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Past Meetings: May 13, 2004
| Date: | Thursday, May 13, 2004 |
| Time: | 7:00 PM |
| Location: | Kelly Services Headquarters |
| Attendees: | 31 |
Before we jumped into our topic for the evening, we had a few announcements:
- Tracy updated everyone on a unique way she used her Garmin Forerunner 201--this is the wrist-watch GPS receiver that keeps track of time, speed and distance traveled for runners, walkers, hikers, bikers--and lawn mowers! Tracy was curious how far she walks when she cut her lawn--FYI it was 1.5 miles for a standard subdivision lot in Rochester Hills (approximately 150x75ft). Click here for aerial photo. No, the lawnmower didn't get away from me--due to lots of trees that have finally sprouted leaves the GPS signal is sometimes temporarily lost, which distorts the final route.
- A new low-cost easy-to-use PDA has just been released--this may be the perfect PDA for your boss!
- Due to a rash of end-of-school-year activities, we are canceling our June meeting. We don't normally meet in July and August, so our next meeting will be Thursday September 9. Have a great summer!
Agenda:
Our topics this month were:
- DPUG Member Carl Brooks gave us a quick review of his wife's new Palm Zire
72. Overall, a very impressive handheld. Main differences between the Zire72
and the Zire 71 are:
- Zire 72 has 32 MB memory; Zire 71 has 16
- Zire 72's digital camera has 1.2 megapixel resolution; Zire 71 has something less than that
- Zire 72 has Bluetooth
- Zire 72 does not have a universal connector
The Zire 72's street price is $299 which doesn't seem bad at all for all the features.
- DPUG Co-founder Tracy Dreslinski showed us ways she used her Palm over the
past few months.
- "How I Used My Palm"
PowerPoint presentation (PDF, 713KB)
- DPUG Cofounder Scott Dreslinski showed us tips for upgrading to a new handheld.
DPUG Member
Bill Osmer showed us his Palm-powered fire fighting robot. This was an incredible
demonstration. Bill is a robot enthusiast, and realized that with the serial
port on the bottom of most Palm handhelds that this was a powerful way to
communicate via RS232 protocol to other devices such as servos and sensors.
Bill devised a Palm-powered fire-fighting robot and entered it in an annual
competition at Trinity College in Connecticut. The robot must navigate
a model home (8 ft x 8 ft) and extinguish a lit candle without touching it,
and then successfully navigate back out of the room and the house, in the
shortest amount of time. There were about 100 entrants in the contest, and
only about 25% successfully completed the task. Bill qualified on Saturday
for the finals but failed to successfully extinguish the candle on Sunday.
His robot successfully found the candle, and depressed it's can of air (think
electronics cleaning), but didn't fan widely enough to actually extinguish
the flame. Bill programmed his Palm robot in Basic. He referenced a book:
The
Ultimate Palm Robot.
Bill even brought a replica of the model home used in the competition and demonstrated his robot to DPUG attendees:
Bill's robot ready to roll
The robot searches for the candle, located in room behind the panel labeled "G"
The robot locates the flame, and enters the room to attempt to extinguish the candle
The robot successfully extinguishes the flame.
Giveaways:
Thanks to our friends at PalmSource we had a big box of T-shirts, hats and pens to give out. Nearly everyone got something. Here's a photo of us in our PalmSource T-shirts.
