It’s been a while since the last Microcontroller Study Group so it’s time to get together again… bring projects to show, and come and see the our new fancy space.

When: Wednesday, March 19th.,  7:00 p.m.
Where: 397 Bridge Street, Brooklyn 11201 – 5th floor – Look for the pack of resistors on the door.
Who: You! Bring your project, meet the group, or just see what others are up to!

See you then! If you have any questions please contact the group.

My good friend Chris McDonald made this extra-great, 2-axis drawing machine for doing time-lapse photography.

Here’s the info from his personal website vanita phone company: 

Gertrude uses two stepper motors to move an LED in a very high resolution x/y plane. The movement of the LED is photographed using exposures usually between 30 and 90 seconds. Gertrude can either be programmed to “print” a design automatically (“Christopher & Daniil”, the Hell Yup!: Scanlines shots) or controlled live via a joystick (Open&Close portrait series). 

II: Christopher & Daniil not talking (pt. 2 in a series of 2) 

Hell Yup!: Scanlines 3 (Self-Portrait)
 

Modulate/Demodulate from Zach ‘Iowa’ Hoeken on Vimeo.

Great, simple, idea. An etch-a-sketch hooked up to an old mouse with a couple of stepper motors, wired through RS232 connectors, a couple of couplers (I love saying that), and a nothing-fancy Atmel Mega 32.

Imagine the possibilities this could hold? Actually being able to draw a circle on an etch-a-sketch! We should build this and marry it up with Bre’s code for printing images of of people and we can have an etch-a-sketch Portrait Maker 3000! Here’s the link to the schematic, the code and the instructions.

There is a great show going on at the MOMA, NYC right now. It’s called Design and the Elastic Mind and features lots of amazing projects built with Processing, Flash, hardware, solar panels, etc. Here is a link to the show which will be in New York from February 24–May 12, 2008. Also a brief description of some of the projects at the show:

The exhibition will include objects, projects, and concepts offered by teams of designers, scientists, and engineers from all over the world, ranging from the nanoscale to the cosmological scale. The objects range from nanodevices to vehicles, from appliances to interfaces, and from pragmatic solutions for everyday use to provocative ideas meant to influence our future choices.