Quite a busy night at the Swindon Hackspace tonight. Welcome to the five(!) new people who turned up to see what we get up to at our weekly meetings, hope you had an enjoyable evening and we’ll see you again next week. Along with the regulars it made for a pretty full room. After resetting a few trip switches to sort out some power issues the evening got underway with a bit of chat about what we do, complimented by drinks and some biscuits brought in by a couple of our regulars, James and Jess.
James and Jess also turned up with some funky little electronic Cube World games, so we all spent a while trying to work out what they do. As far as we managed to work out, each cube contains a little character who you can control and play a simple game with. Clip the cubes together and the characters will move between the cubes and interact with each other. Information on the internet seems sparse, even Wikipedia doesn’t appear to have a page. There is a manual available for download from the Mattel website and plenty for sale on ebay if you fancy getting some.
In the mean-time people rummaged through the selection of 3D printed items Steve had brought in and he chatted with some of the newcomers about 3D printing showing off some of his excellent 3D prints and designs.
Simon brought in the robot arm he’d recently bought for the Swindon Museum of Computing robots revealed exhibition. He was having some trouble getting it to work reliably. After a some messing around we discovered that powering the servos from 6V rather than 5V resolved the problem. There is a short video of it in action on YouTube
The hackspace has recently been working on getting an old Heathkit Hero robot to work (but we’ve not been making much progress recently in all honesty!) One of the members has 3D printed some replacement parts for the arm and we need to replace some of the wiring inside after it was, er, accidentally shorted out during some testing. It has been commandeered back into the museum for the robot exhibition so we spent a bit of time refitting its outer panels and reattaching the repaired arm ready for display.
As a few members headed off home leaving the die-hards, James set up the oscilloscope to have a poke around in his Blu-ray player with the hope of doing some hacking on it and we pondered the issues we’ve been having with the internet connection recently.
All in all a fairly busy and entertaining evening. Sorry if I’ve missed off anything else that people were doing but there way too much going on to see and hear everything.
Rob