Here’s this week’s schedule at the space:
We hope to see you out!
This past month, members of Splatspace went to the Carolina Farm Stewards Sustainable Agriculture Conference. They were there to help demonstrate simple DIY tech projects for agricultural work and products.
Darren Boss and Jeff Crews showed off several micro controller projects. Darren displayed parts from his work on a brewtroller system and a chicken coop door that opens and closes automatically. Jeff demoed the Mantis Mill and an Arduino controlled temperature control system created by another Splat member, Mike Broome.
They also learned about several other interesting projects, like Coolbot and a variety of low tech fabrication tricks.
This was a really cool conference, and we’re looking forwards to other ways we can participate in the vibrant agricultural hacking scene in North Carolina.
Here’s this week’s schedule at the space:
We hope to see you out!
Here’s this week’s schedule at the space:
We hope to see you out!
Here’s this week’s schedule at the space:
We hope to see you out!
One of the Splatspace contributions to 2013’s SparkCon was a set of 3D printed connectors for building with common bamboo skewers.
The design is now up on Thingiverse, and the prototype kit has now found a new life at a local elementary school, where it will be used for art as well as teaching 3D geometry.
This past Sunday Splatspace held another Beginning Soldering class, at which about 10 attendees learned the basics of electronic assembly using kits from Velleman, Adafruit, and Solarbotics.
Our youngest attendee was 10 years old and successfully completed her first solo soldering project, a Velleman holiday ornament.
This event was also the first usage of our new solder fume-filter. Triangle Ecycling (triangleecycling.com) donated two large case fans. We had hoped to use them in this design from Thingiverse, but the fans were so big that our printer couldn’t handle the print. So we used that as a base and designed our own. With an activated carbon filter, it worked very well. We plan to make another of this size as well as some other, slightly smaller, 3D-printed ones.
Back in September, a few Splatters ran some events at Sparkcon. One of the bigger attraction was an event called “Raleigh Rampage”, where people dressed as robots and monsters could smash a cardboard replica of downtown Raleigh.
Sounds pretty cool, right? And now, we have video:
If you like this video, you should check out other videos on our youtube channel.
Here’s this week’s schedule at the space:
We hope to see you out!
The first of the two Robot Camp sessions advertised in this posthappened a couple weeks ago. Holding to our many years tradition, Splatters helped make up the mentors for the several teams of kids.
Josh Buczynski helps sort out a Mindstorms kit.
Robot Camp, for those readers not familiar with it, is a day long event at Efland Cheeks Elementary where students design, build, and program “battlebots” style robots using Lego Mindstorms. The program is a major motivator to get students involved in science and technology, and many students have shared that it’s motivated them to get involved with other robotics groups as they get older. It’s free to students, and as such relies on volunteers to mentor the kids.
Joe Divers helps students get their robot plans sorted.
This year one of members, Pete Soper, attended and the students he mentored swept the competition. He wrote about the experience on his blog:
Pete Soper helps two students build their robot, Wally. Wally became the Robot Camp champion.
[The students’ robot] came out on top in a free for all battle between all seven robots. The robots fought “sumo style” within a roughly four foot diameter circle until all but one robot was forced outside the circle or disabled. … Very exciting!
