When: Sun, September 25, 11:30am – 7:00pm
Where: think|haus, 25 Dundurn St N, Hamilton ON (map)Description: Come play retro and not so retro games, eat sugar cereal, and relive your childhood days. We will have the following game systems on hand:
* Nintendo 64
* Atari 2600 flashback
* NES
* dosbox with Carmen Sandiego
* Xbox 360
We have one big teevee, a projector, and a bunch of monitors. Bring yourself, your games, your system, and maybe your pjs? Come hang out and play games just like the good old days.

$5 entry – everyone welcome

From Laser fire…

Note the poster at the top left…

More photos available on teh picasa.

No one was hurt, and we learned a lot. Like, that knowing how to operate the fire extinguisher is important BEFORE there’s a fire in front of you.

tl;dr: Intro to Arduino course Feb 26th 12PM-4PM. Free to members, $20 to non-members. See Required Materials list.

Paul Lariviere will be running this course. Here is his description:

As has been discussed in numerous previous threads, we’re going to have an Arduino course. I will be holding the first ThinkHaus Introduction to Arduino course at ThinkHaus on Saturday February 26th from 12pm to 4pm tentative. (may be extended to 6pm depending on progress) This course will be free to attend for all ThinkHaus members and will be available to non-members at a cost of $20/person. There is a list of “Required Materials” below. Please be aware that these are not 100% necessary, however some sections of the course are very hands-on so if you do not have the equipment you will either have to partner with somebody or will not be able to participate in the hands-on programming activities. I will also state off the bat that this course is MOSTLY ripped off from other free online tutorials, I have simply added detail to explain what is actually happening under the hood.

Why it’s worth coming even though resources are available for free online:

Aside from having an actual human being who can answer your questions, there are actually a few good reasons to consider attending. Every source I’ve managed to find online for Adruino development tends to over-simplify everything and doesn’t provide clear explanations. IE: They tell you X command produces Y result, but do nothing to explain what happens behind the scenes. This has resulted in a huge wave of terrible embedded code floating around, and a phenomenon I call “Google Coders.”

A Google Coder is somebody who knows what he wants to do, but has no idea how to do it so he searches Google for code that is close and tries to modify it. This usually results in broken code, which was never inteded for the exact task you want to accomplish, being modified into an incomprehensible mash of garbage code. Although this course is an introductory one, it provides a foundation of knowledge required to prepare for the upcoming ThinkHaus Arduino Object Oriented Programming course. This preparation is the true purpose of this course. As it stands, jumping from this course to the OOP course will blow your mind (if you’ve never done OOP), however jumping from the current standard of
free Internet Arduino tutorials to OOP C++ code will probably outright kick your ass since you’ll have no clue what is happening in the background.

If you already understand OOP and C++ you will still gain knowledge of circuit wiring, schematic reading, data sheets, etc. and gain actual hands-on practical experience making something.

Required Materials: (what you’ll need to acquire BEFORE the course and bring
with you)
-A Laptop & Power Supply or battery that will last ~6 hrs.
-An arduino
-A programming cable for your arduino
-A power supply for your arduino (most commercial ones can be powered over USB)
-Solid Core Hookup Wire – to connect components of your circuits (if you don’t have this there might be some floating around, but I can’t guarantee this)

Nice To Have Materials: (bring this if you have it)
-Extra programming cables
-Resistors
-Buttons
-LEDs (color doesn’t matter)
**I have purchased a community supply of these materials with my own money and *HOPE* to have enough for everybody, but supply will be limited to what I have.

Arduino Course Modules: (what you’ll learn)
Module 1:
Introduction to microcontrollers
Setting up and configuring your Arduino and the IDE
Our First Program
Exercises

Module 2:
Circuit Basics
Data Sheets
Reading Schematics
Understanding Digital I/O

Module 3:
Understanding Libraries
Serial Communication
Basic Math
Understanding Types

Module 4:
Buttons
Design Challenge Part 1
Design Challenge Part 2
Design Challenge Part 3
Wrapping Up

Learning Objectives: (end result)
By the end of the course attendees should have a strong understanding of types, procedures, libraries and other programming concepts. Attendees should have enough base/background knowledge to be able to use the Arduino.cc site
as a reference and learn how to use ANY of these libraries on their own for future projects. In other words, you’ll learn how to use a small subset of Arduino features, but learn it in such a way that you’ll be able to TEACH YOUSELF how to use the rest of the features.

The intended objective of this course is to prepare for the next Arduino Programming course which will focus on OOP for the Arduino and producing GOOD embedded code vs. crappy kludge code that barely works.

Hope to see you all there!

Cheers!

Paul L.

think|haus has finished moving in to our awesome new digs, and we’re inviting everyone over to check it out! There will be project show and tell, talks, and demos. See our laser cutter in action! You will even be able to build an electronic kit to take home.

Everyone is welcome to this free event! Bring your friends! Bring your kids! Bring your nerdy roommate who never leaves the house!

Can’t make it? We’ll miss you, but you can come out on any Tuesday at 7pm for our regularly scheduled open|haus.

There is no pre-reg for this contest, it is more in the fashion of con badgehacking where your entry is presenting your creation at the time of contest closing.

The When:
The contest will cover a 2 day time span. It will commence on Dec 10. The contest building will continue until 11:30pm of Dec 11th. Demos and judging will start immediately after this deadline. Once all entries have been presented by the contestants the results and prize(s) (not yet figured out, but will be announced when they are) will be announced.

The Objective:
As the title states “Ùnusual storage“, meaning to find unorthoox ways to store data. Using traditional sd, eeprom, flash, ram, fram, rom, etc… is so very boring,so lets come up with something different. This can include repurposing an alternate storage medium to store data on ie. using an audio device to store encoded data for a microcontroller. Alternately the storage medium can be some completely asinine inefficient electromechanical device that the host controller can write and read data back off of.

The Rules:
1) The host controller (microcontroller, computer, plc, cyborg) can not store any data within its own devices. The host controller can be any type of device you choose. The host controller must only store data by means of communicating to whatever method of interfacing you choose to communicate with the storage device.
2) Since mechanical devices can get very large the minimum data capacity for the device must be at least 32 bits, less will still be allowed, but please no 1 or 2 bit machines. This rule applies as well if removable storage media is by design, the single removable media should meet this minimum.
Note: this is not a size matters contest so most storage capable will not necessarily score you more points.
3) Volatile data or non Volatile data? Doesn’t really matter.
4) Planning and component gathering (even prep) can be done in the time leading up to this contest but all implementation of the storage system must happen during the contest.
5) Contest entries can be individuals or teams. For sake of putting a number to teams the max is 5 people per team. There is no restriction on external help.
6) No materials or methods will be barred from this competition, I would hate to discourage outrageousness, silliness or otherwise potentially hazardous implementations.
7) Rules can be challenged during contest times and will be governed through feats of strength.

Judging:
- Judging will begin at 11:30pm on December 11th.
- The judging will be done by myself, and some other undetermined individual.
- If your entry is not ready by the time others contestants have finished presenting, your entry will be judged as is. Extra build time may be achieved by means of alcohol delivery to the judges and waiting contestants.

Good Luck!
Jason

Some photos and further details about the service are available on the funeral home website. You can leave your condolences there if you like. After about a month, Richard Kranstz, the funeral director, will collect the condolences and photos and turn them into a hard cover book that will be presented to Keith’s family.

We’ll miss you, Keith. We thought we just wanted a space with tools. We’ve gained something much larger: a community and many good friends. We will all remember Keith and continue to feel his influence at think|haus. We were lucky to have known such a wonderful human being.

UPDATE 2010-11-22: You can watch Keith’s visitation and funeral at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/myrcurial.

We are also still open on Tuesdays, so come down and say hi. For more up to date info, join the mailing list.

-Adina

Lockers need to be empty by Friday – so Tuesday is a good time to get that done. Please leave your locker unlocked so that it’s easy to see that it’s empty. Anything left in the lockers when we move them will be left behind! The lockers are heavy enough to move when they’re empty, so please take your stuff out.

After August 23rd, anything left in old|haus is fair game. It could be chucked, claimed by someone, or sold to the gypsies. It would be nice to have as little of this stuff as possible, because getting rid of crap is a big, stupid, thankless job. Please take your stuff home, chuck it yourself, or sell it to the gypsies yourself. If you think someone else might like it, label it “FREE”. Perhaps we can even designate a part of the workshop for this? If it’s not gone by the 22nd, please dispose of it yourself.

In other news, new|haus at 25 Dundurn N is starting to take shape. All the walls that are coming out have been removed, thanks to the hard work of Peter, Trevyn, Paul Hart, James Arlen, James Q and the kind folks at the staircase. Adam ran some phone cable, so we’ll be ready for whenever Bell decides to give us service. Collar ties are up, along with some spanking new parallam beams to make sure the roof doesn’t fall in on us. The next step in this process is the installation of some structural walls on the east and west sides of the building. Here are some photos from the weekend: http://picasaweb.google.com/thinkhausorg/NewHausConstruction#

If you’re free, and want to help, message Trevyn or me on haus|talk, or send me an email (adina at this domain) and we’ll let you know what’s up. We’ll also send emails to the discuss list, and maybe update the website when there are more organized haus|building events. Hugh runs a tight shop, and we shouldn’t have any problems with people showing up and not knowing what to do. If you bring a hammer, safety glasses, and suitable footwear, he should be able to put you to work.

See you tomorrow!

-Adina