Hi all,

To begin with we weren’t sure who was coming down, but it was a good turn out.

It’s great to see people helping each other with various projects, there’s a great sense of community building up from the group, which is fantastic. So thanks for everyone who came down. You guys really make it what it is.

Supplies!

Coffee, Milk and Sugar needed replenishing so now we’ve got enough for quite some time, so come down and have a brew with us! 🙂

Thanks to Kate who redid my “prototype”, we’ve now got our binary “Brew Board” setup so, if you’re getting a round in for your fellow hackers, you know their default choice without having to risk distracting them while holding a hot soldering iron or getting hands on with an angle grinder.

Nobody wants more than one sugar though right?

After blowing up a power supply that Si had carefully worked on for most of a previous session, Dave, Jib, DanR and myself worked on a few more desktop power supply units that we could utilise for powering an array of projects that we’re working on. We’ve now got a good few of these ready to be used.

We’re building up quite a collection of small screens now. DanR took to task on them trying to figure out how to not only power them on, but get a video feed from a Raspberry Pi.

Not quite there yet, but hopefully we’ll have a Raspberry Pi demo setup in the next few sessions.

Will brought down some Roomba robot vacuum cleaners. One which he intends to turn into some kind of Raspberry Pi powered death bot, or perhaps a roaming hackspace video streaming bot (we’re not sure yet) and perhaps even more oddly the other for actual vacuum cleaning… Who would have thought?

The electronic components arrived!

Si brought down our order and got a home for them mounted on the wall.

Perhaps now we can actually start building some prototype boards and using our Arduinos.

Having said that, a few guys were already getting stuck in with their own components and circuits which was great to see.

The hackspace is very quickly becoming a hive of activity, which is brilliant.

Dave brought down his DIY vacuum former and some plastic to try, so we set to work heating up the plastic enough so it was tacky, then placing it over the Dyson powered vacuum bed hoping that it would take the shape of the moulds we had to hand.

Unfortunately the puny Dyson wasn’t powerful enough and we’re not sure we got the plastic hot enough, yet we persevered by getting a much larger, industrial sized vacuum and a heat gun to double up the heating process.

This seemed to work much better, so with a bit of tweaking we should have a fully functional “vacformer” kit ready to go.

However, unfortunately the Dyson has been relegated back to regular vacuum cleaning.

Amongst all the chaos, heroically Tom continued to work on the 3D printer, recruiting one or two of us now and again to be grips. By the end of the night the X/Y axis was actually looking like it was coming together nicely.

The hackspace is coming together nicely now, we all got a lot done last night. There was a great buzz.

For those of your interested, due to the success of the night we’ll be opening on Saturday from 10am, so if you struggle to make Tuesday nights now’s your chance to come down and say hello!

See you on Saturday!