NortHACKton

Last night we had our first hands-on tutorial in the Yeoman of England.  This one was longer than our lockpicking one done in our very first meet.  Martin kindly brought along his router and a few PCs to control it.  The first was used with his existing setup running Mach3, and the second was used to investigate LinuxCNC/EMC as an alternate controller.

After some false starts we were able to take drawings in CamBam (or imported from Inkscape) and have them converted to gcode and drawn on the plotter onto a notepad.  Less success was had with the EMC software which rejected the PC it was running on as being too slow (100us jitter reported).  Still surprising that we couldn’t get it to turn an axis at all though.  Not that we read the manual much.  To do.

Nicholas kindly took a video explaining the process and has uploaded it:

Well we’ve had our first workshop, and the three talks given by Martin, Alan, and Stephen went down very well, and covered a range of topics and abilities.  Martin explained how to design physical 3D objects and manufacture them in the home (or pay someone else to, for the less brave).  Alan taught us that bigger softer running shoes aren’t always the best answer, and Stephen explained the many different ways data can enter a computer.

The slides for these are on the wiki.  The Yeoman of England appears to be a great venue, and so it’s already booked for next month on Monday 6th September 2010.  We also have permission to bring some equipment along, but I don’t think we can devise anything too messy.

Next week we have the traditional pub meet and there we’ll finalise the logistics for the Ballistics Day, and plan the September workshop.  More pictures follow

As well as the standard pub meet this month (Tuesday 17th August) NortHACKton is holding TWO other events. The dates for these events are up for selection by doodle poll until the 27th July where I shall pick the highest-voted days out of a hat of some kind, moderated by any mitigating factors that become apparent (site availability etc). Vote now!

Hack Evening Workshop

Our first workshop will be a series of short informal talks. These will not be held in the public area of a pub, but either a back-room or a community centre. Contact the mailing list or me directly if you’d like to give a talk. There will be time for questions and networking after each talk, and a projector for those with slides.

Ballistics Day

The previous rocketry day was a success. So we’re going to repeat it, but with the addition of trebuchets, or other catapults or methods of propulsion. Bring tennis balls, and then show how far you can propel them. Again, there will be a barbecue, and some raw materials for hacking on the day.