Dunedin Makerspace
Today at makerspace: we applied knowledge of sizing resistors for limiting current through LEDs, to reduce the brightness of this fancy nightlight! It was far too bright initially, but the hot air station at makerspace made it easy to remove the original current limiting resistor (R5 in the photo below), which was replaced with a higher-valued one. Thankfully, the case of the nightlight is held together with screws, so it all went back together easily and is now working better than new!
Apologies for the low quality photo – just wanted to share some progress with the Pact scoreboard over the last few weeks. The PCBs are mostly assembled, the board itself is mostly ready. Next up: buttons and Arduino firmware!
We’ve had a few recent “Arduinos for Absolute Beginners” classes on, two at the makerspace and one at Hive – all have been successful and a lot of fun! I’ve found it particularly interesting to observe the different programming approaches taken by older vs younger students, and how well the different notification methods influenced people to bring USB cables and computers to the class :).
Last Saturday, we adapted and installed a fixture from the old location at King Edward Court in the Valley Workspace – the bare copper wires for hanging LEDs!
Next up is Learn To Solder night, tomorrow 18 May 7:30pm at the Dunedin Makerspace. Bring yourself (in warm clothes), and a gold coin koha or better your membership!
As usual, if you miss one of our events, either post on the mailing list or come to the next open workshop and we can often get you caught up.
The courier showed up today, with a really neat new board from Adafruit – the Feather M0 Express. It is essentially a break out board for the Microchip (formerly Atmel) ATSAMD21G18, which is the same ARM M0+ micro used in the Arduino Zero, plus a 2MB flash memory, RGB LED, and a LiPoly charger. It’s not too expensive at $20USD, nice and tiny, and I think could be a real hit.
Using the Feather M0 Express from Arduino IDE almost couldn’t be easier – just add the Adafruit Board Manager URL to your Arduino IDE settings, then install the “Adafruit SAMD Boards” – instructions at https://learn.adafruit.com/add-boards-arduino-v164 .
However, the really exciting new option available with this new board, is CircuitPython – Adafruit’s implementation of MicroPython. Continue reading “Adafruit Feather M0 Express”
I was recently tinkering with a thing at work, and was surprised to find that a couple internal parts of this thing are 3D printed using a printer of the same type we’ve got at the makerspace!
This is a Thinklabs One digital stethoscope, available for sale online through mainstream retailers for about $500USD. Check out the grey plastic ring around the blue part.
A few weeks back, we had a talk on KiCad (presentation available at http://ianrrees.github.io/KiCad_talk/ ) where we ordered some PCBs to make an inductor tester (Henryometer?) from dirty PCBs. Those boards came in this week, and a few folks have already put theirs together. This post aims to be a quick guide to the usage of the tester; if you’d like to build one yourself just let Ian know, parts cost is $15. You’ll need an oscilloscope and a current-limited DC power supply to make use of it.
After a hiatus over the Christmas/New Years break and a slow start to the year, the Makerspace has been bustling with activity recently. Brian Paavo talked about the underwater scanner project the Makerspace is collectively working on, and work has been progressing on that (there will be a post about that soon). Paul Campbell held a soldering workshop, and about a dozen people made LED sculptures. One of the highlights on Saturday was William George’s project of converting chrome-plated toaster into an audio CD player. And when you come into the Makerspace now, you’ll notice that the room has been re-organised to be better, easier to working in, and more inviting (with special thanks to Chris Baxter and Brian Paavo).
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 was very basic – the slides are in the PDF file below
– if you couldn’t make it you should be able to follow through the talk – the main goal here is to end up playing with the circuit simulation examples – poke at things, change the values of voltages, resistors, capacitors to see what happens (just click on them)
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
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/
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/
Assembled, they look like this:
