[sudo-discuss] TONIGHT - Microcontroller Project Night @ sudo room!

[Hol Gaskill]

Hi Folks,

Come on out tonight for some good ole fashioned tinkerin' at sudo room.  Ongoing projects include: humidity control and irrigation, semiautomatic beer brewing, RGB LED alarm clock, stepper motor and servo control for CNC, and hopefully some work on hacking the roomba into a science rover - if you're interested in any of these I can get you started somewhere suitable to your skill level right when you arrive.  All other projects welcome!

There is a FB event too if you want to poke around and invite people:
https://www.facebook.com/events/360789300699531/

Upon reviewing the activities of the previous nights and listening to feedback on providing more interactivity for newbies who may not yet have a project in mind, I'll be giving 3 quick tutorials tonight: driving RGB LED strips, voltage regulation AKA how to not fry your project's brain, and AVR board assembly for making your own controllers from just one chip and a few passive components.  So if you're interested in learning the basics of how to use microcontrollers I'll have a few simple projects that people can get started on, and as always there's a wealth of projects documented on the internet for independent learning.  Out "kit bits" collection is increasing rapidly so we should have plenty of sensors, motors, and other odds and ends for people to tinker with.

I've also realized I'm going to have to be more proactive about encouraging collaboration between people on various projects.  We have so many people interested in so many things, and more importantly so motivated to build or hack things in order to improve their environment, that it seems worthwhile to develop a framework for collaboration on discrete projects so people can see at a glance what projects are happening first of all, then get in contact with the people working on them and start collaborating.  I have a few ideas in mind for how to do this, but I really need YOUR input to help develop this idea into something we will all want to use.  What I'm shooting for is a database that can be browsed visually (will NOT be very elegant at first...probably just a bunch of thumbnails with lines going between them) that links projects together based on software, hardware, technical area, dependency (like, my LED sombrero needs a power supply to work - if someone's already designed the power supply, I can copy their design and focus on driving the LEDs), and interface specifications (could be as simple as a plug type or a format for sending serial data) somewhat in the vein of what open source ecology has done.  So to this end, I'd like to have a discussion on this around 8PM where we jot down the projects we're working on and lay out how they're related, where there is overlap that can be merged, and identify areas that are critical to moving forward but as yet undersupported.  So if you're generally busy tonight but might have a few minutes to drop by to give some input, we could use your help for 20 minutes or so outlining such a system.

Also, I am still wrangling the settings on the controllers list so please let me know if you have any problems sending message, etc.

Hope to see y'all there,
Hol