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 …
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 …
One of our members used the woodshop tools here at the Melbourne Makerspace to create a custom, wooden urn for his friend’s dearly departed dog, Bella. This shows a good use of the wood lathe and drill press in our wood shop. If you want to take a tour of our wood shop and the …
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 …
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 …
We had another great Retro Game Night held on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. This is the event where we bring all of our old video game consoles and hand held and computer systems that were released before the year 2000. This year we had the original Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, and Nintendo Virtual Boy again. …
As another great example of a project one of our members used our space and tools to create is a stand up paddle board. Instead of buying one they were able to build one with just a few supplies and the hot wire foam cutter tool that a different member at the makerspace built for …
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 …
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 …
One of the many benefits of membership at the Melbourne Makerspace (or any makerspace really) is not just access to expensive and complicated tools like laser cutters and 3D printers, but also having access to other members with different skills to help you with your personal projects. I recently crashed my custom built UAV/quadcopter/drone and …
