ELKC 34.0 will be on June 28th at American Inn in North Kansas City, MO. For those of you that were at our last event thank you for coming and dealing with our power issues. Management has assured me that they will have all the power issues fixed for our next event. I am to meet with their electrical engineer to go over all our power requirements in order to get things fixed for our next event. We had a sold out event with almost 100 participants a whole 20 more than we anticipated. This event sold out two weeks in advance and we worked to get everyone in. We even rented an additional room to get everyone in.

Please keep in mind that the power issues were not our fault. We worked hard to get everyone back online and we had solid power the rest of the night once we got all the bugs worked out. We even finished all of our tournaments ending around 4am with Call of Duty 4 (Xbox 360).

Raffle prizes were really something else as we had Time Warner donate several items like Motorola Walkie Talkie’s, Digital Binoculars, and UFC grab bags. The main prize they gave us was an Ipod Nano! That sure was a great prize that flesy won. There was several more items donated by nVIDIA, Alienware, Bawls and CPU Magazine. Thanks to all our sponsors!

We are close to a location for MidWest LAN War 2008. There are not many locations in the metro area that can meet the power and Internet requirements for us to pull off a 250 person event. The location we are looking at will meet all these requirements plus more! We are looking at July 26th for this event as being the date and that will not give us much time to get to promoting this so I am sending this out in this email to give you all an advance notice.

As soon as I get confirmation on the location I will put out another mass email. We really want to make this event an all out LAN party for everyone so get signed up on registration. The more teams we get the more the prize pots. Right now we are looking at matching up your contribution. You pay in $500 we will match it up to a $1,000 prize pot for 4 different tournaments. If this new location works out for us we will are looking at holding 4 different events per year there giving Kansas City its big prize pot tournaments that you have been asking for. I really want to see some numbers in order to make this happen. Its all up to you to see this through.

- ELKC Staff

It looks like relative upstart Seegrid is doing its part to help robots snag a few more jobs normally reserved from us humans, with it now showing off its autonomous Industrial Mobile Robot system (or IMR), which promises to let self-navigating material handling vehicles work in environments that were previously not economically or technically feasible for them to serve. At the heart of the system is a beefed up “tugger” ordinarily used for pushing shopping carts around, which has been outfitted with four pairs of cheap CMOS cameras that are connected via plain old USB to the computer under the hood. That allows the bot to look around and build a 3D map of just about any area, which it can then follow to a tee over and over again. Head on past the break to check it out in action.

[Via Engineering TV]