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

When: Second and fourth Tuesday of every month, from 8pm (see this calendar)

Where: The Edinburgh Hacklab in The Drill Hall, off Leith Walk (details)

If you're coming for the first time, we advise you to sign up to our mailing list, just to say hello and check we're meeting in the usual place.

The new usual place is the Edinburgh Hacklab, Edinburgh's own hackerspace in The Drill Hall, off Leith Walk. Access is limited outside office hours, so you'll need to buzz us to get in (details on the hacklab wiki).

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 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)

• WaldFlöte - an abandoned 19th Century church organ wired for MIDI

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)

• GedaTalk - brief talk about the gEDA toolchain (GarethEdwards)

Possible Projects

This page is for ideas for projects.