I hope everyone will be able to contribute something to this, our annual event, which has become something of a tradition since we acquired our projector some years ago. It should be an interesting and relaxed evening.
Peter
Gareth started the meeting by talking about Robots. He does not currently have one but had been watching videos of some Robot kits which cost $100 from https://robosavvy.com/store.
He was quite excited to discover the Camjam Edukit #3, which you can buy for £18 (excluding Pi and batteries) from https;//thepihut.com. [Oddly the URL pihut.com is for sale Ed.]. It is possible to use an Ubuntu core and ROS for control. The kit includes a set of two wheels and a ball castor third wheel, a motor controller board and 2 motors with sensors for following a black line and for detecting objects in front. You can use the cardboard box for a chassis. It can be controlled with a gamepad controller and WiFi controller. I hope we may see more of this if Gareth gets one in time for the gadgets evening!
The ROS (Robot operating system from ROS.org) provides libraries and tools to help software developers create robot applications without having to write much code themselves. It provides hardware abstraction, device drivers, visualisers, message passing, package management and more under an open source BSD licence. drivers. It can run on Debian, Ubuntu, C++,Python etc. and there are several distributions. (Ed.) Also useful to look https://camjam.me/. there are also GPIOzero worksheets £14.
Several apps were shown. Using Measure on an iPhone to measure lengths. Rumours of an IKEA App have not yet been proven, Housecraft can be used for room planning. It is free and uses the smart phone camera to let you use AR to place fully rendered 3D models anywhere in your home or garden etc.
Michael showed VR Thrills roller coaster 360 app on his phone.
Peter mentioned some of the features of his new car like adaptive cruise control and cross traffic detection and lane detection.
Michael also mentioned Nightfall and Solar System.
Peter mentioned VR Flight simulators for fighter aircraft.
This was largely visual so not easy to describe here. There was a quite a bit of (off -topic) discussion about military history and the air museum at Martlesham and Foxhall.
By the way Peter has just found the IKEA AR App in AppStore. It is called IKEA Place to distinguish it from their on-line catalogue IKEA Store. Unfortunately Peter's iPhone 5S is a bit too old to use it.
.
At the Committee meeting we decided on the following list of future events, but as always, if someone else would like us to introduce some other topics we would be delighted to accommodate them.
| ICENI Future programme 2018/2019 | ||
| 2018 | ||
| November 21st | Slide/Video Evening | All |
| December 19th | Gadgets and Party Evening | All |
| 2019 | ||
| January 16th | Winter Social Evening - TBA | All |
| February 20th | NAS + RAID + storage solutions | All |
| March 20th | New Devices and hardware SSD | All |
| April 17th | Mac Evening | All |
| May 15th | AGM - Computer Surgery | All |
The Social evenings dates and venues are just suggestions at this stage.
Our meetings are held at the Bourne Vale Social Club, Halifax Road, Ipswich IP2 8RE , for a map and other details please see the website.
http://icenicomputerclub.org.uk
Membership fee currently £15, visitors free.
"ICENI does not have any Insurance cover for computers or other equipment so please be advised that you bring machines to the club at your own risk."
However many household insurance policies will include cover away from home often with no increase in premium. (Ed.)
Our website URL is
http://icenicomputerclub.org.uk
Email to: iceni@woolridge.org.uk
I am open to suggestions on what people would like to have included in the website. If anyone would like a copy of the CD of our old newsletters this could be arranged.