TechShop, the membership-based DIY workshop with five locations around the country, has announced an academic partnership with Arizona State University and will open a new TechShop in Chandler, AZ later this year. Chandler is about 20 miles southeast of Phoenix and its Chandler Innovation Center includes a city-funded technology incubator and Arizona State's College of Technology and Innovation, which has more than 3,000 students. Students taking classes at the Center will be offered free memberships at the new TechShop and discounted memberships will be offered to other students and faculty. An announcement said that classrooms not in use by the college will be available for TechShop programs. TechShop will also open new locations in Pittsburgh and the Washington, DC area later this year, thanks to a partnership with the Department of Veterans Affairs and DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. 2,000 one-year memberships at TechShop will be given to American veterans. A TechShop is also in the works for Brooklyn, NY, slated to open in the winter or next spring. Filed under: Education, Hackerspaces          
What are you waiting for? Every one of you reading this has a big idea floating around in your head that you want to realize. I won’t sugar coat it, projects aren’t easy to start and they’re often harder to finish. What will encourage you to just do it? With Maker Faires happening around the US and the world, you have a platform to show off your idea. Let that be your motivation. You can do it. I did. The 3rd Annual Detroit Maker Faire wrapped this past weekend with an amazing turnout. Over 400 makers and what I’m sure was record breaking attendance. I was very lucky to be accepted with my big project: The Brick Challenge Game Show.
For a number of years, I had a crazy dream of running a Lego game show and gear it toward AFOL (Adult Fans of Lego). This marinated in my head for a while until I was given the opportunity to host the show at a local sci-fi convention. Producing a game show, much less any type of show, is not a skill in my repertoire. Like any new project, I scoured the internet for articles on running a game show, producing a web show, and building a TV studio set. It was a lot of hard work but the massive selection of tools at i3 Detroit was a huge help for the set. My extended network of friends and family helped fill in the holes for what I couldn’t find on the web. I knew that a buzzer system would make the game more exciting but we couldn’t get it finished in the first performance. The same goes for having a scoreboard. There is a lot to do in putting on a show. 
With the basic bugs worked out, Maker Faire Detroit allowed us to polish the show and add a lot more of the elements we wanted. I found the specialists at my local hackerspace to build the components I needed to make the project bigger. Roger Slykhouse developed the Arudino coding for the buzzer hardware along with Brad McMahon making the PHP front end for the amazing scoreboards. Friends volunteered for stage hands, costuming, graphics, and audio. I even got my future father-in-law to help with lighting. 
The first iteration of the show had very limited prizes. Who better to provide prizing than Lego? I put together a one-page summary and just started emailing Lego representatives until someone listened. Eventually, I found someone and was happy to receive some great donations. We geared the show to adults and older kids for the first performance. However, Maker Faire had more kids so we alternated our performances. The kids ones were way cooler and you could see they got so much more out of it. 
I had a blast bringing my big idea to life. What not do the same with yours? Use the motivation of a deadline for a Maker Faire, art festival, high school event, or college exhibition to focus you. Just do it! Brainstorm and get building. Recruit family and friends to help, reach out to local companies for a sponsorship, and read all the articles you can find on the web. The goal of “super-sizing” your projects is within reach. Try it. If you fail with your first execution like we did, learn from it and try again. Happy Building,
Nick Filed under: LEGO          
Ask anyone who’s built a robot using an Arduino and they’ll tell you it’s a lot of work. You’ll need a motorshield, sensors, servos, and a host of other items to put one together, then you’ll have to spend a lot of time coding. Want something complex like motion tracking or voice recognition? Unless there’s some code you can parse or very well written libraries, it’s going to take hours of programming to get things working the way you want. 
That’s what I love about the EZ-Robot Complete Kit (available in the Maker Shed.) Using the items included in the box you can build a fully functioning, interactive robot in an afternoon with no coding experience whatsoever. All you need is an idea, a Bluetooth equipped Windows PC, something like an old toy to house the electronics, and a hot glue gun. Simply assemble your bot, load up the EZ-Builder software, and bring your creation to life! Experienced coders can download the EZ-Builder SDK for even more functionality. I highly recommend this kit to anyone interested in building robots, animatronics, and interactive displays. Check the product page to see all the details!
Filed under: Kits, Maker Shed, Robotics          
Mirco Segatello’s Robot Shield is optimized for servo control and has a built-in ultrasonic sensor. Instant robot! The idea behind this post is to bring together some robot designs and trasform them in a new device with new hardware and standard software (arduino of course) and so easier to use. These robots have three things in common: a mechanical structure, the hardware and the software. While the mechanical part is necessarily different, we wanted to understand if there was a hardware board that could be common, with a unique development system. The choice, quite obviously, has the Arduino board, which with its development environment is perfect to create similar projects. The first consideration that came to our mind is like the Arduino board can manage a large number of servos, eight in the case of the robot SPIDER. Arduino can be powered through the plug with a voltage between 6 to 12 volts, his voltage regulator provides the 5 V stabilized, necessary for the operation of our shield. We could power our robot with rechargeable batteries. A standard servo requires a supply voltage of 4.8 to 6 volts, easily obtainable with four batteries in series, at full charge, provide 1.5 x 4 = 6 volts but towards the complete discharge provide just 1.0 x 4 = 4 volts. We are not in optimal conditions for the servos. Throughout this reasons we decided to create a special shield, already prepared for all these functions, it is easy to install and use.
[via Adafruit] Filed under: Arduino, Robotics          More Recent Articles | |
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