Meeting Log Fall 2009
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September 23rd, 2009
T101's board is under the process of being re-built. Discussion of future projects is under way along with future competitions for T101 to possible enter in.
September 30th, 2009
T101's board is complete and ready for order. We have decided about future competitions and projects. We will now be building two PCB one PIC based and the other Atmel based. The competition rules require a weight limit of 3000kg and a 20cm by 20cm robot width and length. This will require T101 to be rebuilt. The competition we will attempt to enter this coming semester is called RoboGames RoboGames. They have many other competitions that the club is concerning enter as well as the Sumo-bot competition. We discussed possible other competitions that we may enter in.
RoboGames
This is a competition that is found in San Mateo, California. It is one of the biggest Robot event/competition that occurs each year in the World. RoboGames RoboGames will take place this year on April 23-25th of 2010. This is an event that the club would like to enter our bots in.
October 7th-21st
During these past three weeks we have decided to breadboard the design of the both PIC and the Atmel boards before ordering. We believe that this will prevent future mishaps and provide a better PCB to work with. During this bread boarding process we will be design the whole robot, but based off breadboards instead of the original idea of PCB. This will allow us to troubleshoot the circuit a lot easier. Already we have caught several more errors with the broad design.
November 24th, 2009
A few of you have asked about some of the finer points of converting a board file in Eagle into the Gerber format that companies use. As such, a link to a tutorials of this with all the good details can be found here, here, and here
--George
December 2nd
This past week we finalized up the Atmel and PIC boards and will be placing the orders for both the boards this coming week. This time around we had someone double check the basics of the board layout to insure no simple mistakes were made this time around.
December 9th
This week we placed the order through 4PCB. There were several reasons for using this company. The main reason is they offer a student special for a board that is no bigger than a 6"x10" for $33. They also offer a turn around time of about a 1 week so typically the board is received within a week or two. Another reason is the company is an american company on top of that there customer service and website are very well organized. (Hopefully we will have the boards for this coming weeks meeting so we can populate the board during dead week).
December 16th
Unfortunately the boards have not come in yet, so we must wait until next semester since finals week is soon approaching.
-Populating the boards will be left for next semester.
