What: A fornightly-ish get-together for creative hardware tinkering and learning.

When: Second and fourth Tuesday of every month, from 7pm

Where: The Forest Cafe on Bristo Place (map)

Now Infoseed is shut, we're meeting in the upstairs "office" at the Forest. To find us you need to go into the main entrance of the Forest, past the cafe counter and through the mysterious door at the back of the room. Then go up some dark and funky stairs to the first floor, and we'll be in the first door on your left. (If you can see a pulpit you're in the wrong room.)

Introduction

Ever had an idea for a clever gadget or contraption, but not known how to start building it? Want to learn more about hardware and electronics? Got some interesting parts you pulled out of a skip years ago thinking they might be useful? Or maybe you're already a well-established basement inventor, and want to help teach others?

Then come along to the Dorkbot Workshop. This is a new session from the organisers of DorkbotAlba, intended to bring all these people together to encourage and support each other to pursue their interest. Each session will be led by one or more experienced volunteers, who will teach you whatever they know, and help you find out what they don't.

Bring along an idea, or anything you think may be interesting to play with, and we'll all see what we can do with it.

What to bring

• Yourself (everything else is optional)
• Ideas!
• Anything you think may be useful or interesting.

What's provided

• Quiet space to work in
• Basic tools
• Soldering irons
• Multimeters
• Oscilloscope
• A fair amount of old cables and abandoned computer hardware
• Internet access (several Linux PCs, plus wireless access)
• Some space for storing projects between meetings.
• Friendly people to help and teach.

Projects

Following is a list of past and current projects. Please add to this list. If you're interested in working on one of these then note this when you add your name to the attendees for the next event, or tell the person involved.

Not started yet:

• Repair two faulty oscilloscopes (MartinLing)

• Design and build a variable frequency/pulsewidth flashing light circuit for juggling balls (Gandolf)

• Circuitbend an annoying child's toy to be more annoying (GarethEdwards)

• Build a self-loading (robotic?) multi-DVD burner/cloner stack from scratch (Jay)

Work in progress:

• A "persistence of vision" LED array - PovLed

• Further programming on the LED hat (Nick Woolley)

• Figure out how to read data from a Union Reality headset (GarethEdwards)

• Attaching cameras and other gadgets to a radio controlled flying wing (MartinLing)

• Get a serial interface into a Linux-based humanoid robot (JoeHalliwell)

• Build a vehicle which uses vibrating brushes for locomotion (Al and Sim)

Done:

• Repair a large power supply (Gandolf) (*DONE*)
• Create a motorised high speed toilet roll dispenser. (Rocca) (*DONE*)
• Modify a megaphone to take an external audio input (Gary) (*DONE*)

• Fix an X-box suffering from "3 red lights of death" (Sim, Al and Aaron) (*DONE*)

• Convert a wah-wah pedal to be a MIDI continuous controller (GarethEdwards)

Possible Projects

This page is for ideas for projects.

Previous Events

The first event was on 13th February 2007 (Photos).

The second event was on 13th March 2007 (Photos).

We've been meeting monthly every since, and bi-monthly since November 2007.

Next Event

As mentioned above, that'll be the next second-or-fourth-Tuesday-of-the-month by default. To having to announce it all the time we'll only announce cancellations or other changes on the announce-list (see above for details). Upcoming events are now listed at Upcoming - you don't have to but you can let us know you're coming by registering there.