ROBOTMC

There’s a very nice robotics group called Robot MC that I’ve been frequenting for the past couple of years. They gather roughly every 3rd Saturday of the month in a very small town in Belgium called Sint-Katelijne-Waver. It’s not so much a club as a group of people with similar interests. There’s no real hierarchy, no general meetings, membership fees; when donations need to be made for the website, an envelope is passed around and people pay what they can.  It’s laid back and very non-committal, which is why I guess I like it so much.

They organise various competitions during the year with fancy prizes like…a mug.  This helps keep the whole thing nice and friendly with teams even helping each other! If there’s nothing big to be won, there’s no loss in helping someone else, is there?

At every meeting, one of the guys, Wim, goes around to take pictures of all the various people and robots or other contraptions that they’ve brought. They’re posted on the website for all to look at.

Last Saturday he took a few pictures of my table and one of them really jumped out at me.  I love the colours in it.

Members of the club give presentations about some of the things they’re passionate about or know a bit more about than others.  We’ve seen ones about Kalman filters, encoders, various processors and much more. I’ve done a couple of them and they’re a lot of fun. Next month I’ll be giving one about the NXT (surprise, surprise).

So, if you’re in the Netherlands or Belgium and you like robots or electronics or would like to learn more about them then I can really recommend you come check out one of our gatherings.