Here’s this week’s schedule:

• Tuesday, from 07:15PM Splat Space Open Meeting:

  Open Meetings on Tuesdays include member show & tell, project updates, and calls for collaborative hacking from 7pm-8pm. By 8:00pm, the meeting will break and everyone is free to mingle, work on projects, and get to know fellow hackers.

  How to get here: http://splatspace.org/location/

  We’re in the basement below Beyu Caffe @ 331 W. Main St. Parking behind the building on Ramseur St — there is plenty of parking and it’s free on weekends and/or as long as you exit the lot after 7pm.

• Sunday, from 06:00PM Craft Project Night:

  Bring your textile, paper, jewelry, fiber, metal, or any type of craft project to the space.

We hope to see you out!

The guys and gals from SparkFun Electronics are on tour, visiting hackerspaces and other maker hangouts, promoting their Free Day event, filming for a documentary and giving out free stuff. And, as chance has it, they will be at Durham’s own hackerspace – SplatSpace – next Tuesday!

SparkFun have been big supporters of the maker / hacker community and do a lot of business with folks like us, selling electronics parts, robotics stuff, Arduino kit, etc. This should be a great chance to come out, interact with some of their employees, possibly get yourself captured on film (who knows, maybe they’ll put you in the documentary), and generally hang out with cool people at the coolest hackerspace around.

Word has it the SparkFun crew will come bearing gift cards, t-shirts, stickers, logo patches, etc. They’ve been invited to join us for our open meeting which starts at 7:00pm, but they may be around earlier. Follow this space, the mailing list, twitter, etc. for more detailed news if/when it becomes available.

Jeff C. sends in this update, on his Mantis Mill project. In summary… it’s alive and working! And from what I saw of the board he started milling at last week’s Splatspace Open Meeting, the resolution on this thing is better than expected. It’s certainly good enough to mill boards that are suitable for mounting SMD components, which makes this very handy indeed.

Jeff has posted another update on his Mantis 9.1 Mill project. There’s a nice video of his jogging all 3 axes as the mill starts to take shape.

So, Phil was dorking around at Splat*Space, indulging a nostalgia kick for the “old skool” phone phreaking days. To that end, he created a simple simulated phone circuit (hint: just wire two phones together with about 12 volts on the line… you can’t ring the phones this way, but if you take both off-hook, you can talk back and forth) and then had an Arduino board generate a 2600hz tone, which was then piped into an op-amp and then injected onto the phone circuit. As you can see (and hear) in the video, bridging from the Arduino world to the POTS world works quite nicely.

Also in this album are a bunch of pictures of the space. If you’ve ever wondered what SplatSpace looks like, take a gander.

Hit up our G+ page for the pics and video:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/109267952190604954572/109267952190604954572/posts/RViysK6z8Ap

For several years now, the CS Club at the University of Waterloo have been staging an AI programming contest.  Google have lately stepped in as a sponsor, and the contest has been open the public for the last couple of years.  This year’s AI Challenge involves a simulated ant colony competing in a sort of multi-turn strategy game.

A couple of SplatSpace members have started hacking on some bots for the challenge, with an eye towards forming a SplatSpace team and entering the challenge. If you’re at all interested in AI programming, and want to join the team, just let us know. Everyone is welcome to participate. Extensive AI programming knowledge is NOT necessary to compete (although it might be useful to *win*) and the provided “starter kits” make it very simple to get your first bot up and running and “in the game.” Submissions can be coded in any of a number of languages including C, Erlang, Java, Groovy, Scala, Clojure, Haskell, Common Lisp, OCaml, etc.

Splatspacer Jeff C. has just posted this update on his project to build a Mantis CNC mill. These mills are good for milling PC Boards, and we’re all excited to see how well it works when Jeff gets it all together. Just imagine… no more messy etching solution, goofing around with irons trying to transfer laser toner to boards, and no waiting days for a custom board from a commercial fab! Hopefully this thing will truly turn out to be the holy grail of DIY PCB fabrication.

Just an update for all of our friends — Splat Space is alive and thriving! We’ve had a busy summer. Here are the highlights:

– We made and shipped our Global Hackerspace project — The Piano Player. Check it out in all its glory here. Aside from the awesome video and blog post available there, we also have lesson plans and schematics up at http://gghc.splatspace.org/

– We attended MakerFaire on June 18th and met a lot of awesome people. Thank you MakerfaireNC for making such an awesome event happen.

– To kickstart our 3d printing interests, we borrowed a RepRap from Winstom Salem’s hackerspace, Fablocker. We learned a lot, and some Splat Space members were motivated to get their own makerbots working in the space. Win! Thanks to our friends @ Fablocker!

– We’re gaining membership after nearly a year together. Lots of plans are forming and this is only the beginning. Now is a great time to get involved in Splat Space. Do it!

Recommended ways to follow what we’re doing:
– Join Our Mailing List: http://groups.google.com/group/durham-makerspace
– Follow Our Meetup.com Presence for Upcoming Events: http://meetup.com/splatspace