My LCD display from Adafruit has been staring at me for awhile now and I finally pulled it out and started tinkering with it.  The hardest part about working with it out of the box is soldering headers onto the LCD board.  In a convoluted and more playful fashion I used an old Cisco serial cable and a small mint tin to connect the 16 leads of the LCD to a small breadboard.  Following a pinout diagram from Hacktronics I connected the arduino to the breadboard and a 1k ohm resistor.  After verifying continuity with a multimeter to all leads I uploaded the code I got from Hacktronics.  After the Arduino rebooted the result felt like an application of Clarke’s Law.  Its really just proof of concept level implementation but it taught me about the LCD library and soldering techniques.

It kind of looks like a hack job…because it is 🙂

Tactile Transducer Installed

This is one of the first projects that I attempted. The idea was to build a tactile transducer on the cheap that could be mounted to a couch. If your not familiar with a tactile transducer, it is a device designed to transmit vibrations instead of sound. It’s mounted to home theater seating to give you an extra punch during those low frequency booms.

To view more details of this project, check out my project log over on the wiki.

Cigar Box Guitar components

My current project was inspired by an article in the current issue (21) of Make Magazine – a Cigar box guitar.  My project log for this is up on the wiki.

EDIT: The project is complete and the log updated!  Everyone who was at the 2/12 meeting got to see (and hear) it in person.

I have successfully taken a standard storage tub and made it into a portable sandblasting cabinet.

See the wiki for details here.

In case you haven’t noticed the links at the top, our wiki and forum both are now listed up there.  To top things off they work too!

Currently I have been primarily focused on the wiki.  The main goal of it is to document any and all projects that we have in the organization, individual or group.  Since we are built around open source components and basing a lot of projects off of info shared by others, it’s only fair that we do the same.  This is not to say that we won’t necessarily patent any of our projects, but the ones that aren’t and maybe even some of the ones that are will be shared on there.

As part of trying to get all of this up and going, I have started work towards putting one of my personal projects up.  My project is currently not finished, but I do have various components of the overall project that have been completed.  So that is why, the very first article on our wiki is the LCD article.  So go check it out, tell what you think, and look back for more.