Meetup 2018-11-22

Yes, these are just dry reports of what happened, but they provide a kind of archive of the goings-on at the Thursday evenings and gives me a way to track attendance and what’s happening.

I found a pic of the rendering of the vase, so here it is:

Last week:

Steph got some 2mm Depron from a local hobby shop, and we talked a while about the ideal material and setup.

Kolijn continued with the design for the Lora signal strength tracker, and we went through options for getting the cases machined consistently. The plastic box is about R12, but would cost over R100 to get the holes in.

Danie came to chat about his art car project for AfrikaBurn. We tried to figure out how many controllers he’d need and how much power it would require. Lots.

Kim popped in for a short while to say hi.

This week:

Last Saturday and Sunday I messed around with getting a LED to sense light levels, and then average that out and get a moving envelope of the variations, so that I can communicate with an Arduino using flashing lights. This is still in a very early stage, but I can now reliably detect a flashing light at about 1Hz frequency, so it’s going to work. Thursday evening I found out that the capacitance (or something) of my hand approaching the board also has a big influence on the voltage levels, so we might be able to do something with that too.

The MaslowCNC frame is built! Jan got the belts this week, and came to pick up my spare wood to be used for the build. The machine is to be housed against Otto’s garage wall, so I could not help build.

Steph had a four-character 7-segment display, and got it to display a scrolling ‘Hello’ by putting together pieces of code found from various examples on the web. Pretty awesome!

Reuben had the new trinamic drivers with SPI control installed, and spent some time getting the Marlin settings right. In the end, the motors did not run. Time to take a step back and get it running using the non-SPI setup, then we can sort out if it’s a setup problem or a hardware issue.

Altogether, a really nice evening.