[57north-discuss] Themed Thursdays

[Robert McWilliam]

Themed Thursdays have kind of fallen off; I'm keen to see if we can
resurrect them. 

I've a couple of things that I'd be willing to run:
 - FPGA programming - there seems to be a couple of people interested in
 playing with FPGAs. I could run an evening where we go through the
 fundamental of designing for FPGAs and get flashing lights (and maybe
 something more adventurous) running on some dev boards (I think I can
 provide 2 cyclone II boards and a Spartan 6 (I'd have to have a look
 and see if I can find them - the cyclone II boards are pretty cheap if
 we need more) to play with.
- Basic digital electronics - lets grab some resistors and transistors
and build basic RTL gates and other things. I think the step from single
transistor to logic is often fuzzy. Resistor transistor logic is pretty
simple and we could easily wire up a variety of gates on a bread board
and build something more complicated (I'd go for an adder (not awfully
complicated but is useful) but am open to suggestions). We could look at
some of the other options for building logic too. 

Things I'd be interested in/we've talked about in the past if anyone
would run them (or be willing to do them with others):
 - Soldering - Soldering is something that is very easy to do wrong but
 regularly required. There are lots of tips and tricks that can make it
 easier. Let's set aside some time to exchange tips/tricks/pointers to
 where such can be found and make everybodies soldering better (world
 domination to follow shortly).  
- Pointing robot - We have a robot arm with a laser pointer and some
plans to use it to find where things are kept in the space. There are
quite a lot of things that need to be done to get it to do all of that:
a database/list of what's in the space and where it is (or should be), a
way to get from that to what we want the arm to do to point at
something, control/sensing of the arm location, an interface to look up
something for the arm to point at, power supply for the arm + control
stuff, probably more stuff that I've forgotten about.  I'd like to work
on this as a group project. 
 - 3D printer/mill - Ed donated most of the parts needed to make a 3D
 printer or CNC mill. Could we have an evening to have a look at what
 the plans are to build it?

Is there any interest in any of the above actually happening? Would you
like something else? Are you willing to run something?

Robert
-- 
Robert McWilliam      rmcw at allmail.net    www.ormiret.com

Disclaimer: Opinions cited by me are not necessarily my opinions. 
Facts cited by me are not necessarily facts.