Saskatoon TechWorks Forum

There seemed to be some interest at the latest meeting about starting some group projects. I'll leave some suggestions here as a starting point.

* Larger CNC machine
* Quadrotor / UAV
* Space program (high altitude balloon?)
* Swarm robots
* Shop improvements
* Others?

Me and Subterraneanzen have been contemplating the space program, so we're happy to have more people help

I'd be all over the quadrocopter

WTF are swarm robots

All of those sound good to me. My preferences are to work on the space/high altitude program, swarm bots and 3d printing (possibly a bowden extruder for the cnc machine).

And swarm bots are "simple" robots that when they interact they exhibit a more sophisticated behavior.

I'm in for any project. The UAV and swarm bots are most interesting to me, but I'd be happy to assist with the CNC and shop improvements. I won't be able to dedicate any time to projects for at least another month, but I do intend on spending much more time there as autumn approaches.

This post on Hackaday has me quite interested in swarm bots: http://hackaday.com/2011/08/16/i-have-s ... more-52689

This would be fairly cool as a group project and would create something to hang in the space.
http://www.kitesurfer1404.de/tech/matrix/en

Yeah! I was thinking of something along those lines too. If we've got guys who want to do the circuits and coding, I'll spend some time soldering LEDs.

Circuits and coding would be easy enough. I'd be willing to help out with that once I get some time.

This one. It's called real-life particle animation, YouTube does not show up a video of this, so yeah.

http://www.myvidster.com/video/1649029/ ... tion_VIDEO

That site died on me. Here is the YouTube version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcfU8VN7vLo
I call shenanigans. I assume the pcbs inside the balls were supposed to be wirelessly controlled electromagnets (with no battery it seems), in which case instead of all being nicely pulled up towards the "Scrapyard-like HUGE ELECTROMAGNET $200", they should have all flown chaotically away just as easily. Every magnet has two poles, and there was nothing to keep the 'wrong' pole of the pcb from facing the electromagnet.