A New Challenger Appears
A new sumobot, designed and built at the Makerspace!
Electronics
Electronic Project Class Announced
Let’s build a smart Thermostat! As part of the Saturday morning Electronics and Software Open House, we will be hosting a class showing how to design and build a simple IoT device. The first class will start on February 19th and continue each week until April. The Makerspace needs new thermostats. The existing ones have …
Another Interactive Art Project
A local artist, David Burton, asked if I could add some electronics to his art so that it will play a song when a person stands in front of it. So of course I immediately set to work on making a shopping list of parts and built a prototype. Luckily there is already a single …
Scratch Built Motorola 68000 Computer Project
A project by Melbourne Makerspace member, John Gay: My first computer was a TRaSh-80 (TRS-80) from Radio Shack for my 14th Birthday. As the name implies, it was an 8 bit computer based on the Z-80 microprocessor. It had a whopping 4K (4 thousand bytes) RAM and ran at somewhere around 1Mhz (1 million cycles per …
Neighbor Dog Tracking Device
So my neighbor and I have a fence between us that we can’t see through. Their dogs fight with our dogs through the tiny slits in the wooden fence boards and cause a real ruckus that surely wakes up any sleeping neighbors. So we tried to think of various ways to let each other know …
Outdoor Solar WiFi Sensor
Here’s a project by one of our members, James Dinsmore. It shows his experimenting with a completely off grid, solar powered, wifi enabled, remote sensor package. It would be useful for things like monitoring temperatures and humidity around a yard or small orchard for example. Other sensors could be used as well such as moisture …
Coder Dojo Robotics Class Recap
Our third set of official Coder Dojo classes (5 Sundays in a row) was held back in Nov-Dec and covered beginner robotics. To make it fun we wanted to make fighting robots. To keep the costs down we chose mini sumo style competition where the robots push each other out of the ring instead of …
Coder Dojo is a Hit!
Our Coder Dojo classes are the most attended of all. We had to get out our spare folding chairs from the closet to be able to seat every one. These classes are all absolutely free and geared to kids ages 10 and up, but if they are younger and still interested bring them anyway as …
Raspberry Jam: Happy BDay Raspberry Pi
A couple of our members have spent many hours and their own money to create and donate a learning resource to the Catherine S Rood Central Library in Cocoa. It is a set of 36 projects all having to do with Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and electronics. Each project is a fun, standalone, step by step …
Brainstorming Session for Library Mini ’48 Projects’
An undisclosed Librarian, has approached me to see if our Makerspace can help them implement something similar to our 48 Projects for the undisclosed location. Joe and I made a field trip to survey their facility and resources; we would like to meet this Saturday morning at 10:00 to lay out the project. There is …
Brainstorming Session for Library Mini ’48 Projects’ Read More »