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

Last year at the joint D-Space/DunLUG meeting I made  a brief presentation on one of my research projects - the SPI-Scan system.  Several of my first prototypes are currently being used by universities, government agencies, and private consultants domestically and internationally to monitor the ecological health and human impacts on  shallow coast environments, especially mariculture farms, coastal developments, and ocean discharges.  After receiving feedback I wanted to take the next model 'to the next level' and built most of the optical mechanical systems, but the heart of the new s

Here are some notes on my book-scanner project, inspired by diybookscanner.org. This is a work in progress and will initially be a single large page and I'll probably update it and split it into a Lessons Learned (blind alleys, problems, workarounds and eventual solutions) section at some point. If you want something I haven't documented yet just email me: reece.arnott@gmail.com   Vision I am planning on building a book-scanner using 3d printed parts so that the design can be easily replicated in the near future when hobbyist 3d printing becomes more widespread. I want something that

Today we sorted and bagged the components for the Electronic Badge project - 40 kits, ready for people to start building them. The (draft) build instructions are available here: http://www.taniwha.com/~paul/dspace.badge/