Meeting Minutes 2007.01.07

Organizational

The proposal is due February 15th. It would be good to have a prototype to show BM by this time.

Please sign up for email list at yahoo groups! Email list will migrate to lee.org.

Mike out of town Monday-Thursday. Weekend not ideal for meetings. Olya has class Monday and Wednesday evening.

Next Meeting Tuesday, January 16th. 8pm, probably Mike's place.

Design

Currently Evaluating [ET301 SiRF III Evaluation Board], just GPS module available from SparkFun for $59.95

Looking at 3 axis accelerometer, possible 2 axis yaw rate gyros

Communication:

• 802.11a - poor range, good bandwidth, questionable tolerance of motion
• Bluetooth - lower bandwidth, [sparkfun claims 100m range]
• Antenna - can it be integrated in metal body? will it work through metal frame?
• other technologies?

Computation Platform:

• Want Floating Point
• AVR with FPU?
• ARM and PPC?
• power efficient i386?

Body:

• Steel rod
• aluminum tube
• sheet metal with plasma cut holes (available large enough?)
• clear plastic (polycarbonate, acrylic)
• recycled grocery bags (polyethylene?)
• fiberglass

Scale:

• current prototype 2.5 ft diameter
• larger diameter would give a more significant impression, maybe 4 feet
• taller than bicycles makes them more visible
• have to tradeoff weight, shipping constraints, cost, power

LED Options:

• illuminate entire sphere or a few regions in one color each
• make straight line persistence of vision array which forms images while sphere is moving forward
• make rotating display attached to outer shell which forms circular display as ball spins

Audio Options:

• Mechanical noise makers
• Bleepy R2D2 noises, simple synthesis with midi tracks
• sampled sounds, in memory with midi triggers. could be animal sounds, voice, instruments, etc.
• streaming audio tracks with high bandwidth communications

Obstacles:

• Ultrasonic Sensors to detect and evade obstacles
• IR sensors to seek humans

Mother ship :

• GPS base station
• central computer control
• power generation

Green Man Ideas

• Photovoltaics, built into mothership. Possible rent with insurance
• pedal power generation
• pedals drive mothership
• power meter on mothership indicates proportion of Green Power.
• power up at Illumination Village to avoid seperate generator
• Green Man motif in sphere surface and mother ship
• biomimetic behaviors (see below)

Behaviors

• school of fish
• ant swarm
• bee swarm
• flock of geese
• dolphins and sharks
• spheres change appearance - light, shape
• ballet - involve choreographer
• stand in line for cofee
• vibrate to show emotion
• mating behavior
• different sized spheres with different roles- mother/child, warrior, drone, etc.
• orrery - orbiting planets
• sinuous smooth motion is important, avoid jerky motion
• autonomous behavior - machine vision and learning
• seek humans, solicit pedalers