We’re going to do a focused cleanup day at the space this Sunday April 10th starting around 10 AM. Feel free to come when you can; we’ll be working till about 5pm or so depending on how much we get accomplished. Bring your work gloves as we’ll be primarily focused on the shop to make some more room for projects and more work area. We want to make visible progress, not attempt to clean an entire mountain. We want to open up the shop area a bit better so that we (and the landlord) have more room to work. We have set goals that we want to complete on Sunday so that we can focus everyone’s efforts. That being said, if you have projects you’re storing / working on in the shop, you may want to make sure any tools or such are put up before Sunday. I know some of you have projects you all are working on, I just don’t want to have to move something that shouldn’t be moved.

Our main goals:

• reorder and reorganize the mezzanine, specifically the right hand half of it
• move enough stuff out of the way to get the metal rack over on that side against the wall
• order and organize the wood that’s on the floor there utilizing the rack and space created on the mezzanine

This doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a lot to do so we’re definitely going to be using everyone that can show up to help. These three things should keep us pretty busy all day.

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.

Chain Mail Class – Come Learn how to make chain mail with us.
Our NEXT meet will be December 3rd at Republic Coffee. We will be having an abbreviated meeting with a class on how to create chain mail led by John Wood. If you would like to participate in the chain mail class the cost will be $10. You’ll be able to keep what you create as well as the handy pair of pliers you’ll be using in the class. Feel free to prepay by using the paypal link on the front page of http://www.midsouthmakers.org

The class will consist of the start to finish exercise of creating a section of chain mail material out of readily available aluminum electric fence wire. The process will involve taking a coil of electric fence wire, explaining how to make a coil out of the wire using a portable drill and a metal rod. Then taking the coil and creating individual links. Lastly how to construct a section of chain mail material out of the links using hand tools.

LAN Party Part DEUX
The LAN Party will be held at same location as last time: 2203 Freemont Rd. Kevin will be making Cincinnati style Chili and grilling hot dogs. Joe will be bringing Rotel cheese dip and we’ll have plenty of drinks + chips. The exact cost for food is still being determined (should be on par to last time ~$10). If you’d like to bring something to share (1UP Cakes, Strawberry cakes of awesome)  please feel free.

If you have any suggestions for games please let us know, I’m going to throw out Left 4 Dead 2 + I’d like to get Walter to carry me through the rest of the hard mode alien swarm! Also a few us of WoW addic…..players will have a fresh expansion to play through so I’m sure WoW will be represented as well. Feel free to suggest anything else. Last time SC2 and UT2k4 was a big hit.

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

The Arduino Diecimila.

For those of our members who are interested in helping in the Arduino community you now have a chance! It is very simple, you don’t even have to do anything heavy duty. The Arduino Designers are looking to make the next model, Arduino 1.0, and they need to collect information. If you own an Arduino, or have used one, then you can go to the Arduino website and fill out this survey (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ArduinoUsage) they have put up. They are looking to use this information collected to assist in the development of the next model. It is very short, only takes a few minutes to do, and it could be Memphis’ way of helping out with such a great community. So take a few seconds, hop on over to the website and answer those questions!