Author Archives: msraynsford

3D Printing/Prototyping Talk Night

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Monday night is our next Talk night, this months topic being 3D printing and prototyping. We’re hoping for a good turnout after the NSME open day 2 weeks ago.

The talk starts at 8pm but we’ll open up the NSME clubhouse from 7pm onwards.
There is a chance for some practical work after in the form of paper crafting. Bring a windows laptop if you’d like to design your own 3D model to assemble. If you’re just interested in the paper craft assembly I’ll have some simple models to hand. So bring a scalpel, metal ruler and something to cut on.
The software you require is pepakura and a trial version can be downloaded from here. http://www.tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/download/designer.html
Look forward to seeing you all on Monday.

3D Printing Talk

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Our next evening talk, Monday May 16th, will be about 3D printing, the different types available in both professional and DIY versions. We will cover everything from the ground up so the talk shall be suitable for people with no prior knowledge on the subject. New people are always welcome along and all our talk evenings are free. We shall be at NSME from 7pm onwards with the talk starting at 8pm. It is generally informal in its style so if you have any questions during the talk please feel free to ask them. Talks aim to be about 30 minutes but interesting ones tend to ramble to about an hour. The clubhouse will be open afterwards for more specific questions or general project work.

(The Makerbot, just one type of DIY 3D printing)

NSME Grand Opening

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Today was the grand opening of the NSME extended tracks. We set up a stall to illustrate the things that NortHACKton do. We spent a lot of time talking to the public and hopefully made a few new friends. Over 2000 people rode the trains today, the exact number is unlikely to be known as they ran out of commemorative tickets. That meant a lot of people to talk to.

The rolling ball sculpture and pinball machine were a great hit with kids and a great opener for conversations. The chain mail shirt and quadcopter also garnered a lot of interest. It was great to have people asking questions about projects and then being pointed to the appropriate person to chat to. Thanks to everyone for coming down to lend us a hand, lets hope we get some increased interest to our next workshop.

Keyboard Layout Switch

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NortHACKton member, Charlie Webb, recently completed this project based around an arduino and a keyboard. Fed up with the way Windows forced him to switch between his different keyboard layouts (qwerty to Dvorak) he decided to take the process entirely out of windows hands. He modified an old keyboard, inserting an avr microcontroller between the keyboard and the PC. At the flick of a switch the MCU performs the entire keyboard remapping between the two different layouts.

The microcontroller in the keyboard also allowed him to add some extra features at the same time. The big red button on the front of the keyboard generates a whole stream of text to be inserted into whatever you’re working on. Knowing Charlie I suspect this is currently being put to extremely good use harassing the noobs on some First Person Shooter somewhere (“OMG, WTF, I Iz Leet” etc, or maybe minecraft as that’s what the cool kids seem to be doing atm)

More photos and some diagrams of the project can be found in on picasa

And he has been kind enough to supply us with the arduino code for the job too.