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Retro Gaming & Computing Night 2010

It’s that time again folks! The second annual Retro Gaming and Computing Night. Come on out to Makers Local 256 at 203 Brown St on July 3rd for a night of nostalgia, good food, and good people.

We’re celebrating the classics that made us the geeks and nerds we are today. Remember, 16 bit or older computers and games. That’s nothing newer than SNES, Genesis, Neo Geo, or IBM 386sx. You’re welcome to bring your own system and/or games. Emulation is permitted but only if necessary. We’ll have plenty of TVs and a couple of projectors going, grilling out at 7pm, and a keg on hand. BYOB is welcome.

Mario Kart tournament at 9pm, with a bit of a twist. Hope to see you there!

Facebook event page

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Makers Local has borrowed an etching press temporarily. It’s a simple but versatile model, and we’ll be teaching how to use it it Saturday, May 22 at 3pm. The class is very basic, and covers everything you’d need to know to ink up a relief block and operate a printing press. Interested folks won’t need to bring anything, we’ve got all the bases covered at the shop. If you want to make an original image, that’s great! If you don’t, that’s also great! There’s a rumor we might have some copper plate etching happening as well, but we’ll see.

The press is only in the shop for a limited time, and we’ll probably never get a machine like this again, so this could be your only chance to play with one. Don’t miss out!

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This Saturday, May 8 at 3PM Makers Local will have a class to teach the basics of silk screen printing. In just a few hours we’ll have screens ready to print single color images on paper, canvas or fabric. At the end of the class we’ll start hand printing our own tshirts with our Makers Local logo and other original graphics.

All you need to bring is a blank shirt and your own single color image. For example, our logo –

ML256 Logo
ML256 Logo
Screen Printing
Behold the final product!

Text is fine, any image file format will be okay. If you want help creating your own image, feel free to come by for this week’s Art Night, May 6 at 7 pm and we can make it happen.

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Where: Makers Local 256, 203 Brown Street
When: Saturday, October 17th, 1:00 – 3:00pm
Cost: $30 (for the things you get to keep)

Mr. Mike Spiceland, a coworker of mine, will be giving an basic AVR class in two weeks, October 17th from 1 to 3pm. Everyone will need to bring a laptop with them. I’m waiting to hear back about getting some Arduinos for $30. Please email me before Saturday if you’re interested in taking part in the class so we know how many people to plan.

For those with Debian or Ubuntu systems, you should be able to just run the following before the class:
apt-get install gcc-avr avr-libc avrdude

For those with Windows systems, you’ll need to install the WinAVR package here: http://winavr.sourceforge.net/

Don’t worry if you have any problems getting your system setup, just show up a little early and we’ll be able to help you get going.

The class outline is as follows:

Class 1: Introduction to microcontrollers / AVR / Arduino
– October 17th
Basic Concepts
building projects and programming your micro
bits and bytes – hex, binary, binary C operators, and accessing
16-bit registers on an 8 bit micro
getting familiar with the datasheet
I/O ports – talking to the outside world
intro to avr-gcc and avr-libc
Interrupts
Interrupt Service Routines
External Interrupts

Mike also has two more classes planned. We’ll discuss when we want to have them at the this class.

I look forward to seeing you there!
#matt