We had a great meeting last Friday, if you missed it, you missed a good time and some really neat projects. Daniel and Mary brought their Hydraulic Letterpress and some examples of the work they’ve been able to do with it. Mitzi also brought in a handmade wooden basket that Brad made out of materials laying around the garage, and Rick brought in some picaxe microcontroller stuff to show off.

You can see the rest of the pictures from the meeting on Flickr and Facebook

We look forward to seeing everyone Friday @ CBU!

We had a great first meeting at Christian Brothers University, they’re graciously allowing us to use one of their classrooms and we were able to have our first presentation. Rick Mayfield shared his great Arduino presentation. Rick also brought some of his DIY projects including a light made from bright LEDs as well as a USB LED light.

The rest of our pictures have been uploaded to our Facebook Pictures.

My LCD display from Adafruit has been staring at me for awhile now and I finally pulled it out and started tinkering with it.  The hardest part about working with it out of the box is soldering headers onto the LCD board.  In a convoluted and more playful fashion I used an old Cisco serial cable and a small mint tin to connect the 16 leads of the LCD to a small breadboard.  Following a pinout diagram from Hacktronics I connected the arduino to the breadboard and a 1k ohm resistor.  After verifying continuity with a multimeter to all leads I uploaded the code I got from Hacktronics.  After the Arduino rebooted the result felt like an application of Clarke’s Law.  Its really just proof of concept level implementation but it taught me about the LCD library and soldering techniques.

It kind of looks like a hack job…because it is 🙂