Peter Davenport's posterous

I have been working on a robotic arm for a while. My system is made using (vastly modified) surplus medical parts. The base of my robot is made out of a wheelchair, the arm itself is made from a hanging surgical light, and the gearboxes are salvaged from hospital beds.

Check out the video below to see what I have built so far.

Sorry about the shakiness of the video.

Hackerspaces are good, but if your area does not have enough hackers to get one started you are in a jam. Not to mention that hackerspaces cost money and you have to be there to work on your project. Hackerspaces work great but they do have some challenges and drawbacks.
Invention being the product of necessity, I came up with a solution to the drawbacks hackerspaces have. (Really it's just a tool for makers in general so don't worry about me tearing down the walls of your local space.) My idea is to put together a social network for makers. This social network would have you list the tools, expertise, and space you have and are willing to share. You would find local people, connect with them, and meetup with them.
This would hook you up with tools, parts, brains, and hands that would effectively run as a hackerspace without the space itself. Already existing clubs and hackerspaces would benefit from the social network because they would be able to act as hubs where the local hackers all meet together.
The network would be able to host how-to pages, blogs, wiki's, and files to allow for more community interaction.

 

Anyway, if you are interested in getting the idea off the ground than leave a comment.

A hackerspace is an expensive project, commercial space is not cheap, parts cost money, heating bills add up, and cool tools are usually expensive. Most hackerspaces today fund themselves through a subscription type deal where people who use the space pay money every month for membership.
The problem with this way of funding the space is it keeps out people who don't want (or cant afford) to shell out $50-$200 a month. I think a more elegant way to fund hackerspaces is evident if you just look at how hackers interact. When hackers get together they bring together unique skills to a project or discussion. Each one has a different part to add. What if we could harness this type of uniqueness to fund hackerspaces?
Here is my idea: each member of the hackerspace has to bring something to the table that can be be converted to $$$. This could be anything, from blogging (and selling ads on the blog) to doing production runs of some small scale product, selling them, and giving the money to he hackerspace.
Here are some possibilities:
• Blogging (with advertisements for monitization)
• Podcasting (with advertisements for monitization)
• Doing small PCB production runs for people trying to start selling open hardware and donating the profits to the hackerspace.
• Writing a columb in some magazine/newspaper and donating the proceeds to the hackerspace.
• Giving money; if someone does not have much spare time but does have spare cash then giving money actually does make sense.
• Teaching classes at the space which could have small fees.
• 3D printing RepRap parts and selling them for the space.
• And the possibilities are endless.
This plan makes the hackerspace realistic for people without much cash, makes the members more influential (the more they do maker community stuff the more recognized they become), and keeps the hackerpace filled with people more because the hackerspace needs them, not their money.

Through starting and managing the Tacoma robotics society I have been learning ALOT about the hacker ethic/community and how hanging out with hackers changes the way people think and do things. So I thought that I should blog on this.
When TRS started in spring 2010 we basically just had four people (Rob, Jeff, Lei, and myself) meeting at a coffee shop, then we migrated to my garage and slowly grew/maintained the status quo for six months. Then Jarod came and we together worked on a project quite a bit.
Unlike Rob and Jeff, Jarod had just started working with Arduino/hacker stuff a few months before he met me and did not have a geek background. But as he began to build things, in this case for his halloween interests, he became more interested in diy electronics for it's own value.
I think to convert non geeks to geekyness (a good thing in my estimation) the person must find or be introduced to a 'bridge'; an interest that can turn a person's interests into geeky interests. In Jarod's case making props for halloween introduced him to arduino, which eventually got him to where robotics itself was an interest. In my case it was 3D printers that introduced me to the arduino.
I think that to grow the ranks of engineers and scientists in America we need to bridge between normal interests to 'nerdy' interests. Education will follow interest and schools will become the place to get information not the place where teacher's have to beg their students to learn stuff.

Well, my Mendel is coming along. The mechanical part of the Cartesian System is working great. Next step it to get the electronics working with motor drivers and a sanguino. So far I am about $120 in cost wise and expect to spend another another $150, not including extruder, to get the project finished up.
So far I am extremely pleased with the assembly, it basically took two weekends to put this together with my Dad's help, the basics of the frame only took about an hour and a half to assemble.

I have been working on a reprap machine and so far this is what I have. The mechanical frame is almost complete. I just need to add bushings and motors then I can move on to electronics.

How does one cope without an oscilloscope? If you have the SFE Color LCD Shield you do have an oscilloscope! Using a analog pin 2, the screen, and the code I have written you have a very basic portable oscilloscope. You can change the input pin easiy by changing the code: val1 = analogRead(2);

You can download the code here. The file for the oscilloscope program is in the zip file under demos.

So to get in the Christmas mood this year I used math, an eight bit processor(arduino), and SparkFun's Color LCD Shield! The result was, well, this thing:

Anyway, if you want to join the festivities you can pick up an Arduino and LCD Shield at SparkFun and you can download the code here as part of the library. The file for the program is in the zip file under demos.

Lately I have been working on a code library for the Color LCD Shield I designed. I finished it and wrote a manual for it, you can download them here. The library now supports line drawing, square drawing, and string drawing.

In other news, I have been working on setting up sumo-bot workshops with the Tacoma Robotics Society. Check it out here.

I have been reading some older electronics books lately and have found older books to often have better information than those that are newer. Notable on the list is Computer Architecture by Foster, the TTL Cookbook by Lancaster and Radar Fundamentals by Wheeler.
Most of these books are extremely outdated (i.e. Computer Architecture is before floppy disks and monitors) but they allow for the background to be learned and this is easily applied to modern systems.