The dust is still settling and the space is still coming together, but please join us for our first open house meeting. Check out the space and see some of our member’s projects. Socialize with fellow tech-minded makers and hackers. Celebrate the end results of a 9 month sprint that took us from an idea to an actual space for Louisville to call it’s own!
Last thursday night, a tragic event occurred. My bandmate’s Nord Lead 2 synthesizer darted in front of a car and was run over. Crushed, mangled and inoperational.
Before:
He brought the wreckage over to my place Friday night. I worked a little synth triage and was able to get it banged out and functioning. Some hammering, superglue, resoldering to a busted power supply and it lives again!
After:
I’m calling it the Nord Bleed. It’s completely operational and playable. The high C key was pulverized beyond repair, so I left it off. I need to source some replacement potentiometers and knobs. The are all 100ohm pots, but have an uncommon 4mm D-shaft I haven’t found a replacement for yet. Once the bent and snapped pots are replaced it will be 100% tweakable again. I have much respect for the Swedes at Clavia and their roadworthy (literally) engineering.
This past weekend I experimented with dyeing some etched PCBs. I used Rit dye easily found in grocery stores. It was quick and dirty. I just boiled some water, mixed in a heavy concentration of black dye and let it sit for a couple of hours.
The dye worked well enough. Rather than just soaking in a cooling dye, I should have been applying a constant heat and agitating the solution in order to get a darker saturation. And when removing flux after soldering the board, dye came off as well. But in general this is a promising way to make nicer looking DIY PCB boards in the future.
As mentioned at the meeting last night, my model airplane club will
have a charity airshow on June 5 and 6. We have about 15 invited
pilots from around the country that have won many championships in
various categories of RC flying.
As of the moment, we will have several aerobatic demos with aircraft
wingspans exceeding 10 feet. We have one turbine powered jet that has
a true speed of 199 mph (not scale but actual radar detector speed).
We expect to have a national champion aerobatic helicopter and a
turbine powered helicopter. Also we will have a candy drop for the
kids and an egg drop for teens and adults. (Wear an old shirt for this
one.)
Details:
When: Saturday and Sunday, June 5 and 6 11 am to 5 pm. (Saturday is
the best day b/c out of towners leave early on Sunday)
Where: Tom Sawyer Park. 1/2 mile south of Westport on Hurstbourne
Parkway.
Cost: suggested donation is $3 per person (Hundred dollar bills are
welcome) All proceeds go to Kosair Charities.
I have put the materials on line for the Freeduino Spring Training class if you want to take a look. In these lessons you will find sample circuits for most of the things you might want to do with your Freeduino/Arduino. All of the code examples work and are debugged. Enjoy!
We’ll be meeting tonight at Heine Bros in St. Matthews as usual. Lease details are being worked out for our new space on Broadway. We’ll be planning details for our move in to the space. We’ll also have a report from those who visited Maker Faire this past weekend.
As always; makers, hackers and curious bystanders are welcome to come check us out.
Tue, May 11, 2010, 8:00 PM – 10:00 PM
119 Chenoweth Lane, St Matthews, KY
The last round of space voting missed the “Go” vote on Hope Mills by only 1 vote! Could this next round tip the balance? A recent push for Okinawa Health Spa has made it a contender for the top spot. Could this challenger be a LVL1 game changer?! Come to the meeting tonight to find out!
LVL1 is proud to announce it’s latest class- the Freeduino Spring Training Workshop. Time and place is May 18, 2010 from 7-10 pm at the U of L Speed School Room 210. This workshop will help you learn the skills to be able to play with that shiny Arduino or Freeduino that you have been dying to figure out! Our coaches will step you through building several fun circuits that demonstrate how to interface your Arduino with LED’s, LCD’s, switches, sensors, potentiometers, motors and sound. After taking this class, you should be able to breadboard a circuit and then program your Arduino. We know this class will be a GRAND SLAM!
The cost of the workshop is $50 ($80 if you need a Freeduino). Besides the world class instruction, you will get your very own breadboard, several LED’s (even a tri-colored one), a cool blue LCD display, a temperature sensor, a photo sensor, several switches, many resistors (with brightly colored bands!), a few potentiometers, a motor and a speaker… everything you need to batter up!
OK, enough with the cheezy baseball references. This highly requested workshop will be just what you need to get started learning electronics, bit-banging, embedded computer interfacing and programming. It is sure to be a h.. good time.
