The next Make, Hack, Void meeting will at 6:30pm on Tuesday the 19th of Jan 2010 at the food court near Dendy/JB Hifi in the Canberra Centre.

Placeholder for HAM radio stuff

Placeholder for Canberra soldering tutorial day ideas...

I'm working on a simple lighting display for a friend's night club event. It's based on 9 Aerpro 'neon' under car lights and will be sequenced by an Arduino.

I've decided that this would be a good a time as any to design my own Arduino shield and to start having a serious attempt at using gEDA.

The next Make, Hack, Void meeting will at 6:30pm on Tuesday the 12th of Jan 2010 at the food court near Dendy/JB Hifi in the Canberra Centre.

We'll try a change of venue since the Wig & Pen is a bit too noisy.

Hacknmod have created a list of companies that provide free samples - great for getting your project off the ground.

Microchip have published a nice summary how of to drive motors with microcontrollers: http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/devicedoc/41233A.pdf

I've pulled a couple of stepper motors out of an ancient bubblejet printer.  I plan to make a lenz2 turbine, about 40cm in diameter, either directly mounting the motor, or using the toothed belt that I pulled out of the printer.

I'll be using some 2mm plywood, PVC halfpipes for the vanes, and I'm not sure how to join them to a hub and axle yet.

see http://www.windstuffnow.com/main/lenz2_turbine.htm for more info on the turbine design.

We will be meeting up again at 6:30pm on Tuesday the 5th of January.

Venue TBA (Wig & Pen is a little noisy).

In the absence of a better suggestion, this meetup will be held at the Wig & Pen again.

For the benefit of any new people joining us, please bring along a project, toy, tool, etc that you are currently working on, find useful, curious or just plain cool.

In order to minimize component count, stocked items in my junk box, and to improve efficiency as well as have software control of the power supply, I wanted to do away with inefficient, standalone linear regulators and instead use spare PWM pins on the microcontroller to generate voltages instead.

I have written a library which creates a simple feedback loop, where you specify the target voltage, and the microcontroller alters the PWM duty cycle to create the requested voltages.