Couple of meetings and progress for the Great Global Hackerspace Competition:
We now have a couple prototypes working and are progressing towards ultra low-tech measurement techniques
Sector67 hosted a FIRST Lego League competition course open to anyone, increasing exposure in the Madison area of what FLL is and what all the competition entails:
The Isthmus Green Day Expo came and went this weekend. The bicycle blender built for Dream Bikes was running:
Makerbot has been cranking out larger and larger parts, resulting in a giant pencil holder bolt:
and has been partnered with an Xbox Kinect for instant 3D printable models:
Additional member storage shelves were designed, fabricated, and installed; leading towards a more organized conference room and computer lab:
Sector67 competed in the 2011 UW Engineering Expo robotics competition, whose objective was to pick up and place a single tennis ball into a goal. We ended up designing for simplicity and robustness, leaving behind complex graspers for a simple vacuum pickup tool and a retrofitted (heavily modified) Tamiya Bullhead:
Another awesome find at Expo was a ridiculously large sub-sub-sub woofer designed (by graduate students from WEMPEC) to play infrasonic tones. It didn’t have the best tone in the world, but it was easily shaking the entire building and leaving me with a massive headache by the end of the day (robotics competition was below this thing):
The plate is getting larger from everyone whose contributed by taking the TIG welding class:
Lots of other projects being worked through including an auto-balancing robot:
modifying a servo for continuous rotation to control brew temperature:
and an explanation of electric motors: