Keeping Austin weird before weird was cool
At the Annual Business Meeting, held on 2024-12-29, the ballots were counted, and the results ratified by the Board of Directors.
Our officers are board members for 2025 are
Thank you for stepping up for service in 2025!
PLEASE TAKE NOTICE THAT a meeting of the Board of Directors of the Corporation will be held on the date and at the time and place stated below. The meeting is a special, annual meeting to elect Officers and Board Members held upon the call of the Corporation’s Board of Directors according to its by-laws.
Place of Meeting : Diogenes Makerspace, 1917 Hydro Drive, Austin, TX 78728
Date of Meeting : Sunday 29 December, 2024
Time of Meeting : 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Date Notice Sent : Friday 13 December, 2024.
The meeting shall consider and act on all matters and business which may come before the Board. Without limitation, you are advised that the meeting may consider any agenda which might be included with this notice.
_____________________________
Secretary
The last find in the folder rescued during the move-out from the old Robohut in February 2005 is a postcard advertising RoboFest 7, i.e., seeking additional funding for the event held September 14-15, 1996 at the Dobie Mall.
The gentleman pushing the shopping cart is unknown to me but he was someone known to members, Tom Davidson and Sonia Santana. It would appear that he is ‘dumpster diving’ (a technique to rescue from the municipal waste stream useful electrical, electronic, and mechanical components to repurpose into robots or robotic art).
In his shopping cart of goodies can be seen the Babbling Head (eying the gentlemen pushing the cart), Tai Chi Charlie (articulated arm above and to the left of Babbling Head in the photo), and the torso of a member of the Megabot Army.
On the reverse side of the postcard a small inset photo shows the Babbling Head admiring Tai Chi Charlie. The remainder is a plea for funding.
Luddites that we are, we think that this YouTube thing might stick around for a while. President Brooks Coleman has chased-down that bandwagon and leaped aboard.
Once we get 100 subscribers to the channel, we can get a custom URL.
For now, it’s
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCicL_thM5mLI4_zmNyiXKbA/
Tami’s daughter, Rachel, has established a memorial (blog?) for
DE Bob WB5AOH
Tami’s memory, and please share it as Rachel asked us to do :
www.forevermissed.com/rebecca-tamar-friedman/about
Rachel said that an address to send cards would be her own address :
Rachel Jagodowski
86 Waid Rd
Monson, MA 01057
As so much of the web is so very ephemeral, I have taken the liberty of extracting some information from the memorial linked above :
Rebecca (Tami) Tamar Friedman (nee Whaples), of Austin, Texas, passed away peacefully on Saturday February, 8, 2020 after battling a long illness.
Tami was born 07/17/1951 in Bloomington, IN to Dr. George W. Whaples, PhD and Dr. Miriam Whaples (nee Karpilow), PhD. Tami spent her childhood in Bloomington and Westminster, MD before moving to Amherst, MA with her family. She graduated from Amherst Regional High School in 1968.
She moved to Austin, Texas in 1973 where she graduated from University of Texas’ School of Nursing. She lived and practiced nursing in Texas for a number of years before moving back to Western MA in 1987 where she continued working as a nurse and became interested in the work of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GNU project.
In 1990, she moved to Brighton, MA where she worked as a hospice nurse and also worked for the FSF for several years before returning to her beloved home in Austin in the late 1990’s. Tami spent her remaining years staying involved in the FSF community, getting involved in the HAM radio community, cat rescue, and volunteering her time as a nurse to help others.
She was predeceased by her brother, Jonathan Whaples, in 1990, her daughter, Nylah Siddiqi, in 2006, and her nephew, Benjamin Rives, in 2008. Tami is survived by her son, Noah Friedman, and his partner, Carrie Lang, of Seattle, WA; her daughter, Naomi Friedman, and her partner, Matt, of Longmont, CO; her daughter, Rachel Jagodowski, and her husband, Matt, of Monson, MA; her daughter, Esther Friedman, of West Barnstable, MA; her sister, Barbara Rives, of Nantucket, MA; her nephew, Sasha Rives, of Nantucket; and her three granddaughters, Nylah, Analise and Molly Jagodowski.
Tami was very dedicated to her work as a nurse, especially as a hospice nurse. She truly felt that patients who were terminally ill still deserved not only the highest of care but the dignity and humanity that she saw as lacking in much of hospice and elder care. In her honor, please consider making a donation to the Alzheimer’s Association at https://alz.org/ to help advance research of Alzheimer’s and dementia as well as support those who are suffering from those diseases.
The days are short. The weather is colder than might be preferred. Hell! The month only has 28 days 75% of the time. Melancholy abounds even as the cedar pollen counts drop toward zero.
Tom Morin passed away – quite unexpectedly – in February 2007. Now Tami Friedman, another long-time member of The Robot Group, Inc. has followed suit.
From Eric Lundquist comes this missive :
I am sad to report that Tami Friedman KD5RJU passed away the morning of Feb 8.
DE Bob WB5AOH
She passed away peacefully in a nursing home after extended illness.
Right now, there are no arrangements planned, per her daughter Rachel who is taking care of her affairs.
If I get an address for the family to send a card to, I will pass it
along, but since she has no family in Texas, there won’t be any
services here.
Rest in Peace, Tami.
Can I get a quick show of hands from any members interested in doing a quadcopter build if I do a class?
The Lil’ Deuce frame I got from Dalton is really turning out to be a lot of fun and you can build one out for under $100. You can get a cheap, compatible 6-channel radio for about about $50 and same for the goggles so total cost would be $200 if you need everything.
You can get extra receivers for the radios for around $10 to $20 that can also work for controlling robots. Also, extra cameras with transmitters around $20 for the video if you want to telepresence (the kids call it FPV for First Person View) your bot.
These things are a blast to fly around indoors and you can set the video transmitters to the minimum 25mw so you don’t need the HAM license required for the higher power levels. Eventually I’d like to offer HAM test training classes too. So … anyone?
Here’s a couple of videos I did with the Lil’ Deuce, and don’t worry, it’s on horizon mode so no dizzying dives or loops. Also check out my latest addition to the effort of blending moving features to the indoor course.
[Posted on behalf of Yama Ploskonka by rutrohverlord]
This device, designed and built by Robot Group member, Yama Ploskonka, appeared in a cruder form at Maker Faire Austin on May 04, 2019.
Yama reports that, after just a few months of additional work, the device has now reached ‘production’ reliability.
“I just drop a file with tagged text, and the machine does the rest (of course I have to mother the pen’s ink supply, and set the paper, but that would be the same if doing calligraphy by hand).”
He continues, “I seem to find very few ‘practical’ writing automata out there, seems the concept is a bit abandoned. Yes, of course, essentially it’s just a CNC, conceptually not that much beyond an EggBot, and, yes, it would take just a few rods to transfer the movement to a more humanoid arm and hand. It might be that the actual challenge is then really in the software.”
“The text file goes in as text, including dimensions for the paper, column locations, then coordinates for each stroke in each character come as a CSV spreadsheet. Both get slurped by some Python code (150 lines), that spits out Gcode (for red, gold, black), and on to the CNC.”
Future developments include another attempt at Chinese writing.
“It proved too complicated, so I did a ‘step back to better jump’ by going first to Blackletter (Fraktur, like Gutenberg font), then to this medieval hand. That did help me figure out and pass several limitations that my software and conceptualization had, so I feel more ready now for what is probably still the most complex writing system in use, Chinese. As a fringe benefit, the code is more able to be ‘universal’ … potentially being able to deliver any hand that has been compiled.”
The Yamautomaton (likely a tentative name) is able to travel. If y’all have a venue, please speak up.
The DaVinci Awards are a way of giving recognition to the folks that help make the TRG such a success.
With Paul Atkinson doing the electronics & PCB work, Ed Gonzalez doing the layout and laser work, Rick Abbott doing the metal work, and Vern Graner doing the final assembly and project management, they delivered some pretty nice looking awards!
The awards have a built-in battery base with a microprocessor-controlled color-changing RGB LED. There are several modes of operation from static, blinking, and color shifting. The finished product was incredible … but what was even more amazing is the fact that they were kept entirely a secret until the day of the end-of-the-year banquet.
More information on color-changing LEDs and driver circuits : http://picprojects.org.uk/projects/rgb/
This page was modified (slightly) from the version found at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine by rutrohverlord on 2020-03-02.
