Well we're starting up for the year - in fact we've already sort of started with regular Thursday and Saturday open workshops for the past few weeks - on March the 14th we're going to have our first organised night - of you haven't come before or want to check us out come on down - we're going to make LED throwies in honour of the first night of the fringe festival - we'll have parts for sale - these are buildable by anyone without any prior experience other than ability to use masking tape.   http://www.instructables.com/id/LED-Throwies/   It's that time of year again -

A month ago we did some freeform soldering for beginners, this coming week we're going to repeat the board soldering night for beginners we did last year. Thursday this week May 10th is board soldering night - please bring along a soldering iron of you have one. Last year we built badges with an Arduino on it that could do blinky LEDs, they were hard to program though without a special cable and used expensive 3v batteries. This year we have a new add-on kit that rectifies those limitations of the badge kit - it includes a USB to serial converter and allows you to power your badge from your

I've started giving a series of basic electronics courses at Makerspace - these are aimed at everyone including complete beginners - I'm avoiding maths as much as possible, the idea is to get an understanding of what's going on in a circuit without getting bogged down in the details - your goal should be to be able to look at a schematic, ask yourself  "what's that thing for?" and be able to make a reasonable guess I'm making heavy use of the excellent circuit simulations at http://www.falstad.com/circuit/e-index.html - your browser will need java enabled to use them. The first session

Here's some references from the 3D printing talk: First of all Thingiverse where you can find 1000s of things to build and make http://www.thingiverse.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------- The "reprap host" slicing application can be downloaded from reprap.org http://www.reprap.org/wiki/Installing_RepRap_on_your_computer you'll need a working Java runtime to use it. You need to download the config file for our working reprap from: http://www.taniwha.com/~paul/reprap.properties install it in ~/.reprap (or wherever else reprap host stores s

As announced at last night's meeting we're having a competition: Clothesline Racing The basic idea is to build a device that will travel from one end of a clothesline to the other and back again - there will be (chocolate) fishy prizes. The clothesline will be strung outside, as level as we can and fairly taut - but will probably dip a little in the middle. The rules we'll be using will be the same as those listed below: http://www.tcmaker.org/blog/2010/10/clothesline-race-o-rama-mk2-sat-nov-20-2010/ with some minor (largely metric) changes - we'll have a 30m line (if we can find s

I've uploaded my talk from last week about adding hardware to Arduinos - here's the slides as PDF.   Here's the promised link for  buying L298 H-bridges in NZ: L298