In case you have not been informed, hopefully you have, but just in case. The Midsouth Makers meetings are moving. As you can see from the location info on the right hand side here, we are now meeting in the Nolan Engineering Building at Christian Brothers University. Many thanks goes to Dr. Ventura and CBU for this one. They have been watching over us almost since our conception as a group, and had a reasonable amount of interest in what we are trying to accomplish. Even more so now than ever before, everyone is encouraged to bring anything you wish to show off to the meetings. We’ll have plenty of room and plenty more people who will be interested in the various projects found at our meetings. We hope that this new location will prove to be not only beneficial for us, but them as well. This will be a great opportunity for us to expand now that we have more breathing room. There are several interesting projects this year from the seniors so keep your fingers crossed, we just might get to check some of them out.

Directions are relatively simple, and we really hope you don’t get lost. You will park in the Central Ave. parking lot and head north towards campus where you will quickly see the Nolan Engineering building. Typically the glass doors closest to the parking lot are locked during the evening so you may wish to try the next set a little further down on the building. Once you’re inside just head up the stairs on either end of the building and we’ll be in room 241 (the numbers are listed over top of the doors.) For anyone that feels like they need it, there is an elevator in the center of the building. In the event that you do get lost we have one other measure in place. You’ll be able to find our signs around campus with our logo and arrows on them directing you to the room. If you have any issues, questions, or all around problems don’t hesitate to send an e-mail to info@midsouthmakers.org.

Midsouth Makers March 12th meeting

We had a great meeting last Friday. Jim and Daniel were at MidsouthCon setting up our fan table, but they managed to make it to the meeting. They had a great time at the con and spread the word about our group. We had a special guest Bryan from Makers Local 256 in Huntsville, AL. We had a great time talking about how Makers Local got their start and it was nice to talk to someone from another hackerspace. Here are the Memphis Hackerspace Pictures from the March 12th meeting.

We also discussed fund raising ideas to help out the group. We currently have vinyl decals availiable at our meetings for $5. If you are interested please let us know in the next meeting. If you have any other fund raising ideas or ideals for decals please let us know. We have our very own Google Group you can join and stay in touch with the group between meetings.

March 5th Midsouth Makers Meeting.

Pictures have been uploaded from the March 5th Meeting. We had a great time and met some new friends from the local 2600 group. We had a few different projects shown off at this meeting including how to modify a cheap ink pen to write like an expensive writing instrument, Jim’s Arduino kit, Daniel’s scarf prototype and a handmade bracelet. We love hearing about any DIY projects or craft projects! Feel free to send us information about your project and we’ll feature it here on the Hackerspace Blog.

Don’t forget that you can keep up with the makers group by following us on twitter, becoming a fan on facebook, or even joining our Google Groups mailing list!

This weekend Daniel and Jim will be at our fan table at MidsouthCon! If you’re going to the con stop by and say hello. We’re having our usual meeting this friday March 12th at Republic Coffee, we hope to see you there. Feel free to bring a friend or a project!

We had a great meeting tonight thanks again to everyone who came out and special thanks to those who brought projects to show off. Tonight we learned about using a vinyl cutter to create custom stickers and we learned how to mod a Montblanc pen refill to fit into a much cheaper pen casing. We also got a few more ideas for a space since we seem close to outgrowing Republic Coffee. A few of us showed up early to join in on the local 2600 meeting, they were a great bunch and we had a few stay for our meeting as well. The local 2600 group meet the first Friday of the month and they seem very interested in a Memphis Hackerspace. We’ll share the pictures from the meeting and of the various projects that were shown off soon.

My apologies for taking so long to get a post up about our last meeting.  The shortest and sweetest description of it I can give is, it was excellent.  To note before anything is said, I have the pictures at home.  They just aren’t put up yet.  I’ll edit the post and add them as soon as I can.

[Edit] As promised, pictures are now up.  Check out the Flickr and Facebook postings to see the rest.

We had a record number of people show up.  Quite well more than I think any of us expected.  A whole seven new people showed up, nearly doubling our attendance from the previous meetings.  To top it all off, four of those that showed up knew no one in the group previously, and found us entirely based on our web presence.  So welcome to all those that were brave enough to drop in.  For those that have yet to come, the new people showed up and left with all limbs intact.  We seriously try not to bite, and those that do are kept chained in the shed out back as pets.

In all the meetings seem to be improving as well.  We spent a bit of time covering various portions of our agenda, and had quite a bit more time dedicated to goofing off.  A few of us even managed to pick a lock or two this time around!  There was a lot of good discussion about the non profit status of the organization.  Some suggestions on places to go and people to contact about getting everything up and going.  There’s still a lot of research to be done, but we are certainly well on our way!  The idea was only thrown out there, but everyone definitely needs to be thinking and brainstorming about our bylaws as we’ll be working on our draft soon.  So everyone please keep the ideas rolling, we need every bit of help we can get.  At the end of it all, we finished what business there was to cover and really had a great time speculating what the group can accomplish and directions for it to head in.  Pretty much it came down to the idea that there is little we won’t be able to do.