Mark Edmonson recently donated a big box of pretty high quality used battery powered laser levels to us. They’re in various states, from apparently completely functional to rather dead.
Each one contains 5 diode lasers, as well as some other parts. There are fairly complete teardown notes and pictures here.
Here are the parts I salvaged from one.
Thanks, Mark!
Two of our members, Paul and Eric, recently took initiative to rework the electronics lab. The lab has already seen quite a bit of traffic in less than two weeks of being operational. Big thanks to Paul and Eric for all of their hard work and the materials that they provided for this remodel of one of the most important rooms at Workshop 88!
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| From Workshop 88 electronics lab remodel |
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| From Workshop 88 electronics lab remodel |
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| From Workshop 88 electronics lab remodel |
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| From Workshop 88 electronics lab remodel |
Workshop 88 co-founders Jay Margalus and Russ Lankenau recently gave a talk titled “Open Hardware and the Future of Games”. In their presentation they talk about a lot of things including Workshop 88, Raspberry Pi, open hardware initiatives, games as culture and much more. It’s always awesome to see what has come out of the work done by Workshop 88 members!
Russ is the current president of Workshop 88. He and Jay run an independent game company called Lunar Giant as well as a coworking space in Mokena, IL called SpaceLab.
Two members of Workshop 88 went to hear Massimo Banzi’s talk on Arduino, open source hardware and more. The talk was part of Ge Garage’s Idea Week. He gave some great stories of the philosophy, joys and problems of putting the Arduino out as open source hardware.
Among many other insights, he described how the fashion industry – with no intellectual property protection – made a lot more money than the entertainment and music industries with all their DRM efforts. He told of the value of the many iterations of Arduino and how a primary metric of its success was the time between a new user opening the box and getting a useful result. We learned it was named for a bar where they held many design meetings. It was a great talk.
Rachel also scored some excellent networking time with Massimo, including connections that will be very useful in her upcoming trip to the Rome Maker Faire. Jim brought home a newly autographed Arduino that had run the dollhouse at Rachel’s New York Maker Faire booth.
(Thanks to Drew Fustini from PS:1 for the lead picture!)
Pursuing her passion for making technology accessible to girls, Rachel Hellenga inspired a whirlwind project to automate a dollhouse. After the smoke cleared, the one-room dollhouse she and Jim W and Bill P built was a miniature version of – and is now displayed within – the “Circuit Castle” she’s showing at the New York Maker Faire. Read her Make Magazine blog post about it.
The Dollhouse Automation System powering it is a collection of small, cheap microcontrollers in a simple network allowing sensors (push buttons, motion detectors, light sensors, etc) in one part of the house to control actions (lights, motors, sounds etc) in another part of the house.
Here are some gory details of putting that system together.
This class will cover Schematic capture, PCB design, and CAD File generation.
When: October 26, 2013, 8:30 am to noon
What you should know before coming to this class: You should be somewhat familiar with electronic circuits.
What you should bring with you to the class: You should bring a laptop with the free version of CadSoft Eagle PCB installed and running on it.
What you will leave the class with: After the class you should have the ability to capture a electronic circuit into a schematic, build new components, layout the physical printer circuit board and generate the files needed to have a PCB manufacture make your board.
Ruby is an open source general purpose interpreted programming language intended to be easy to write, read and learn. In this introduction to Ruby, we will focus on basics of the language, with a bit of object-orientation and Test Driven Development.
When: September 28, 2013 9:00-11:00 a.m.
What you need to know before coming to this class: You should be familiar with Unix-like systems (Mac OS X or linux, for example). You should also be able to create and edit text files.
What you need to bring to the class: If possible, you should bring a laptop computer with Ruby preinstalled. We suggest using Rvm (http::rvm.io) to install Ruby.
What you will leave the class with: A knowledge of the basics of Ruby, what it’s strong points are, and how to learn more about programming with Ruby.
Workshop 88 is offering our introduction to the Arduino platform at our makerspace in Glen Ellyn. This class is for anyone (member or non-member) who wants to learn how to get started with the arduino microcontroller, regardless of experience with programming or electronics. Class attendees will learn how to configure their arduino programming environment, how to design simple circuits for interfacing with the arduino and how to write simple programs to control the arduino. What is Arduino, you ask? From their home page:
Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.
If you need to get an arduino, please see the Workshop 88 Arduino Store. Sales from that store are fulfilled by amazon.com, and help support Workshop 88. Alternatively, you can order Arduino systems from several places, including Adafruit and Sparkfun. Both companies have lots of tutorials and howtos to get you started with Arduinos. If you’re looking for a local source to get Arduinos, try Trossen Robotics.
What you’ll get from this class: If you choose the registration + materials option, we will have an arduino and assortment of electronics components for you to take home after the class. (The Workshop 88 Arduino Store is by far a cheaper route to get supplies.)
In this class you will learn how to start programming in the Arduino environment including interacting with the inputs and outputs of the Arduino.You should bring: a laptop with the Arduino environment downloaded and installed. Please contact us (info@workshop88.com) if you have any questions.
Image credit: By Linuswiki (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Workshop 88 will have another Instructables night on Thursday, Aug. 22nd. This is electronics based and we have already received the booty from Jameco for it:
http://www.instructables.com/community/August-2013-Build-Night-with-Jameco/
Please note that the Grab Bag of Electronics Components has been renamed as the 1 Pound Bag of Crap (1lbboc). It has some odd things like an ISA bus connector, Extra-Wide SCSI and bunches of other junk.
Everyone come out and see what we can do with this!
There will be no Public Meeting on the Fourth of July.
Go enjoy the holiday with your friends and family. We’ll see you next week!