Attending: Tony, Elizabeth, Kieran, Mike and a warm welcome to Patrick on his first visit. Patrick joined us today as our first official Makerspace member, this marks another step forward in our quest to transition to a Makerspace. Patrick is interested in making a point of sale terminal for a very specific use, and came equipped with a ‘Beagle bone’ and touch screen for the project, pictured below.

Mike, Les, Elizabeth. Keiran, James, Ollie, Donald, Joe, ‘surly Dev’ and myself Tony. Another general week of discussion and one or two individual projects going on during the session. I was trying to restore a backup image of my main desktop PC which is a Lenovo Thinkcentre MT-M 7373-CTO onto an almost exact replica of the machine but with a slightly faster Core 2 Duo CPU. After an initial glitch the image copied onto the HDD (same 160Gig as the other PC) but refused to boot.

Attending: Tony, Les, Elizabeth. Keiran, Ollie, Donald, Joe, Simon from Preston Hackerspace and a warm welcome to newcomer, ‘surly Dev’, and not forgetting me of course…….Mike No specific projects were undertaken this week, it was more of a social gathering and catch up. Although Les did bring a combined humidity and temperature sensor and demonstrated it using an Arduino. One of the highlights for new members is typing in the 26 bit Hex code for wireless access.

At our last Arduino session, several shrimps were built, and they were all running without the load capacitors across the crystal oscillator. Below is a discussion from the Arduino forum about the capacitors. http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,5677.0.html From the crystal’s point of view, C1 and C2 are in series, so the total that the crystal sees is 11 pF. Stray capacitance and input capacitance on the pins of the ‘328p may account for 8-10 pF.

We have been doing various projects with the Arduino. Several people have expressed interest in the energy monitoring project I am working on, so here is the progress so far. A site monitoring the temperature of various rooms in my house, and also the power usage. See it here:- http://data-graphers.appspot.com/feed/49171226?t=4 The loft is the hottest area in the summer, and the front room is the coolest room. The outside temperature is also monitored for comparison.

Attending: Les, Tony, Elizabeth, Keiran, Joe and Mike. Les led another Arduino teach in session. This week it was laser trip wire alarm system, using a light dependent resistor and a torch standing in for the laser. When the light beam is broken, the LED flashes and the buzzer sounds repeatedly. The TV on the back wall goes off by itself after a couple of hours, and seems to be a temperature related fault.