Meetup 2018-11-29

We had a very full garage this week! Lots of people, interesting projects, even though we had loadshedding from 8pm to 9pm.

I did a few labels on my masking tape labeller, after having found a way to make it run consistently without first having to recompile the Arduino code.

Steph cut out the wings for his pico stick (copied off my stick’s wings) and worked on his 7-segment display.

Albert and Stefaan (2 learners from Paul Roos) visited to talk about some projects they were thinking of doing. Later, they disassembled one of my old hard drives. Hopefully an enjoyable evening for them.

I helped Reuben go through the settings on his Marlin installation to get it to work with the Trinamic 2130 drivers with SPI. The extruder (non-spi) works now, but not the rest.

Bouwer (first-time visitor) wanted some help to design a circuit that would sound a buzzer if more than a certain amount of pressure is put on a mat made with Velostat (interesting material!). Otto talked him through a circuit and the tradeoffs he needs to make.

I talked with Jan a bit to sort out details for the belt tensioning on the Maslow, and he was busy with the hardware wiring looms.

Otto was working on getting his laptop set up with all the tools on Ubuntu. Looks like his Salae clone does not work on it yet. We tried looking at the SPI signals on the 3D printer board.

Otto also got an Itsy Bitsy set up with 3 serial ports, talking to an Arduino. This is for a project where he needs lots of serials. We discussed the pros and cons of Micropython.

Kim popped in for a few minutes. She had started growing cell cultures on a silicon mold she made from my 3D-printed surfaces, to see if they would follow the grooves caused by the layered build process. This should be interesting…

Altogether a really nice evening.