered to give a
presentation at the meeting about automation direct

Frank has offered to make a presentation on infrared detection.

RBNO: the next RBNO is April 17th Wednesday. There is a vision theme. Paul
gave a quick explanation of the RBNO for the new attendees. The last RBNO
was on h-bridge circuits. They also looked at the CMU camera.

SciTrek Exhibit update - Keith gave report on the Mars Rover. The rover will
be inaugurated on Friday, April 5th. times will be posted on the listbot.

New attendees
Zack Raymond - heard about this from his mom, she heard from the media
coverage of the Robot Rally

Around the room:
Don Brown suggested an essay contest with the schools. This would be a Robot
Essay contest. Richard and Frank will contact SciTrek staff to see if they
can help with an essay contest sponsored by the club and maybe SciTrek.
Don also mentioned some opportunities for white papers for a project. He has
a business opportunity and wanted to discuss it with anyone interested
during the networking break.

Frank brought in the current copy of Circuit Cellar magazine with a good
robotics article on robot simulation and infrared detection.

Richard brought in a Lego catalog from the education institutes.

Dale demonstrated T-Zero - his new 12 pound battle bot. It has a pneumatic flipper. It
was able to flip a 4-pound book. It is intended for Dragon*Con Robot Battles.

Frank showed a wire dispenser pen that he built.
Sean Hussey brought in a block bot made from Lego Mindstorms.
Frank showed a few kits that he bought at radioshack.com - these were on
half price sale. He had a robot arm with a few points of articulation and
some kind of robot platform kit.

Networking Break:
The members had a chance to see the new mars rover exhibit. Next stage is to
reduce the power and the other thing is to slow the motors down. There is
still plenty of work and volunteers are needed for the next stages. Then
there is some graphics on the screen and interactive menus of a sort. The
rover currently uses a recharging scheme for power and has a wireless camera
with output to a monitor in a nearby pedestal.

Frank and Richard discussed the different ideas for the monthly contest. We
listed all the contest ideas so far and discussed the differences in an
attempt to limit the number of ideas. We are left with the "hurdle" which
ahs been renamed the "Slalom" contest and the "Can-can":
Slalom - this is a head-to head contest where there are obstacles or mazes
for each bot and they compete for time on side-by-side obstacle courses.
"Can-can" - this is an idea that Paul has been working on using soft drink
cans for object recognition and navigation. It involves a course with a grid
of some kind and cans that are located at different spots. A robot could
perform different levels of difficulty.
Keith brought up the idea of changing the vacuum, contest. These ideas
should be passed onto the robot rally committee meeting. Some of the ideas
are to change the material being vacuumed to be something other than rice -
maybe grits or ball bearings!

Video:
No video this week

Presentation:
There was no presentation this week.
Also, the Intel clubhouse seems to be closed for the Easter holiday so there
is no Lego SIG meeting today. We will put information about the next Lego
SIG meeting in the listbot and will try to do something on the web.

Also, we will try to put direction to Automation Direct on the web page to
make it easier for the members to find us.

The next meeting will be held at Automation Direct, which is up 400 at exit
14. Directions will be on the web page. We may have to reschedule nearer to
the date for the meeting if Ron is out of town, in which case we have no
location for the meeting. We are still interested in meeting locations and
members should send their ideas or contacts to one of the club officers.
Also, members are encouraged to check with the listbot for news about the
meeting location.

We are evaluating meeting sites, and are all pleased with SciTrek. The club
wants to thank SciTrek and their staff for all their help with the monthly