Jeremy Awesome’s Amazing Technicolor Soapbox Kart

When Jeremy ‘Awesome’ Ashinghurst is not busy hacking at HaHa, researching new and interesting ways to make power tools dangerous or just generally being awesome, he’s busy riding his custom-built gravity-powered vehicle, also known as a soapbox kart, at dangerously high speeds down steep hills. Well, all of the hard work and road rash paid off for Jeremy recently when he won the grand prize in Make Magazine’s Karts and Wheels contest. Keep your eyes peeled for Make Volume 26, starring Mr. Awesome’s Kart, at your local newsstand. In the meantime, read his entire, well-documented build on the Make Blog. Go Awesome, go!

Our Trash is Your Treasure

We will be at the second annual Techno Swap Fest. Come buy our junk!

Feb 19, 2011 – 9am to 2pm

National Electronics Museum
1745 West Nursery Road
Linthicum Hts, MD 21090-2906

More Info…
https://sites.google.com/site/technoswapfest2/

Entrance Donation:	Adults $5, Kids under 16 FREE
Seller’s Table:	$10 (limited number, reserve early)
Club Sponsorship:	FREE (just send us your info)

CNC User Group Wrap-Up

We hosted our first CNC/Makerbot User Group meeting. A special thanks goes out to Brian Dolge for organizing the event and making it a success. We had a great turnout with about 20+ people in attendance. Marty McGuire demonstrated his Makerbot by drawing on Post-Its with a Sharpie. Harford Hackerspace demonstrated their CNC Milling machine by cutting out a wooden Ninja star. Check out the images below.

Getting started with CPLD’s and FPGA’s

Chris has been dabbling with CPLD’s and FPGA’s. He wanted to share some helpful resources with anyone else looking to get started with them as well.

Difference between CPLDs and FPGAs:
- http://www.differencebetween.net/technology/difference-between-fpga-and-cpld/
VHDL Tutorial:
- http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~ese171/vhdl/vhdl_primer.html
Xilinx ISE Software (Windows or Linux, 32 & 64 bit available)
- http://www.xilinx.com/tools/designtools.htm
Digilent Xilinx FPGA Board:
- http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?NavPath=2,400,790&Prod=BASYS2
Digilent Xilinx CPLD Board:
- http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?NavPath=2,400,798&Prod=CMOD
Xilinx Platform USB Programmer:
- http://shop.ebay.com/?_from=R40&_trksid=p5197.m570.l1313&_nkw=platform+xilinx&_sacat=See-All-Categories
  (you can program through the USB of some of the boards but you can do a lot more with a VHDL interface)
How to install the cable drivers in Linux:
- http://www.george-smart.co.uk/wiki/Xilinx_JTAG_Linux#Using_Xilinx_USB_JTAG_Programmers_under_Linux_.28Installing_Cable_Drivers.29
Opencores.org: (open source hardware modules (“cores”) for FPGAs)
- http://opencores.org/projects They have a lot including multiple CPU designs.

DIY 8×8 LED Array

Like most normal people, I enjoy blinky lights. Although I helped build the ring of lights in the Tron disc, I was not involved with any of the hardware or software used to actually control the LEDs. Prior to this project, I had never done anything more than simple PWM control of a few LEDs directly from a micro-controller, so I decided it was a good time to learn how to control a lot of LEDs. Since this was done for the purpose of learning, I did everything as difficultly as possible, such as building my own LED array on a protoboard instead of just buying an array. I also wrote code to bit-bang the serial data instead of just using the compiler’s built in SPI function. But, I wanted a generic serial data module anyway after dealing with the Nokia 6100 and it’s weird 9-bit SPI. The main point of the whole project was to simply do it myself without asking anyone at the space for help with anything. I’m sure the code could be a lot better, but it does what it is supposed to do (I think). 🙂