Invention to Venture: Madison 2010

Sector67 is proud to see and support events like Invention to Venture in Madison, this is a great opportunity to meet and greet with successful entrepreneurs in Madison and pitch your idea to an inviting audience.  Hope to see you there!

Join us for Invention to Venture: Madison 2010!

The National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance and Capital Entrepreneurs are bringing you an amazing one-day entrepreneurship workshop!

Highlights:
– Keynote by UW-Madison alumni entrepreneur Matt Younkle, inventor of TurboTap and former Schoofs prize winner.
– Elevator pitch competition sponsored by Groupon – win $$$ while getting valuable feedback from entrepreneurs on your business idea!
– Breakfast and lunch provided
– All I2V attendees are invited to a special Capital Entrepreneurs networking event the night of Dec 2nd from 7-9pm

Details at a Glance:
Date: Friday, December 3, 2010
Time: 9:00 AM – 2:00 PM
Place: Grainger Hall, room 1295
Registration: Cost is $5 for students, $10 for the public. Register here

Sponsors include the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, Groupon, and Capital Entrepreneurs in partnership with the Burrill Business Plan Competition.

For any questions contact [email protected]

The official website: http://www.invention2venture.org/madison10/

Posted in News

The School Factory : Space Federation Video

James Carlson (Founder of The School Factory and Milwaukee’s Bucketworks) posted a great explanation of the Space Federation and what The School Factory is:

I’m enjoying great food and talks in The Netherlands which is why we’re a little slow on updates this week! I’m hoping to visit a few spaces in Amsterdam on the way back to the airport Saturday 🙂

Posted in News

Updates! – MSN Article, Arduinos in stock, Arduino class tonight

Couple of interesting things to report:

MSN has a surprisingly well written and interesting summary of hackerspaces throughout the country.

Our reseller order from Adafruit Industries has arrived, meaning that we have (and will continue to stock) Arduino Unos.  In addition we have a protoboard shield, a trip glasses kit, and a Boarduino kit.  Prices are Adafruit standard pricing +$2 (Uno is $32, etc).

We’ll be hosting our first ever official class out at S67 tonight, we’ll put up pictures soon.  If you haven’t taken a look, we have an ever growing list of classes on the classes page, if you have something you’d like to learn about (or to teach) let us know by e-mail/etc.

Posted in Arduino, Hardware, News

Week in Projects

This week in projects:

  • Attempted to rescue a hard drive with a bad controller, received exact replacement controller from online seller and swapped EEPROM but no luck
  • Repaired the knee lift on the newer Webb Champ milling machine, a few buttons met their demise after being soaked with cutting fluid a few too many times.  Donor parts were found in the switches bin
  • A LEGO car/plane found its way out to the benches, complete with vegetation and a giant cannon:
  • A light went nuclear and smoked the transformer oil (and popped the 20A breaker)
  • Last but not least, an open whiteboard design was built and tested, using 3 – 1″ 80/20 extrusions and 2 – 4×8′ sheets of melamine a giant, professional looking, reversible whiteboard can be built for ~$100 versus several hundred online
Posted in News

Accessible Bicycle Finished @ S67

Over the last week we watched a tandem-recumbent bicycle take shape at Sector67.  The project goal was to enable a Madison community member to ride a bicycle again after sustaining injuries in a bicycle accident years ago.

The basic structure centers around 3 primary bicycle frames centered around futon frame sections and other found bicycle parts allowing the rear rider to control steering, braking, and to pedal with additional propulsion from the front rider.

Posted in Hardware, News

FIRST LEGO League

I had the privilege of judging FIRST LEGO league’s technical session for robot design and programming.  For the second year in a row I was absolutely astounded at the technical competency of 5th-8th graders in programming, design, and development of these robots.

I had a great time talking to the students about their design process and learning more about how they work as a team and look forward to helping again next year!

Posted in News Tagged with: , ,

Alumni Night :-)

Two UW alumni/Microsoft professional developers stopped by to finish preparing for their 2010 Microsoft Puzzle Challenge in Madison. In addition to putting the finishing touches on their code for tomorrow, they took some time to reach out to their inner child:

Stop by the UW Engineering Center’s building Saturday (Tong Auditorium) to participate in the puzzle challenge and have a chance to win an Xbox 360 Elite!

Posted in News

Pumpkin Carving and Costume Building

Between Styrofoam tombstones, an ultrabright rendition of the Iron Man arc reactor, and traditional pumpkin carving we had a lot of fun getting ready for Halloween:

Of course a S67 pumpkin was carved:

and we tried out the CNC mill but just didn’t have enough time to get the pumpkin properly “fixtured” to get consistent performance:

Posted in News

Projects Around the Space

Over the last week there have been a bunch of interesting projects floating through the space, a quick summary:

  • Larry swapped his car strut in record time (for the 2nd time in under a year)
  • Mike finished putting UV leds and UV sensitive tape on his road bicycle, making him ultra-night-visible from the side
  • Larry built a set of bicycle turn signals and a brake light of course using an Arduino (complete with flasher modes)
  • Dougal rocked out and modified some of his electronica music
  • Scott cut up some stock for his injection molding machine V2 (drill press model)
  • CNC mill was assembled and drew its first SVG image of the S67 logo
  • Richard and kids used the LEGO table to dream up some new methods of transportation
  • CMKT4 instructed 8 people on how to create piezo-microphones, resulting in 7 bottle cap microphones by the end of the night
  • Matt created more inventory for his speaker infused backpack start-up
  • Sewing machines got tested out and are ready to create Halloween costumes
  • Prototype Joule Thief was assembled and works!  Ready for others to create more in Wednesday. . .

We’re again open for the rest of the month for free (until the 1st of November), so check the calendar for hours and/or give us a call (608-241-4605) and stop out!

Posted in News

Changes to the Website

You may have noticed some slight changes in the website – some under-the-hood modifications were put in place last week, and now things will start looking a bit different too.  Blog posts now show up on the main page, and you’ll notice a ‘login’ link in the upper right, as well as as Classes page in the menu.  We’re still working some bugs out of the class system, but we plan on expanding this more and more to make class registration and tracking certifications for using the tools better and better.  For right now, we’ll just be putting some events up on the new system and see if it survives the public beta 🙂

There’s an example class up right now – How to Herd Cats.  Try logging in using the login link at the upper right – use your forum account info to get in.  Once you’re logged in, you should be able to register for the class, and if anything breaks, you can let me know by sending an email to brian [at] sector67.org!

Posted in News Tagged with:

CMKT4 Microphone Build Night

Circuit bending rock band CMKT4 stopped in to give a crash course in soldering piezo elements and creating vibration sensitive microphones:

Seven people successfully created microphones and had a great time!

Posted in Hardware Tagged with: , ,

Field Trip to Isthmus Engineering Cooperative

We had the opportunity to take a quick tour of Isthmus Engineering, an engineering cooperative in Madison, WI.  That’s right, engineering co-op like Willy’s St Co-op, with the majority of employees as owners and voting members in the business.  They’ve been in business since 1980 having moved 3 times to successively larger buildings to encompass ever growing projects.

Their facility is amazing, unfortunately, I’m not able to share any pictures of what they’re assembling, but let me put it into perspective by saying that there are many houses in Madison smaller than the manufacturing equipment they’re building and sending out.  They’re creating manufacturing lines to fabricate products like toothbrushes, filters, flywheels, etc:

Lots of robots, arms, pneumatics, hydraulics, controls, actuators, relays, and wires flying around the facility!

Posted in Field Trip, News Tagged with: , ,

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