Sonny recently shared his current progress of his UAV Quad Copter project and included a test flight video.

So today I had my first real flights with my quadcopter UAV.   The setup is pretty advanced and it takes a lot to get up to speed.  I’ve learned a lot from my build.  I made custom printed PLA motor mounts, which have worked out really well to hold them on the end of aluminum pipes.  Unfortunately the cross in the middle which is also PLA could not handle the rough landings and cracked.  I’ve secured it for the time being, but I think I’ll be milling something better Wednesday.  If I can work out the stability issues, I’ll bring it Friday.  Anyway, check out the first flight/set of flights.

Ben sent me this writeup of his progress on his Rep Rap Prusa printer. Here’s his progress using one of the teensyduinos that PJRC: Electronic Projects with Components sent us.

I am currently building a rep rap Prusa 3D printer and one feature I want to add is a Graphic Display to display the nozzle temperature and the heated bed temperature. Once I had the Teensy in my hands, I rummaged through my parts bin and found a 128×64 graphic LCD.

As an Arduino newbie, I was blown away how easy the Arduino environment is to get up and running. Within minutes, I was able to get the IDE installed and the Libraries installed for the Teensy.

Using the GLCD example on the Teensy’s website, I populated my breadboard. The Crystal Fontz LCD (CFAG12864B-YYH-N) I used in the project has the NT7107C driver, not the KS0108 found in the GLCD example. The pin out on the Display ended up being different, but worked just fine.

My plans are to use the I2C output on the GEN7 Prusa electronics to send the temperature data to the Teensy over the i2c bus. For prototyping, I used the “Bus Pirate” to send i2c commands to the teensy to simulate the GEN7 electronics.

Haunted by old computer parts? Frightened by the prospect of having them go to waste? This Friday, May 13th at 7pm we’re going to break the curse of broken electronics with our first de soldering class! Come by the space and you’ll learn how to exorcise the demons that plague your old hardware by learning how to remove solder and reclaim your parts for good!

Image copyright Becky Stern

There is no cost to participate, however any donations to the group would be greatly appreciated.

You won’t need a young priest or an old priest, simply bring the following supplies if you can (if you cannot, don’t worry, we will share!):

• Soldering Irons
• Picks (dental type)
• Alligator Clips
• Tweezers
• Solder Suckers
• Stainless Steel/Brass scrub pads
• Circuits that you wish to desolder

We will provide participants with the following items and our assurances that they are free of any bad luck:

• Solder wick
• Solder flux
• Brass wool
• Kapton tape
• Helping Hands
• Alcohol (for cleaning flux)

All black cats, broken mirrors, and open umbrellas are welcome! Sign-up at http://www.midsouthmakers.org/events

As a special thanks for the MidsouthMakers assistance during SoutheastCon, the University of Memphis Student Branch of IEEE would like to welcome the MidsouthMakers to come to the Engineering Technology building for a demonstration of some projects we have been working on. We will be starting at the normal meeting time of 7pm, in Room 227, on the second floor of ET. The meeting will take the place of the normal Friday, May 6th meeting. We will be demoing the robot we took to competition this year, as well as one of our CNC machines, a programmable robot arm, and a professional grade 3D printer.

The University of Memphis is located in midtown Memphis, near the intersection of Poplar and Goodlett. The Engineering Technology building is across the street from the large parking lot on Central Avenue. Attached is a link to a map of the University of Memphis campus, with the Engineering Technology building highlighted in red.

This Friday February 18th at Republic Coffee we’ll have members showing off their Arduino projects and answering questions about the Arduino platform. We’ve had a lot of interest in getting started with various Arduino boards so come learn more about the great things you can do with an open source platform.

What is an Arduino? Arduino is a physical computing platform and a software development environment for controlling various things like motors, sensors and even entire devices. The hardware and development environment are open source and there is a very large community of developers and hardware hackers out there working on projects. The hardware is also quite inexpensive. There are also “Getting Started” kits that are a package of items to help you hit the ground running with your Arduino.