DPRG will hold its 2nd sesson at theLab.ms in Plano on Thursday, April 27th, between 6:30 and 11:00 PM. The event’s purpose is to help people complete their club or other robot. However if you have another project, please feel free to come work on it and socialize. Everyone is welcome.
Category Archives: News
Plastic Fastener Sumo Workshop
DPRG is proud to announce its annual Plastic Fastener Sumo Workshop. The workshop will be manned by experienced volunteers from the Iron Reign FTC team and DPRG members to help participants in the Roborama 2017 competitions (or similar) plastic fastener Sumo contest. If you need help with your Lego or Vex IQ system Sumo or line follower robot, this is where you want to be on Saturday, May 6th. The purpose of the workshop is to help competitors either get started or improve their Lego or VEX IQ based Sumo or line follower robot.
The workshop will be held at the Dallas Makerspace located at 1825 Monetary Ln #104, Carrollton, TX 75006 (Map) between 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM on Saturday, May 6th in the Interactive Classroom. The courses will remain setup until 4:00 PM for practice after the workshop.
You must bring your robot or robot parts (don’t forget your battery and charger). No parts will be provided.
In addition to the workshop, the courses for other Roborama contests will be setup, so that they can be used to test robots and practice for the competition.
The event is open to everyone.
Monthly Meeting – April 8th
Meeting is at Noon, on Saturday April 8, at the Dallas Maker Space.
Members of Iron Reign FTC team will demo their award winning robot at the meeting. The Iron Reign team has a long time association with DPRG. This year they won the Judges Award at the South Super Regional and will be competing in the state championship. Their robot has become more sophisticated each year. It will be fun to view the construction and hear the strategies they are using in this year’s contests.
As always, remember to bring and share your projects with other members in an informal show and tell session after the presentation.
iMake 2017
iMake, a festival sponsored by the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History to celebrate the Maker movement, gives people a chance to be “a maker for a day”. The event collects demonstrations and on-hand activities created by a diverse group of organizations, and provides a venue for sharing them with young children and parents.
DPRG manned a five table exhibit with interactive demonstrations of robots, Kinect, CNC drawing, 3D perspective tracking, LiDar, automated xylophone, Roborealm modeling, manual driven robot arm, and 3d printing. Also, Big Robie made an appearance, all bright and shiny for this year’s event season.
The booth was crewed by Steve Edwards, Eric Chaney, Carl Ott, John Kuhlenschmidt, Ray Caslier, and Doug Paradis. The all day event occurred on April 1, 2017.
Monthly Meeting – March 11th
Meeting is at Noon, on Saturday Mar 11, at the Dallas Maker Space.
Eric Chaney will present an overview of AForge, a C# framework designed for developers and researchers in the fields of Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence. Eric’s presentation will focus on the use of AForge with OpenCV.
Highlighted is a robot using AForge.
As always, remember to bring and share your projects with other members in an informal show and tell session after the presentation.
Club Robot Build Session at theLab.ms
Mark your calendars! On Thursday, March 16th, DPRG will hold a robot build session at theLab.ms in Plano, TX between 6:30 PM an 11:00 PM. This is the first DPRG event at theLab.ms. The event’s purpose is to help people complete their club or other robot. However if you have another project, please feel free to come work on it and socialize. Everyone is welcome.
Monthly Meeting – Feb 11, 2017
Ron’s slide deck: slide deck (PDF)
Meeting is at Noon, on Saturday Feb 11, at the Dallas Maker Space.
Ron Grant will present an overview of the Processing environment, how to add libraries and tools, and show some simple examples. He will illustrate what can be done with the tool without a big commitment in time.
Presentation will cover:
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Easing into Java from C
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Basic graphics examples.
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Two GUI Building Variants.
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Serial Interface — talking to micro-controllers
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Video Capture
Highlighted is a joint project with Will Kuhnle – Interfacing a web cam to Arduino to control a 2D puck grabber arm.
As always, remember to bring and share your projects with other members in an informal show and tell session after the presentation.
DPRG Team wins Collidathon – Entrepreneurs IoT Hackathon
After DPRG team’s success at the AT&T Hackathon, other DPRG members decided to try their hand in a similar event. They received their chance with Collidathon, an IoT hackathon event orientated towards entrepreneurs. The event was spread over two weekends (Jan 21 – Jan 29, 2017) and offered a spot in the Collide Village Incubation Program to the top 3 teams. Approximately 250 people initially participated in the event, and 14 teams were selected to advance to the second week of the competition. The DPRG team took first place in the competition, besting all other teams.
The team had to abandon their initial project idea after market analysis showed that idea to be in an area with many competitors. They joked that they would have to name their company “Red Ocean Security” due to all the chum in the water. Their second project idea turned out to be in a much less explored area, hence their company name of “Blue Ocean Technology” or BOT for short.
The team consisted of DPRG members: Carl Ott, Thomas Ericsson, Steve Edwards, and Jian Shi. Also on the team was Gary Ramsey (not in the picture above), who is not a DPRG member.
Learn more about Collidathon at http://www.collidevillage.com/collidathon/.
DPRG Hackathon Team Advances
DPRG’s own Hackathon team of Jain Shi, David Ackley, Omar Barlas, and Carl Ott have successfully advanced to the next tier of the AT&T IoT Hackathon. They are one of four teams in the nation to be invited to compete in the Mechatronics challenge at the AT&T Developers Conference in Las Vegas held in early January. With their selection, AT&T has provided help with airfare and travel expenses for two members of the team. The whole team plans to go to Las Vegas and they are sharing the cost. If they place in the top three teams, they would win a nice cash prize. Wish them luck!
The team will be discussing the Hackathon experience and their project at the December 10th, 2016 DPRG monthly meeting.
The featured picture is missing team member Carl Ott who is pictured below.

Carl Ott