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Electronics Workshop with Mitch Altman

Iestyn — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 20:24:19 +0000

RobotBrighton and The Skiff hosted an excellent electronics workshop today with Mitch Altman – the guy who invented the TV-B-Gone and the Brain Machine – who kindy decided to visit us in Brighton during his stay in the UK.

It’s been many years since I’ve done any soldering, and to be fair I was never that good at it, so it was good to have an expert on hand to show how it’s done.

Mitch had a few kits with him for sale, I bought a Mignonette game kit to help me practice my soldering, and a Brain Machine kit that I’ll put together soon. I had a go on one of the pre-built Brain Machines, and they are very strange..

More photos on Flickr.

Hacker Spaces

Iestyn — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:52:00 +0000

Found on the Wired blog. Brighton so needs one of these!

[update]: I see The Skiff is listed in the HackerSpaces wiki. Is it really a hacker space? Surely it’s more of a co-working thing? Perhaps they’re one and the same. Perhaps I just like the look of the photographs in the article.

Arduino + Flash + Wii Nunchuck + Servos + Webcam. Part 1

Iestyn — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:25:13 +0000

Here’s part of what I’ve been working on over the last few days.

The Wii Nunchuck is connected to my Arduino using I2C.

For now, the webcam is just a standard webcam with the housing removed, and connected via USB.

It uses hacked up code from here and here.

(If you want to make something like this, Making Things Talk is an outstanding book.)

Here’s a sample video:

[update]: Hello Hack a Day people!

[update]: As Dokument says, here’s an almost identical setup created long before I did this.

[update]: If you don’t want to cut the end off your Wii Nunchuck, you can buy one of these.