Meetup 2019-05-02

Threads and Batteries:

Another nice evening, with a full garage! Some highlights:

Steph had his power-assist glove finished, and demoed it. His sensors on the fingers are just bare wires and the Arduino senses the capacitance/resistance. Nice solution, and a really neat project! He then worked on getting a radio link set up, blinking a LED triggered via the link.

Hedley brought his roomba-knockoff vacuum cleaner and spent some time cutting out the battery compartment. The old battery was shot, so he found a holder and new batteries with roughly the same form factor, but slightly bigger. The battery transplant was a success after a bit of faultfinding with the batteries not making contact. Successful repair!

Kolijn was working on one of his projects and also helped Steph with the setup of the radios.

JP had an interestingly-shaped antenna that he wanted to work with at a lower frequency, so he brought some brass brazing rods and we tried getting them threaded with an M3 thread. The first one was successful, but my threading tools are not that great, so the rest turned out cross-threaded and just janky. Nonetheless, we did get 2 of them to work, so he could experiment further.

Cassidy and Pine worked on their skateboards. Cassidy had a new one with 2 belt-drive motors. Looks like a beast, but the torque is not comparable to the older one.

Just as we were packing up, JP showed us a component tester that he built with a maker group in the Netherlands. That is a really nice piece of kit that takes any component and measures it to figure out what type of component it is, and it measures the parameters of the component. Interesting part!

Some of the people brought a few beers, so we had a nice social time.