Portland Robotics held their annual PDXBOT show, May 25th, in Portland, Oregon. It’s a great gathering of robots (and people).
Portland Area Robotics Society, founded about 10 years ago as an informal group of robotics enthusiasts, meets monthly in the Portland Center for Advanced Technology on the PSU campus.
Members come from all over the community, explained president Pete Skeggs. “Some members are high school or middle school students, engineers from Intel, Tektronics or other tech companies, teachers, artists, one guy who’s probably the best robot-builder in the club manages service departments for car dealers.” They put on a fun show with a variety of challenges and skill levels. You can read about Pete Skeggs, an anti-gravity hobbyist, in this cool Wired story.
Mark Madonis showed his Maxwell (right), an Animatronic talking Android of his own design. He has pre-fabbed kits available. Just plug in your PC and type. Maxwell speaks.
Other clubs include the Seattle Robotics Society which sponsors a yearly Robothon, held in October. The Southern Oregon Robotics Club, and the San Francisco Robotics Society have additional cool stuff. My own Robots in Portland page has hundreds of links, too.
Speaking of sensors on wheels, the annual Sensors Expo & Conference will take place June 2 - 5, 2003, near Chicago. The exposition will host companies whose sensor technologies shape the design and use of electronics including medical equipment, manufacturing, MEMS implementations, optics, test and measurement, detection, analysis, data acquisition, wireless and portability applications, robotics, and networking.
This overview touches on products from exhibiting companies.
- Airak: Fiber optic electrical current transducer (FOECT-3000) measures the magnitude and phase of electrical currents within wires using light to measure electrical current
- All Sensors Corp: The Digital Output Series, high-accuracy pressure sensors, incorporate a bidirectional, TTL level, asynchronous serial interface mode (9,600 or 19,200 baud) and synchronous communications.
- Baseline - MOCON: Plug-In Photoionization Sensor, piD-TECH, traces detection of volatile organic compounds in environmental and health/safety applications
- Crossbow Technology: Two wireless microsensor network systems: The MICA2 accepts up to 32 collection channels (8 analog / 24 digital); and the MICA2DOT, which accepts up to 15 channels (6 analog / 9 digital) and has an onboard temperature sensor.
- GE General Eastern: The Optica VGA is a humidity analyzer that interfaces with chilled mirror dewpoint sensors to provide primary dewpoint measurement as well as temperature and pressure measurements, its Ethernet port with Java applet enables Internet or LAN connection.
- Helicomm: ZigBee Ready Starter Bundles allow accelerated wireless-enabled product development through implementation based on the new IEEE 802.15.4 and ZigBee standards. Includes hardware for wireless network prototyping, software that leverages the strengths of the IEEE 802.15.4 and ZigBee standards, and support.
- Hi-Techniques: An Ethernet-controlled (wired or wireless) data acquisition and analysis tool for signals up to 20 MHz with signal conditioning front ends. Suitable for transient or streaming data capture in ballistics, engine combustion, and jet propulsion.
- Honeywell: The HMC6352 is an electronic compass IC that provides a digital heading relative to true north by sensing the Earth’s magnetic field. It combines two magnetoresistive sensors plus analog and digital electronics; and is used for handheld GPS navigation devices, wireless phones, PDAs, and automotive navigation.
- Instrumented Sensor Technology: The Shock Timer A Series (A-25, A-50, A-75) is an electronic, self-contained, battery-operated shock detector with date and time stamp that measures and records biaxial shocks (trigger threshold) to whatever it is mounted on.
- Kavlico Corporation: The P321, an OEM exhaust gas recirculation differential pressure (dPFE) sensor, measures pressure drops across an orifice (wet/wet) using ceramic capacitive sensing technology.
- Lightway Systems: A wireless optical profile sensor, LSC-RF1, can be mounted directly into a CNC manufacturing machine to measure various parameters and profiles. The sensor communicates via RF to the CNC machine control for in-process inspection and tool adjustment.
- Lion Precision Inductive: The ECL100 linear analog displacement sensor uses eddy current technology to provide both a 0-10 VDC and 4-20mA linearized output proportional to the distance from the probe to an electrically conductive target.
- Microchip Technology: A small wireless sensor and data acquisition system, enables the creation of smart structures, materials, and machines.
- EmbedSense: Es-2, a small wireless sensor and data acquisition system, enables the creation of smart structures, materials, and machines. It eliminates antenna and power consumed by RF communications.
- Millennial Net: The i-Bean 5000 is an ultra-small, ultra-low power, self-organizing wireless sensor network with support for radio technologies. Providing a scalable wireless sensor-networking platform, it is used for industrial and building automation, homeland security, and remote health monitoring.
- Motorola Semiconductor: The MPXY8020A, a tire pressure-monitoring (TPM) sensor, consists of a capacitive pressure sensing element, a temperature-sensing element, and an IC with wake-up, all on one chip.
- National Instruments: LabVIEW 7 Express v 7.0, a graphical development environment for automated sensor measurement applications, measures and analyzes data from multiple sensor types, and presents graphs, digital indicators, or web publishing. Engineers can focus on experiments, not hardware/software configuration and programming.
- Ocean Optics: Fiber Optic Carbon Dioxide Sensors (FCO2) are fluorescence-based optical sensors that connect to miniature spectrometers to measure dissolved CO2 in liquids for medical, biochemical, or environmental needs.
- Onset Computer: The Tattletale TFX-11v2 is a small SBC with integrated hardware and software components to simplify design of battery-powered and portable products requiring data logging and control. Suited for oceanographic, aeronautical, wearable medical devices, and robots, the small data logger/controller draws low power.
- PCB Piezotronics: A miniature Model 356A01 ICP accelerometer for performing shock and vibration studies in space-restricted locations on small, lightweight structures. It measures three axes simultaneously.
- Photon Control: A special phosphor coating on the end of a fiber-optic probe to sense a wide range of temperatures from -50 degrees C to 350/650 degrees C.
- Texas Advanced Optoelectronic Solutions: Programmable color light-to-frequency converter, the TCS230 integrates RGB filters on a single die. It is built on a high-performance light-to-frequency converter platform that enables 10-12 bit resolution per channel.
- Texas Instruments: The MSC1211, a data acquisition system-on-a-chip, which integrates a 24-bit delta-sigma ADC, a quad 16-bit DAC, a 8051 processor core, Flash memory, I2C interface, and peripherals for analog and digital processing using low power and noise.
- Vaisala: The miniature Drycap Dewpoint Transmitter (DMT142) measures dewpoint temperatures from -600 to +600C, provides analog output.
