Meeting Minutes, AHRC, October 27, 2001

Officers present:
Frank Borowiec - president
Richard Bodor - vice president

Attendees: 21

Club Business
Frank and Richard gave a quick Scitrek  update:

Volunteers are needed to help update web pages - each volunteer
will be assigned a specific page to make the job easier. Changes
should be then sent to Dale for posting.

Corporate sponsorship -  Scitrek needs collateral materiel  (press kit
and a tri-fold brochure on the club and it's activities) so that  they
can approach corporate sponsors for rally sponsorship and for prizes.


Scitrek robot needs work - This robot has been in their storage area
and could use some major updating. This could be an RBNO project.
Basically, Scitrek is offering us the opportunity to have an ongoing
display at the museum.  T-shirts will be offered to rally staff and
officials as a token of appreciation. All rally staff and officials
will be allowed free entrance to Scitrek on the day of the rally.  We
have retained a professional stage manager to direct the rally. This
will help raise the quality of the rally. In addition, the stage
manager will need an assistant. Preferably, this would be someone
interested in learning stage direction.

The official date for the robot rally has been set for February
9th, 2002.  The next meeting of the Robot Rally committee will be on
Tuesday, October 30, at 6:30PM at Barnacle's in Friday's Plaza. All
interested parties are invited to attend.  Starting in November, the
Robot Rally committee meetings will be held on Wednesdays. Also, there
will be 2 meetings a month until further notice.

Frank and Richard gave a quick summary of their visit to Dekalb Tech:
Richard Eggy and Stuart Rolf met with Frank and Richard to give a tour
of the machine shop at Dekalb Tech and to explain the procedure for
using the facilities. Details are available from Frank or Richard for
those interested in taking advantage of the resources at Dekalb Tech.

Nominations:
Nominations were opened for officers for 2002.
Nominations will continue through December and the election will take
place at the December meeting. Once again, we are going to try and get
co-vice presidents to help share the load.

President - Frank Borowiec
Co-vice President - Bob Baxter, Paul Burrell
Secretary - Richard Bodor
Treasurer - Clint Bridges
Webmaster-for-Life - Dale Heatherington (Not an elected position)
None of the nominees has declined to serve, at this time.

RBNO:
Paul gave a summary of the RBNO held in October. Clint brought
in a bunch of feeding machines salvaged from Siemens and they
disassembled them to salvage the motors.

Treasurer's report: There was no treasurer's report at this meeting.

New  attendees:
Kanav Jain - interested in robots.
Sam Repp
Matt and Mike Haggerty

Video - no video was shown.

Show and Tell
Frank brought in a door prize, a sealed membrane keyboard with
trackball manufactured by CKS. The winner of this month's door
prize was Charlie Oldham.

Richard showed a reference book on vendors of PC/104 equipment.
This book has been donated to the club reference library.

Sean Hussey brought in his new Cybiko Extreme. According to
Sean, it has 3 times more RAM than the old Cybiko (1.5MB), has a
built-in microphone and speaker. The unit is available from Best Buys.
Meanwhile, it seems that the original Cybiko has dropped in
price dramatically.

Dale went to Hobby Town USA to check out traction enhancing products.
He discovered that "Paragon Ground Effects" works well on slot car
tires but not at all on Lego tires.

Presentation - there was no presentation this month

Mini-Sumo Contest
Robor's Bane vs. Delta Force. Robor's Bane won the first round
and then Delta Force won the next 2 rounds. This is Delta Force's 2nd
month as champion.

The next meeting is to be held on November 17, instead of the last
Saturday of the month due to the holidays.