We will be meeting up again at the Wig & Pen in Civic (directions), at 6:30pm on Tuesday the 22th of December.

I bought a couple of these displays from Sure Electronics (an Ebay vendor) for an upcoming project.

The displays each consist of 4 LED modules, each module consisting of 8x8 LED chips, each under its own plastic diffuser lens.

Getting stuck into my LED matrix project, I soon ran into memory problems on the Arduino.

It turns out you can stick constant data into program memory using the PROGMEM directive, with macros provided to get it back out without having to have everything residing in RAM simultaneously.

There is a good tutorial on how to use it on the AVRFreaks forums.

We will be meeting up again at the Wig & Pen in Civic (directions), at 6:30pm on Tuesday the 15th of December.

The agenda is as follows:

Two different methods of shifting from 3V3 down to 1V8 and vice versa. The second method is particularly useful as it requires less components and is bi-directional. The first method was required for prototyping a GPS module and was needed in a hurry and had to fit in a small space. I have included the work I did breadboarding the design as I was fairly happy with how small I got the circuit.

I came across this site with a bunch of pre-canned recipes for bit manipulation: http://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html

Makers

present

Alistair, Eyal, Brenda, Geoff, Angus, Adam, Rob, Andrew and Dave

unavailable

Hugh

In the process of developing PCBs it is quite normal for the first revision of a design to require modification - either due to error or a design afterthought/improvement. Here are some examples and thoughts on how to successfully modify a PCB. This is not a specific project as such, rather an attempt to start collecting ideas and processes that I have come across or developed over the years. This is work in progress, please comment.

Cutting tracks:

Love the Arduino but hate the minimal IDE it provides?

http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Code/Eclipse shows you how to develop for the Arduino in Eclipse.

The first Canberra Make, Hack, Void meetup will be at 6:30 at the Wig & Pen in Civic on Tuesday the 8th of December.
The proposed agenda is:

• Show and Tell - everyone must bring along 1 useful tool or a project they are working on and give a quick spiel
• Locations - Where can we host a Hackerspace
• Funding - How do meet the costs of the Hackerspace
• Alliances - What other community groups can we ally with