LOCATION: Austin
DATES: October 9, 2005
THEME: Castle
ORGANIZERS: Laura & Tim

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This text was emailed by Tim to the group, and I've reproduced it here with Tim's permission. Thanks, Tim!
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All,

Here's a recap of last Sunday's TexLUG meeting in Austin. Our building theme was castle; we also put up a Great Ball Contraption and held a robotic sumo contest.

The meeting was well-attended, despite the last-minute change of venue from National Instruments to the Little Walnut Creek library. Among the regulars were Ed, Kurt, Laura, Lee, Mark, Pat, and myself. Also attending were three sets of kids/parents who entered the sumo contest: Evan Ryker and his mom, Michael Johnston and his dad, and Joey and Gavin with one of their dads.

Ed and Lee brought in a nifty set of castle MOCs. Ed had a number of small scenes with some of his as-always cool customized minifigs. Lee's black castle was also stunning. (I wish I'd taken more time to admire and photograph them, but I was swamped with GBC and sumo.)

Kurt brought in his fleet of Texas navy ships. It was really cool to see them all on display at once; he has done a fantastic job maintaining style and detail across his various sailing ships. His cutter is still in progress; I and others had a couple suggestions for working out a few details on his railings.

Laura and I showed off a small Great Ball Contraption, which got a lot of crowd attention. Laura brought in her scoop lifter module and James Loftus' ball counter. I had a rather free-form multipart construction, which Laura eventually managed to work into a loop with the other two modules. She was justifiably miffed at my lack of adherence to GBC module standards; next time I'll make my things fit.

James' ball counter dutifully registered a total of 1465 balls while we ran the loop. The mpg of the GBC is a little shaky (I used the movie mode on a small digital camera), but it captures the ball movement nicely.

The sumo contest was well-attended, and got lots of great reactions from the crowd. There were four entries, so there were six round-robin matches in all (two points were awarded for a win, one for a draw):