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.

This Friday Feb 11th 7pm @ the space come check out what we’ve been working on with 3d printers. We’ll have 3 Mendel printers in various stages of assembly. Come by and ask questions, hang out, and see the progress. Dan and Claudio will be working on early stages of assembly and Sonny will be working on later stages of assembly of his Mendel. Nick’s Makerbot will also be at the space to show off differences between it and the Mendels.

If 3d Printers aren’t your thing then feel free to ask for a tour around the space. Our Friday meetings are open to the public. Come by and see what we’re all about and of course, feel free to sign up for a membership!

This past weekend Sonny and Nick had their Makerbot 3D Printers up at the space. Sonny showed off his by printing a part used for the Mendel 3d printer in glow in the dark ABS plastic. Claudio and Daniel are in the process of building their own Mendel 3d printers. Once everything is built and working we should have 4-5 3d printers among the group! If you’re interested in learning more about these printers or how to get started in building your own, come out to a meeting and strike up a conversation with one of our many members active in these projects!

A week ago we saw a good condition non-working Ms. Pacman arcade cabinet come across craigslist. After some frenzied emails we had an appointment to pick up the machine. Claudio and I went out and purchased it and donated it to the group. Sonny offered up to take a look at the machine for us, found a prom that wasn’t acting right, so he borrowed a replacement part and low and behold! It WORKS! So now our task is to secure our own replacement part and work on getting the video sorted out. The display has some pretty bad burn in, but it’s playable. We still need to tweak the color a bit. The art and the marquee are going to need some work too. But we’re going to keep working to make it functional and we have some plans down the road to add more functionality! Wiki Project page for this project. Here are some pictures:

At last Friday’s meeting Sonny brought and demonstrated his Doppler Direction Finder Kit. Here’s the video of the demonstration and some questions / answers about it.

MidsouthMakers Doppler Direction Finder Kit Demonstration from Midsouth Makers on Vimeo.

MidsouthMakers Doppler Direction Finder Kit Demonstration by Sonny Mounicou on 8/6/10. www.midsouthmakers.org