•  Announcements
  • On October 20th Nordic Semiconductor is conducting an all-day seminar with members of their R&D organization on Friday, October 20th. They’ll cover the nRF52 chip series, Bluetooth 5, Bluetooth Mesh, and “802.15.4 and Thread: Mesh technologies for IoT applications”. They say somewhere that attendees will receive an nRF52 dev board. Registration here.
  • Monday, November 1st at Duke University the IEEE/Robotics (aka TAR) meeting will offer a presentation about Duke’s humanoid robot project. (This is not the same as the IEEE project being done at the Forge Initiative )  Again: this meeting is not at NC State for November. Pizza and beverages at 6:20 pm, the program starts at 7 pm. Location, parking, and other details and painless “register now”  button to gauge the pizza order are here. Program:
    • Humans and Autonomy Lab – Humans’ Interaction with Autonomous Systems, by Dr. Michael Clamann
    • Explainable AI, by Dr. Alexander Stimpson
    • Experiment on Humans’ Trust in Risk-Aware Autonomy, by Dr. Lixiao Huang
  • November 8th at the McKimmon Center at NC State will be PCB Carolina, “North Carolina’s Premier Electronics Trade Show”.  They offer outstanding food, a range of technical presentations and many vendor and organization booths to do with PCB design and production, and electronic assembly as well as related vendor’s wares. Details here.
• Problem of the Month
  • Paul presented his “sorting a mixture of colored marbles” mechanical+electronics problem and gathered ideas submitted by the attendees
  • Details of problem-solving sessions are available here.
• LTSpice talk. The materials are on Carl’s GitHub repository here  and he’ll update it as the project matures.
• Show-and-tell
  • Glenn Smith showed a charging base he build for his Ham Radio.  There was a 3D printed (ABS plastic) base with a LiPo charger board inside.  It plugs into his car dash (not via cigarette lighter port, but a more robust connection).
  • Paul MacDougal showed his mushroom growing box.  A plastic tub with a 12V fan, a CO2 sensor, and a DHT22 temperature/humidity sensor.  An Arduino monitors the CO2 and turns on the fan at 800 ppm CO2 and turns off the fan at 750 ppm CO2.
  • Paul MacDougal showed his pushup counter based on the horizontal ultrasound sensor technique suggested in the September meeting.  It worked well “in the lab”, which has hardwood floors, but not so well on carpet.  He will continue to develop this project.
• General discussion and final questions

Archive of past meeting slides, videos, code and design files