Last weekend we displayed our projects at Robot Fest 2011. In our photos, you may notice a few new things on display. This is because in 2010 Robot Fest also became Mid Atlantic Mini Maker Faire. Unfortunately we spent most of the day behind our table and we were not able to capture everything at the event. If you have photos of the event to share with us please e-mail them to info@harfordhackerspace.org
Come by our table and say hi!
I took my son to the Combat Robots Workshop at the National Electronics Museum in Linthicum, MD. The workshop was hosted by the PennBots Robot Club of Pennsylvania. The rules of the game were demonstrated to us at the arena and then it was our turn. For the low price of $25 we were given an RC toy to hack and a bunch of parts to pick through. The biggest challenge was reducing the weight of the robot to the Ant Class (1lb). The other classes were Flea (150 grams) and Beetle (3lbs).
I have to say that my 7 year old son made me very proud today when he cleanly pushed another bot into the pits while it was being controlled by an adult. See him in action in the video below. After the competition, we stuck all the robots into the arena for one last melee. Since there were only two frequencies being used it made for a really interesting match.
Several Harford Hackerspace members spent the day at the Lochraven Skeet and Trap range shooting clay pigeons. If you are interested in the sport you should have a look at SCSkeet.com beginner tutorial and watch the instructional video below. There is a little bit more to the game of skeet than just aiming and shooting.
What are we going to do with our newly acquired vintage 1977 Lear Siegler terminal? Why, we’ll play ASCII Star Wars Episode IV on it, of course! Recently purchased at the 2011 Techno Swap Fest, this baby-blue beauty has classic 70’s styling, comfortable keyboard and gets 80 columns on the screen in a lovely white uppercase font. It took some coaxing to get Baby Blue to play along with an Ubuntu-equipped laptop including tweaking some DIP switches hidden inside her chassis, some clever character substitutions in the ASCII Star Wars file, reading the datasheet for the terminal itself (thanks, Wikipedia!), and wiring up both a FTDI USB-to-serial converter and a MAX232 level converter IC. But the results were worth a quick video. Future improvements could include a way to hide the cursor (hardware modification?) and possibly speeding up draws by only painting the characters that have changed. What do ya think?