We had about 15 people show up at the Arthouse, with talk of Arduinos, 3D printers, teardowns and mobiles. Tea was drunk, cakes were eaten and a good time was apparently had by all.
Teardowns:
More Teardowns:
Arduino Temp Sensor:
3D Printer Examples:
Hackers:
Given a relative success of the first proper meeting of recent years I believe we’ll be pushing for another one next month, keep an eye on this blog for more info as we decide it, or join the Google Group to get involved.
Last week’s workshop was great fun despite the dreary weather! Mitch Altman, (inventor of TV-B-Gone, and co-founder of Noisebridge) and Jimmie P Rodgers (circuit bender and purveyor of Atari Punk Consoles, LED hearts and LoL shields) joined us at SteamShift HQ in Eastleigh to put on a workshop excitingly titled “How To Make Cool Things with Microcontrollers!”
Mitch teaching the basics of soldering
Mitch gave a great introduction to microcontrollers, and entertained everyone with, among other tales, his experiences in the US, recounting how he left his job in Silicone Valley and got into hardware hacking, and amusingly how the Noisebridge hackerspace is insured somewhere under the category of “Artistic Robotics”.
He and Jimmy had a great selection of projects on show and available as kits for hacking; the LoL Shields went down well, around 6 of us opted to build them for our arduinos.
Heads-down and soldering!
Another attendee constructed an Atari Punk Console, while someone else constructed their first arduino clone from a Boarduino kit.
Our guests continued their tour of the UK the following day, going on to their next event at the Brighton hackerspace BuildBrighton.
If you’re interested in hardware hacking or learning to solder, why not join the discussions on our google group? If you want to stay up to date with the latest SoutHACKton news the google group is also the place to go!
Our next meeting, Hack Day 1, is on 4th October. Click here for details.
At 2pm Saturday 29th of August, on an otherwise uneventful bank holiday weekend, a varied group of men and women met at Steamshift HQ. Their purpose – to get down to business and HACK! Some arrived with projects in mind – disco lights, energy usage monitoring, laser mazes – while others turned up with little equipment but an eagerness to get their hands dirty. At the full height of the meet, there were around twenty people there, playing around with Arduino and PIXACE boards.
The meet was organised and hosted by Andy Bennett and Steamshift as part of SoutHACKton – a group of like-minded Solent residents who all want to kick back, take stuff apart and build new things out of the resulting mess.
And that they did – sometimes clusterd in small groups, working away on personal projects, sometimes coming together in larger groups to admire a piece of someone else’s handy work. Projects that drew particular attention were Ruzz’s walking robots (a hit at our last meet too), Andy T‘s LEDs (Did I mention he has 4,000 LEDs?) and my own project: Lou Lou the Furby. I hope to hook Lou Lou up to the PC and tell me when I get new email. Maybe she’ll get her own twitter account one day. For now, she’ll just have to be happy playing sounds from my eeePC through an Arduino.
Our next meeting, Hack Day 1, is on 4th October. Click here for details.
This event was kindly hosted by Steamshift.
Steamshift develops creative solutions to technical challenges primarily in the fields of web application development, flash AS3 programming and linux hosting. They work closely with their design and branding partners to deliver an end-to-end solution.