The Plan:
At my office, we have wisely instituted a new green office program. No, to my knowledge, this does not mean that were are now ordering up renewable energy for the office (which everyone can do by the way).

What it does mean is .. recycling. What it means to me. I have no more garbage can under my desk. After I eat something, I have to walk across the room and put the garbage in a new handy more central garbage container. ( I do have a recycling bin, but then, I don't use a lot of paper.. )

"What!?", you say, "how could they subject you to this uncharismatic outrage!".

Fear not. For I will build Trashy, a robot that will throw away my garbage for me. And Trashy will have charisma and general office functions, perhaps attending meetings for me. Trashy will also have aspirations to be a Broadway star and will sometimes go into a storage room to practice singing.

Eventually.

For now, I would just like to start with a model head, probably a wig holder, but attach this head to a webcam with motion detection software. If it all works, then the head will simply people as they walk by.

Not rocket science, but some good skill building. I have a Roboduino (designed by our very own Eric Forkosh), a couple of continious servos, a Macbook and a half a pack of Cigarettes.

Also, found some nice code in Actionscript 3.0 we can use for the motion detection:
http://blog.soulwire.co.uk/flash/actionscript-3/webcam-motion-detection-tracking/

For those using a mac isight camera, you will need to find the Camera index of your camera:
http://www.squidder.com/2009/03/09/trick-auto-select-mac-isight-in-flash/

Once you have that index, you can either hard code it into the Main.as file that comes with the .swf from the first link.. or can somehow write that code from squidder into the Main.as file.

We will go over it later.

Finally, we will need to send signals from flash to Arduino. That I might have to figure out on the spot..
http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Interfacing/Flash

We are going to work with inertial guidance in a 2d plane, or navigating blind only using accelerometers and gyroscopes.

We have just ordered a gyro/ accelerometer combination board and some related pieces from SparkFun (http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=838). Anyway feel like they can help us get this connected to Arduino boards?

Also.. I will be reaching out to the Math meetup group to see if anyone wants to help out with the calculus for the intertial guidance code.

AND ABOUT BROOKLYN
If anyone would like to help that group get started we will make some time at the end of our meetup to talk about that. My idea is that the Brooklyn and New York Robotics groups will be independent but would cooperate on some projects and perhaps have periodic joint meetups. Suggestions are welcome.

Yes.. we have changed out name.. (from New York Robotics and Home Automation Meetup... to just New York Robotics)

We return yet again to the Cyber-Cafe near Times Square.
(Please keep in mind, they do not charge us rent, so please pick up a cup of tea, joe or beer (if you are at least 15 ... i mean 21) and support our venue?)

AGENDA

Arduino C (~30-45mins):
We already have a good start reading through our boilerplate code line-by-line. We will continue with this and showing newbies how to write code for our bot.

Robot Time (20-40 mins):
We have already discussed the start we are making with our Movement API. As I began to work on it more, it occurs to me that coordinating many robot commands through time and tracking their execution on parts in the real world can be rather involved. The Time module will be the first part of the MovementAPI to be tied up. I will show the progress on that.

Robot In Every Pot Plans
We will discuss and schedule our next hardware workshop, "Robot in Every Pot", wherein we assist people to build their own robots and hopefully put one or two more together for the benefit of the group. We will also discuss which new sensors we will attach to the existing robot.

Yes, I know, I know, Math. Maybe you are asking Why? Or maybe you are thinking, "math scares me". Well.. it scares me too, but we will find a way to get it done.

If you are bringing a laptop, please download Processing IDE from Processing.org.

So, we want to program a robot. Well, if we program a robot, we can make it do something in particular. We could make it go in a circle, a square, or even navigate in a maze. Maybe it will make the bed.

But, when we start programming the robot, we realize there are a whole bunch of problems to solve. What if it goes off course? What if something is in the way? or.. why do I have to write a hack every time I make a robot do something?

What we really want is the ability to program a robot easily and quickly. For this we need some fundamental equations and a set of commands (API). During this meetup, we will begin this process.

Don't worry about your math skills. We will find or make some functions to do the heavy lifting.

We return yet again to the Cyber-Cafe near Times Square.
(Please keep in mind, they do not charge us rent, so please pick up a cup of tea, joe or beer (if you are at least 15 ... i mean 21) and support our venue?)

Sorry for late announcement of Agenda,

Three parts today:
1. Practice with our robot programming in C. While we do this, we will write notes into the wiki page for basic C programming of an arduino. Hopefully.. everyone will get a chance to go. (don't be shy)

2. As part of our efforts to work with our robots in languages and interfaces other than C, today's project is to get a wiimote to work with the Processing platform.

(For those of you who are new, Processing is a java-based programming language known for being relatively easy to pick up and is heavily used in the arts. Processing programs can also be run via the internet like Flash. Processing can be found here: http://www.processing.org)

The project we are working on can be found here.
http://www.brockcraft.com/2008/05/15/how-to-use-a-wiimote-in-a-processing-sketch/

Next time, we will work to make Processing communicate with our robot as well. Then it might be possible to have a wiimote controlled robot using processing.

3. Discussion of outline of long-term goals.