Prospective members and Veteran members alike should come to the McConomy Auditorium on Friday, September 3rd at 5:30PM for this semester's general body meeting. We will be announcing shop safety training dates, as well as other useful training sessions that will be held this semester. Also, you will get to know each of the official roboclub projects and learn how to get involved with any that spark your interests. Finally, the group will travel back to the club room so people can pay dues and pick up their free T-shirt.

Robotics Club Friends:

This past year has been a busy one for the Robotics Club. We have seen the introduction of a new project, stalwart projects awarded, and improvements made around the club. The URO has continued its support of the club's projects, awarding small grants to every Roboclub project that applied for one. Also, the club has been giving new projects access to some funding in order to get them rolling. One such new project is Stairbot, which provides the club a new interesting mobile platform to develop. At Meeting of the Minds, both the RobOchestra and Colony projects were graced with lifetime achievement awards for their continued hard work in expanding upon their projects. The ASME team also won first place at their regional competition.

A major change to the shop has taken place with the completion of Tooltron. Tooltron has given the club another way to keep everyone who uses the shop safer. Trained members simply swipe their CMU IDs and select which machine tool to use and begin their work. Hot air rework and desoldering stations are keeping the electronics bench up to date. We are also now the proud owners of a Makerbot Cupcake 3D Printer and are learning how to use that in our prototyping process. Making one off parts with our Cupcake in little time is a huge asset to the club.

So it's summer in the 'burgh, and that means two things: Heat and Rain. Well, come shelter yourself from the adversity outdoors and hang out with us in the club. If you're around this summer make yourself a part of the summer D-List: RC-summer at andrew.

Last weekend was the Robotics Club Open House. The event coincided with the CMU Spring Carnival as well as the National Robotics Week.

Each project put on a demonstration for those in attendance:

Air hockey demonstrated the capabilities of their air hockey robot through a few games against guests of the event.
Colony had their robots playing a game of robot tag.
Stairbot publicized their progress through a function test.
Roborchestra put on a demo performance of its newest instruments integrated with the rest of the orchestra.
Red Robot made an appearance at the Mobot Races and led those in attendance to the open house event.

iHeartRobotics published on their site. You can find the article here: http://www.iheartrobotics.com/2010/04/national-robotics-week-pittsburgh....

Thanks to everyone who came to our Rube Goldberg Ice Cream Competition last Friday night! It was a great event, and we hope everyone had a good time.

Congratulations to the winning teams:

1st Place: Lactation Station (Doug, Scratch, Alex, Julia)
2nd Place: Banana Splitters (Abe, Leto, Faiz)

UPDATE: Please visit our gallery to see pictures of the event: https://www.roboticsclub.org/index.php/gallery/v/social/rube_goldberg_ic...

The Rube Goldberg Ice Cream Competition (originally scheduled for Friday, February 12th) has been postponed. The event will now take place on Friday, April 2nd. Stay tuned for more information.

RobOrchestra will be playing in Skibo Cafe this Friday (11/20) from 6pm to 8pm. The show will include their instrument-playing robots, featuring:
- old favorites: BassBot, XyloBot, and SnareBot
- veteran back from retirement: Flutophone
- new faces: Whamola and High Hat

Come to the show to hear a great selection of songs, including Flight of the Bumblebee and Mr. Roboto. We hope to see you there!

Stay tuned for an update after the show (with video for those who couldn't be there).

We have created a channel on YouTube where we will post videos from the Robotics Club. You can find our page here:

YouTube - CMURoboclub's Channel

The first two videos have been posted, so take a look:

The Office theme - RobOrchestra

Hunter Prey - Colony

We will post more videos soon, so subscribe to our channel and stay tuned!

Thanks to all the projects that participated in this year's sponsorship competition. We saw some great presentations, and have decided to award prize money to the following projects:

• ASME EarthSaver: $500
• StairBot: $500
• RobOrchestra: $300
• Mascot Robots: $200

If you would like to learn more about any of these project, take a look at the Project page .

The club is offering two $500 project sponsorship awards for current club members. If you are interested in funding to start a new project or continue a current one, there will be a presentation session this Sunday (October 11th) at 3pm (location TBA) where you can present your project ideas to us. To apply, please send a short abstract (a few sentences) about your project proposal to us at officers AT roboticsclub DOT org by Wednesday October 7th. This abstract should just be a brief overview of your project. For the presentation, we will require more detail about your project:

1. Project Overview - this should be similar to your abstract
2. Current Team Members and/or Plans for Recruiting Members
3. Timeline
4. Budget - a list to justify your use of club funding
5. What do you want from officers? - besides funding, what will you need from the club officers? equipment? publicity?
6. Why do you deserve funding? - is your project a cool, new idea? will it provide a good experience (learning or otherwise) for its members?

Again, please send your submissions to officers AT roboticsclub DOT org. You can also direct any questions you have to the same address.