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This coming Tuesday (Nov 3) at 7:00 PM, we have some amazing people from YourDuino.com coming by Makers Local 256 to give a presentation/demo/Q&A on Arduino microcontrollers and embedded electronics in general. They’re touring around the Southeast and ML256 is one of the many places they chose to stop by!

Their main objective is to talk to people about Arduino and what you can do with it. They’ll have some kits and parts available during and after the presentation, so if you don’t have an Arduino (or two) already, you can pick one up then. They’ll be showing off a neat display of a few different Arduino projects and circuits, so it should be interesting and fun!

They’ll be going through the entire process of designing, connecting, and coding up a simple Arduino project from start to finish. If you have any questions about your own project, they would love to discuss ideas and give help where they can.

There’s no cost to attend the presentation, but they will have parts available for sale if you need them. Anyone is welcome to attend!

The Huntsville chapter of Engineers Without Borders invites Makers Local 256 to come to a class on appropriate technologies design.  To define, appropriate technology design is the use of technology to allow a community to become self-reliant; e.g. using local resources and skills to implement and sustainably operate a setup for basic resources and income.  Some examples are here.

The appropriate technologies design class and tour will be starting at 10am on December 3, 2011 on-site at SIFAT‘s campus at 2944 County Rd. 113, Lineville, AL 36266.  Expect it to be an all day event as it is a 3 hour drive from Huntsville (we will need to leave at 7am, some of us are planning to carpool).  If you are interested in attending please sign up on the wikipage (carpooling is being arranged therein).

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!

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.

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