Remember that ‘closet’ that had paint splattered all over the walls and ceilings? It looked like some ugly accident happened. At the end of the night it was a whole different room.

We only did the main walls, although some trim got painted with the same color too. We should get a gallon of contrasting trim paint and get these done right. Here’s a selection of pictures I took at the meeting. Compare these with the ones in previous blog post. Oh and that foosball table got a real workout too.

Maui Makers New Home

Its official, Maui Makers now has use of 1550+sqft of the F-2 Cafeteria building in Pu’unene, courtesy Hawaii Dept of Education. This is the building next to our container, so the basic location has not changed. However, now we have:

• a large (34′ x 31′) open classroom
• a kitchen (14 x 22) with two sinks, stove, and washer/dryer
• a small (7 x 5) room w/built in shelves (and power breakers)
• a larger (11 x 14) ‘office’ with shelves, 3 windows and working air conditioner
• two bathrooms!! (outside)
• AC Power galore.

Floor Plan of Maui Makers F2 Building in Pu'unene HI

We need to secure the exterior windows on the front (kitchen) area. Perhaps some bars made from welded rebar? Some of the rooms need painting. Everything needs a deep cleaning. Then we are ready to move in equipment!

The Classroom:

Interior F2 Classroom from rear corner

Panorama of classroom in F2 Cafeteria - kitchen is on left

The large room in the center of the building is an open 34′ x 31′ space. DoEd mayoccasionally want to use if for meetings, etc. We can use it for classes, temporary projects, etc. If we are going to use it for any projects longer than a couple days, we need to inform DoEd. There are two (large but skanky) bathrooms off this big room. They are NOT to be used. If you need one, there are two bathrooms with doors outside on the front of the building (towards our container). The interior bathrooms are much larger – which would mean a LOT more custodial work if they were used. Since Dept of Ed is providing cleaning, they get to say dont use em… besides which, they need a bunch of work.

New Kitchen Doorway

We installed a lockable door between the kitchen and the classroom this past Thursday (3May2012), with the expectation that DoEd was going to retain the classroom. It will still be useful securing our space if/when DoEd wants to use the room. The windows to the left of the door now open/close for pass-through. They can lock but we may want to add some sort of security grate over them.

The Kitchen Area:

The main kitchen area is about 17′ long and 14′ wide. It has a lot of counter space, with cabinets under counter. We need to clean out the cabinets and then they can be secured as project storage for members.
There is 220v power in the opening for the stove. There is a stove+oven but we dont know if it works. I have not even opened it to look inside.
The main sink (under window) has two parts and works pretty well. The other sink (on right) is deep but has very weak water flow. Oh, we do have hot water. There is a non-functional refrigerator which we have arranged for CWD to pickup for disposal when we get it outside.

Closet and Hallway
Off the kitchen is a fair sized (7′ x 5′) closet, which has the power breaker panel inside, and a small cupboard with shelves built into the wall. Someone had fun splattering paint all over this room (and its carpet.) We need to repaint, remove the carpet and clean out the shelves. We also need to get a key to the breaker panel.

Next to the closet is a hallway to the Office. There is a washer and dryer setup on one wall. The washer has (leaky) hot and cold water and working drain. There is no exhaust or 220v power for the dryer. Maybe they swapped the dryer and stove as needed? The security door in the hall opens to ‘The Pantry’. We havent seen it yet but based on wall space, it should be pretty large.

The Office – Shop
The back room was called ‘The Office’ by DoEd. Its a 14′ x 11′ concrete block room with shelves built into one wall. The long outside wall has one window with a working air conditioner (aka dust hole). The short outside wall has two windows. There are two rows of power outlets running around the room, and a set of RJ-45 connectors. Some of the RJ-45 say Data, while others are probably phone. It is not known yet if the Data sockets are live network access. This room will make an excellent workshop!

Shelves in The Office (and Cole)

Here’s the full Flickr set:

We were met by Jason and Dylan, two of the founders of this space.  I was totally blown away with how HUGE this space is, and how much stuff they have accumulated in their short existence (incorporated Feb 2011).  The building is your basic brick industrial one story on an industrial road a block or two from a residential area. It is pretty close to the OKC airport (took me 10 minutes to drive to airport). The building is on a slight hill and so has a second story below the one visible from the main street. They have 10,000sqft upstairs, with several rollup doors for access, and another 4,000 sqft downstairs.

Inside is wide open, although they are in the process of renovating, painting and perhaps doing a bit of subdividing. They had plastic sheeting hung from the ceiling when I was there. This was to keep the dust and paint somewhat contained. It also served nicely to divide up the space. One area was full of wood shop equipment, including a large flatbed CNC built from particle board by a member. Another area had a large projection screen, rows of large open workbenches, all ready for member projects – along with a big row of full size lockers for storage. The last big subdivision had a whole bunch of equipment and projects stacked up and out on tables. There are separate real rooms along the back and side wall. One is full of couches and chairs, another (in process) room will hold their 20′ meeting room table. Side rooms held a big server rack (fiber internet hub is right near by), and a ‘security room’ used by the local computer security group… basically a nice quite separate room for programming, exploring etc.

Downstairs they have another big open space, that is pretty much empty at present. Well it does have a couple impressive bits of equipment. The big one is a Cincinnati Milacron CNC mill with 20 bit changer. This is a full size industrial CNC mill – that has seen its share of use. The Ohm folks have been reconditioning it and it is fully operational. They are fortunate to have several members whose day jobs are maintaining similar large machines. Another big piece down in the Ohm dungeon is a beautiful kiln, recently acquired by a member off E-Bay (if I recall correctly).

Ohm has LOTS of space and are only just beginning to get settled in it. Dylan and Jason have big plans and are very open to collaboration with others. We talked a bit about their history (Dylan was a rock concert organizer for many years, helping get the Norman OK festival started, etc.) and plans – a coffee shop and retail outlet with hacker gear someday! They are very interested in education and spreading MAKE technologies – especially in an open source fashion.

If you happen to be in Oklahoma, head over to OHM and check them out.

Here’s the full Flickr set of pics from Ohm Space visit:

This year Maui Makers was invited to repeat the Sewing Electronics class taught at the February “Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day” event also sponsored by MEDB’s WIT. The 2 hour class was listed as “Creative Innovation”, promising:

“The way things are invented is changing rapidly. Technology is now available to create innovative products on deemed, locally at low cost. Shared equipment workshops known as Makerspaces and FabLabs are popping up around the world, giving people access tanned training in this technology. Join the Maui Makers group as they help you explore various technologies from laser cutting and 3D Printing to sewing electronics into clothing.”

That translated into a short (~15 minute) presentation and ~45 min of sewing color cycling RGB LEDs onto a felt bracelet, with a Makerbot Thing-0-matic running on a side table. I was assisted in this class by Makers Evelyn Z (also a teacher at Kihei Charter School), Dina M., Lynn F., Kimberly D. and my son Brian. There were about 25 kids in the class, with a couple friends of mine (Lotus and Josh) from King Kekaulike High School Robotics Club coming in later after they finished presenting their school’s STEMWorks projects.

LED Bracelet by Dina M.

Presentation Overview
The presentation itself was pretty simple. I called it “21st Century Innovation and Hands-on Sewing Electronics”. I have split it into two parts for PDF uploads. The first half is on 21st Century Innovation Spaces and the 2nd half is the Hands-on Sewing Electronics portion.

First I talked about the history of making (hand crafting -> industrial manufacturing -> 21st century print-on-demand). Then on into ’21st Century Innovation Spaces” – namely FabLabs, TechShop and Makerspaces. I talked about CNC and Desktop Fabrication (additive and subtractive) with example pictures. I touched on Electronics and Physical Computing then moved on to Soft Circuits (aka e-Textiles). I finished up with a quick review of how to do 3d printing on a Makerbot – as Evelyn Z fired up the Thing-o-matic.

Teaching a room of middle/high school kids is fairly new to me. There were a few points were I tossed out some terms (eg. Fabrication) that probably were new to many of the kids. Fortunately, Evelyn was there to help me – interjecting questions to the students for these teaching moments.

I had a surprise for the kids when I got to the e-Textile slide. Under my shirt, I was wearing my LED T-Shirt. This is a plain white T with an 8×10 array of individually addressable RGB LEDs sewn in. I fired it up mid-slide and WOW! kids lit up brighter than the shirt. More on this shirt further down this post.

LED T-Shirt

LED Bracelet

The later half of the presentation was instructions on sewing the LED bracelet. I gave a quick overview of the project and then started the kids working on the steps. As we worked through the steps, I advanced the slides. Printouts of the main steps had been distributed to the tables, along with components before the class started.

Presentation overview slide for hands on portion

The bracelet was pretty straight forward – black felt, conductive thread, battery holder & battery, two LEDs on LilyPad PC boards, and metal snaps. The basic idea was to sew from one snap to – side of battery holder; from + side of battery to + sides of both LEDs; from – sides of both LEDs to the other snap. Closing the snaps around the wrist would complete the circuit and light the LEDS.

This was a step up from the “Intro a Girl to Engr.” class, that lacked the battery holder and snaps. I figured with 2 hours (vs 1) we would have time for other components. Another big change from the last class was better visual aids. The presentation/handouts had pictures of what was expected, and Kimberly brought in a terrific multi-color blackboard/chalk drawing. Dina and Evelyn made a few quick additions before class started. It was a big help to some of the kids. Having the assistants was absolutely essential. Kimberly and Dina had been over to the makerspace on Tuesday for a trial run, which was big help. Evelyn and Lynn had helped me at the Intro A Girl class. Brian, well, he was friends with many of the kids.

One big area that helped was having LOTS of the needle threaders. Conductive thread is rather large and very difficult to fit through eye of needles – especially when needles need to be small enough to fit through holes in battery holders, etc. Last class we ran out as they broke, etc. This time I had 250 on hand.

Using a needle threader

The best laid plans of mice and teachers … it was amazing how many creative ways simple instructions can go wrong. The assistants were quite busy helping kids out – and kids were helping each other too. Several kids ran out of thread and needed more – generally due to some sewing mistake that needed to be backed out. We had some super perfectionists who took a lot longer than others. Their work was great, it just took longer. Overall the kids were successful. I think all the bracelets worked. I saw several of the kids wearing theirs later in the day. Then again there were some who gave me back their finished projects, not really wanting to take it home.

Classic mistakes were:

• sewing wrong polarity of battery/LEDs (quite easy to do)
• crossed stitching or loose ends shorting out
• thread looping around sides rather than thru material
• loosely attached parts – threads not pulled tight

The LillyPad PC boards come in two varieties – pre-populated with SMD LEDs, and bare boards with thru-hole plating. I used the later as they are much less expensive (including bay purchased leds), the holes are bigger and I can get ing 5mm LEDs while the SMD boards are single color. I soldered up about 30 of each type a day or three before the class. These are fairly easy to do, although a bit of a pain as they don’t lie down well for sewing. If I do this class again, I might consider making a jig to hold a bunch of them in position for soldering.  An alternative to using the PC boards is to roll the LED legs and sew through the loops.

Color Changing LED soldered to LilyPad PC board.

LED mounted by sewing thru rolled leads

Sources of materials
You could buy most of the materials at local stores, except maybe the LEDs and battery holders. However small quantities can be very expensive. I was able to get significantly better prices buying from E-bay in quantity. Sparkfun.com was my source for the LilyPad PC boards, conductive thread, and battery holders.

SparkFun.com Products:

• Blank LilyPad LED PC Boards (Set of 10)
• Sewable/SMD Coin Cell Battery Holder
• Conductive Thread 2ply 1oz, 150yard spool $35
• Alt Conductive Thread 4Ply  75yard spool $35
• Alt Conductive Thread 50′ stainless extra thick $24
• Alt Conductive Thread 50′ stainless thick $11
• Alt Conductive Thread 50′ stainless thin $9

LEDs -E-bay vendor JeledHK  I bought both slow and fast change and gave kids one of each:

• 5mm Slow Flashing Multi-color RGB LED 100pc $30
• 5mm Fast Flashing Multi-color RGB LED 100 pc $30

Batteries – CR 2032 (to match Battery Holder) look around carefully. You can buy singles and 3 packs from lots of sources. I found a vendor that sold 100 for less than the price of buying a few retail single packs.

Needle Threaders – buy lots of these. The ones I got are pretty cheap – in both senses of the word. Having lots of them meant it was no big deal if they break…. and they will break. I’m not sure the higher quality ones are worth the premium price – but I haven’t tried many.

• 250 Silver Tone Bow Wire Needle Threaders  - 8Season-gift

Snaps and Felt: Local Fabric Store. I was able to find quite decent 12 packs of metal snaps for a decent price. Felt may or may not be best choice for bracelets. It worked for me as a strong, simple material. Some instructables (LINK) and advice from friends suggested using the material with cover/backing material. This would add extra sewing which would be fine for personal or semi-commercial projects, but part of my consideration for the class was keeping it simple and fast.

Beads – Dina M. added some small metal beads to her example bracelet, along with doing some artistic patterns with the thread. These made the finished project look MUCH better (her professional level sewing skills helped too.). We made beads available to kids as an option.

LED T-Shirt

The LED T-Shirt was something that I threw together in the week before the class. Syuzi P posted about a CuteCircuit’s really amazing Aurora Dress  with hundreds of LEDS created for an opera. When I commented on wanting that on a shirt on Facebook, Suyzi challenged me by saying ‘you could make one’. I had a bunch of LED Strip lying around, and Adafruit had published some interesting tutorials/forum posts about creating arrays, so I took up the challenge.

The result is a fairly simple array using 8 strips of 10 LEDs, using the older HL1606 controller based strips that Adafruit sold in 2010. They upgraded the RGB strips in 2011 (?) to use LDP8806 controllers, so if you buy now you will get the new (better) ones. I had about 10meters of the tape lying around gathering dust. I used 3 of it for Logo Glowego (LINK) but still had lots left over. The 80 LEDs works out to just under 3 meters (32 lights/meter), which at $30+/meter is still pretty expensive. I could probably have used discrete LEDs and saved a lot of money, at the trade off of a LOT of sewing and programming. Having the strips on hand made this a no-brainer. I also had an extra PJRC Teensy 2.0 which is a great form factor for small projects.  A LilyPad or AdaFruit’s new Flora platform would be better alternative, but I had Teensy on hand.

First step, after ascertaining there was existing code to help me complete the project quickly, was to cut up the strips and wire them up as an array. Since the strip is linearly addressed, you have to connect them in a ZigZag pattern. The Adavision code from Adafruit provides a function to remap an array to linear LED id. The code was for Processing  (eg java code) but it is still basically C, so moving it to Arduino was trivial.

The tricky part of the code was that the Processing code converts the LED id to a pixel array index – which is also a linear vector index. The Processing code effectively has 3 values for each LED – the original pixel image, the mapping value, and the value sent out. This is too much data for a small machine. I wanted a function that would take a pixel index and convert it to an LED index, so applications could set led values directly using this mapping function. Rather than derive a new function that could provide the options of the Processing one, I chose to use its mapping calculations. I wrote these into the mapping vector, then stepped through this array setting corresponding values of the library’s led array with index, then copied the values back to the mapping.. effectively using the leds array as a temporary. I then cleared the led array…


// invert the mapping matrix into leds array
for (i = 0; i < _numLEDs; i++)
{
_leds[_remapMatrix[i]] = i;
}
// copy back to mapping matrix
for (i = 0; i < _numLEDs; i++)
{
_remapMatrix[i] = _leds[i];
}
// clear led array
for (i = 0; i < _numLEDs; i++)
{
_leds[i] = 0;
}

I have not uploaded the code changes for this, as it combines the Java Code (one license) into the HL1606 Adafruit library (different license). Perhaps I can get this straightened out and shared soon.

I chose to make my strips vertical with the power/control coming in at the lower left corner (when viewed from the front.) This allowed me to attach the array only at the top of each column and letting them hang naturally. There was some movement of the strips, but this was a trade of between time and effort. I chose the quick and simple method. It also lets me quickly detach the array to wash the shirt, as the strips are NOT fully water tight sealed.

The wiring required jumping the 3 control lines at alternate ends of columns to create the proper zig-zag, remembering that the left/right pads of each column were reversed (eg column 1 wend gnd A B C NC vcc, while col 2 goes vcc NC C B A gnu) — check this, use real names

Power and ground were connected along the bottom of columns in a daisy chain fashion. Extra care was taken to insure proper connection, remembering the pad reversal each column. Initially I used cables with male/female connectors in the power segment. this left long cumbersome wires, so I replaced them with simple no-connector wiring.

The resulting mesh hangs together pretty well. I used ElementalLED’s silicon sealant to seal the ends of each column. It may be water tight but I have not tested it. I think it needs a second application of silicon before I’m willing to try. (NOTE: do NOT buy the sealant kit or end caps they sell. These are the wrong size. Adafruit has started selling some that are the right size)

The processor used was a PJRC Teensy 2.0. I gained significant comfort using these on the Logo Glowego project. They are a very nice arduino compatible board. I hounded the Teensy on an Adafruit breadboard with standoffs, and put the board inside a Sucrets box. The pins I used to create the socket for Teensy made it a bit too tall to fit into the classic Altoids tin. Fortunately, my parts collection yielded up an old Sucrets lozenge tin that fit quite well.

The LEDs strips draw significant power – about 1amp/meter, at 5vdc. While a LiPo battery would be nice and small, I only had 3.5v LiPos handy. So I opted to use a 4 D Cell battery pack that was in my parts collection. This is pretty hefty but worked well. I used a DC-DC step-down converter (Pololu) to insure the power 5vdc. I used connectors on both input and output ends of the converter making the output one with yellow electrical tape. The mounting screw holes in the dc-dc board were too small fo the scres I had (Spartkfun part link) so I wrapped the entire converter with black tape.

Programming the Teensy beyond the library changes was pretty simple. I used the Basic Patterns example from the Adafruit library with small mods to call the mapping functions. I was going to try using the more advanced PWM version of the library but the examples for that are single effect. I wanted to show off a couple effects.

The setup is quite adaptable. There is expansion room with the Teensy to support sensors to control effects (buttons, body motion, etc.) Adding a blue tooth connection to a desktop or android device would provide more effects.

I posted a quick note on the shirt to the Adafruit forum and they posted a note on their blog

Inside LED Tshirt

Jerry wearing Shirt

Logo Glowego at Source 2012

Logo Glowego is an interactive LED sculpture developed for Source 2012. (SOURCE is Maui’s largest annual multi-media arts, music and healing festival held at beautiful Camp Keanae on the wild tropical coast of Maui, Hawaii.)

It started innocently enough with the idea of decking out the old Source rebar logo sculpture with LED strip tape. It wound up using 7 arduinos, 12 meters of LED strip (at $30/meter!), a TFT Display, wind direction/speed sensors, IR distance sensors, temperature/humidity/barometric pressure sensors, etc., etc., etc.

I just finished the documentation (first round) over on the Maui Makers Wiki Additonally a Flickr Set is available documenting the build and a GIT repository has been established at GitHub to hold the software for Logo-Glowego.

This project was as much about the end product as it was a journey through learning complex arduino/maker projects. I have evangelized for years about the Arduino platform. However aside from working through the Oomlaut ARDX examples, being a user of products such as Makerbot/Eggbot, I had not built a complete Arduino based project. I had talked about building a network of wireless weather stations based on the arduino and Xbee RF modems. I felt it was time to “Shut Up and Make Something”

The requirements were that it outline the structure in RGB LED tape, be interactive, use only microcontrollers (no PCs) and be able to handle the environment of the Source Festival – Camp Ke’anae Maui in February. The festival has earned the nickname Soggy Man (a play on the its inspiration, the famous Burning Man) for the heavy rains and mud that often accompany the event. 2012 lived up to its reputation with the wettest and windiest weather in memory of the camp staff.

For more information, check out the wiki docs, and especially the Enhancements.  If you want to help develop some, I plan to install the rig at our Pu’unene container.

Here’s the flickr set:

Maui Makers from SelfMadeinHawaii on Vimeo.

Thank you Jess!! And to all the Makers who were interviewed, and/or just there hanging out!

Maui Makers at TEDxMaui

The producers of our local TEDxMaui event, Katie McMillan and Sara Tekula, graciously invited Maui Makers to show some interactive artwork and have an information/display table outside the event on Sunday January 22, 2012. This was an opportunity we could not pass up. I (Jerry Isdale) had been working on an interactive LED art piece for the Source Maui event in February (its our local burning man inspired event). That piece would be incomplete and inappropriate for the TEDxMaui venue, but a prototype would be a great talking point.

Brian Thomas with help from Cole Santos put together a great display board with pictures and text to show and explain the Makers. Ziz Seykota brought down a whole selection of tools and projects, including the solar rechargeable battery pack he created using batteries harvested from the discards at Community Work Day. Ziz uses a 12v inverter to run various AC powered devices, including his guitar & bass amplifiers. Ben Ward brought his cool multi-touch table with DJ software.Crystal Jean Baranyk brought in some of the art she made with laser cut parts. Evelyn Zayas brought in some samples of the soft circuit/sewable electronics her Kihei Charter School kids had made. Aside from the LED art piece, I brought out our Eggbot, Makerbot Cupcake CNC and a number of sample pieces from these devices and the laser cutter. A good number of makers stopped by the booth to chat and help out (like Chris Taylor in pic above). All in all it made a great display table.

We had a fair number of people come round to check things out. Many remarked that it was the first they had heard of the Maker movement and were quite interested. I expect we will have a good number of people stopping by our blog here and at our Thursday Public Meetings. If you are one of our new friends, please check out the ABOUT page, come to a meeting and read up on our google group.

A week or so ago, Katie uploaded a pic of the what I thought was the goodie bag to Facebook.  I commented it needed EL wire. I brought some with me to the event and sewed it on while listening to the speakers.

TEDxMaui gave these nylon bags to attendees. I though they needed ELwire

EL Wired TEDxMaui bag in dark

Here’s a small Flickr set of pics I have from the event:

A little bit more about that interactive LED piece… It used 5 meters of RGB LED tape from Adafruit.com, controlled by a PJRC Teensy 2.0 (one of a half dozen or so sent to us gratus by PJRC for maker projects. See me if you have an idea for one.), with interactivity provided by a FreakLabs HackerMom’s FredBoard topped by an AdaFruit Proto-Screw-Shield and connected to a wind vane, an anemometer, a pair of Sharp IR Distance sensors (one short range, one longer), MaxBotix Sonar Range Finder and a lighted push button from AdaFruit. Interconnects are waterproof screw-cap 4 wire connectors from Cool Neon. The cage around it is MicroRax. I did some quick laser cutting of cardboard for the bottom, back and top, with hand trimming and hole making as needed.

I plan to write up more tech details in a future post.

The piece currently has two modes, controlled by the button. Demo mode simply cycles a rainbow pattern across the length of the tape. This comes from the AdaFruit LED Belt project. Interactive mode uses the wind vane and IR sensors. The IR pair controls the length of the tape that will light up. Two sensors are used because the long range one gives flaky results when the target is less than 25cm away. The short range one lets us compensate for this response curve. The Wind Vane (from SparkFun’s weather kit) controls the color of the lights… Colors change with the wind… or hand turning. I plan to investigate more sensors an modes of operation for the Source installation.

The use of both the solderless breadboard on Freakduino and the soldered connections on proto shield allowed me to make some quick changes during the late night development leading up to TEDxMaui showing. It also showed the fragility of solderless breadboard connections… There were some 30mph wind gusts during the day and they wrecked havoc on our and other display tables. The connections microRaxx box blew over and a couple of the wires came loose. In my haste to get it back together, I miss wired a couple and did not catch the error for a couple hours. Solderless breadboard are great for experimenting and prototypes, but for any sort of even semi-robust demo setup, you need soldered connections.

MicroRAX cross section 10mm x 10mm

I was putting in an order to Sparkfun and decided to add a MicroRAX Medium Kit to build some frames. Shipping on my order was already expensive (once over $100 it HAS to go UPS, which is roughly $50 to Maui), so I figured adding in the microRAX would be offset the expense. The box arrived yesterday and today I got a chance to play with it.

MicroRAX Medium Kit from SparkFun

There isnt a lot of documentation on how to use it – none provided in the kit. MicroRAX just recently (late 2011) opened up a MicroRAX Wiki which may build up more info over time. Their YouTube channel has a few decent videos. They have an ok overview and another on how to do joint assembly – and some other treats…

Basically you join the beams together using a cover plate, a nut plate and several M3x5mm screws. The kit came with three different types of cover plates – L, Corner and Truss. There are two ways to put these together. The video says to screw the nut plate to the joining plate and then insert into the beam….

Inserting a nut plate screwed to L-Joining Plate into a MicroRAX beam

This works ok sometimes. However I found that the nut plates can be difficult to get into the slots. Perhaps its a tolerance issue, perhaps its some flashing left over from the press cutting of the nut plates. When dealing with multiple corners, it can be REALLY hard to maneuver the assembly to get the nut plate to line up right. This is especially pronounced when dealing with something like a box. You only have so much freedom of movement and its nearly impossible to get all the plates slotted up before pushing it together.

So the alternative is to put the nut plate into the slot first and then line up and screw the joining plate onto it. Pretty easy.

Joining two rails, inserting nut plate first, then screwing together.

I decided to try building up a quick box using a few of the parts in the kit. It didnt take very long and brought back memories of playing with Erector Sets. One trick is noting the direction the L-Joining plates will go, and being sure you are putting the nut plate on to match properly. I had to flip over one to learn this. There is another video showing how to make a linear slider with just the basic parts, so I added one to the box to give it a try. Pretty easy if not elegant.

Completed box with slider

It should be fairly easy to put MDF or Acrylic sides on a box like this. It wont be water proof but it is a nice quick way to make a small frame. For larger projects I would definitely use 80/20. The MicroRAX folks recommend it for projects over 18 inches.

Here’s a flickr set from my first night building….

We still need some major improvements to our current space (like real AC-power and more enclosed space). We are moving forward developing our relationship with CWD and Dept of Education – our benefactors who let us put the container in Pu’unene. Once we have power and more room, we can build up our shared equipment.

This week Thursday (Dec 29, 2011) we are having our last meeting of the year at our Pu’unene location. It will be a special one for a couple reasons:

1. last event of the year (our new years party)
2. Jason Axleson of HiCapacity will present on Computer Security and also update us on the Oahu makerspace.
3. Jess Craven, producer of the OC16 show “Self Made in Hawaii” will be filming and interviewing makers for an upcoming show.
4. Make & Tell – bring your latest projects and share with others!

Hope to see you there! (and post pics soon)

I started mentoring for them last January for the FIRST competition. It was a LOT of effort and I was very impressed with the work the kids did. The bot suffered a catastrophic failure about an hour before we were to ship it (nearly taking me and one of the students out in the process). However, the team managed to ship off the bot, minus some parts, fix the parts in the month between shipping and competition.  We went to the regional competition on Oahu and had a respectable showing.

Unfortunately, almost all the kids involved last year were seniors. This year we started up in August with almost a completely new crew (including my son Brian).  There were a number of kids interested in building a bot for the Oct 1st VEX Competition, but also about half the club did not feel ready to dive right in. We decided to split the club into two sections. The Competition Group would be our team for the VEX regional competition on Oct 1st at the Maui Fair.  The second would learn some basics.

The Competition Team worked very hard for the month or so we had before competition. We were able to visit Maui High School on a couple weekends before the event and test our bot. We had still had to rebuild our bot several times during the course of the competition day – once when one of the claw motors was determined to be no longer legal (old style VEX), and a couple as the motors or gears failed.  We wound up finishing the qualifications fairly well down the list, but were selected along with Baldwin High School (Maui) by one of the top teams (Kealakehe High School from Kona) for their alliance in the finals. Our alliance went on to win the competition!!  An article from Maui News covered the event and includes some pictures.  Here is my Flickr set from the event…

The second group, those not involved in the VEX Competition, needed to come up to speed on robotics, etc. We didnt have enough parts for them to use VEX or other competition robotics. I also feel that while competitions are good, they tend to focus kids on mechanical building within strict limits (parts, etc). I wanted our club to have a broader exposure to robotics and indeed the whole world of Making. I have six of the SparkFun Inventors Kits (SIK) left over from our July 2011 Intro. to Arduino Class. Hmmmm. Easy decision. We started teaching basic Arduino to the 6 club members not doing VEX! One of the kids had some exposure to programming, but most of the rest (all female) were new to electronics and programming. So far we are only a couple weeks into the training but the kids have done VERY well.

With the VEX competition behind us, the club is now working as three groups. Group 1 is the original Arduino class and is continuing on with more advanced projects. Group 2 is just starting Arduino. Group 3 is learning CAD systems (AutoCAD and Inventor), which will help us do some planning for FIRST. I have a whole bunch of arduino parts, shields and alternatives (eg 8 Teensy USB Development boards). The kids are excited about hacking a robotic arm and creating some awesome science/senior projects for this and next year.

This is a learning experience for us all. I have not taught classes like this before, so I’m learning to teach. Mark Ausbeck, one of our makers and fellow mentor, is helping teach the class. I’m looking forward to the experience and hoping we can grow it to other schools in the county. The kids from Molokai HS have already asked us to come over to their island for a workshop. hmmm… need funding! Any arduino experts out there want to come for a makecation and teach?