At last Friday’s meeting Sonny brought and demonstrated his Doppler Direction Finder Kit. Here’s the video of the demonstration and some questions / answers about it.

MidsouthMakers Doppler Direction Finder Kit Demonstration from Midsouth Makers on Vimeo.

MidsouthMakers Doppler Direction Finder Kit Demonstration by Sonny Mounicou on 8/6/10. www.midsouthmakers.org

For those of our members who are interested in helping in the Arduino community you now have a chance! It is very simple, you don’t even have to do anything heavy duty. The Arduino Designers are looking to make the next model, Arduino 1.0, and they need to collect information. If you own an Arduino, or have used one, then you can go to the Arduino website and fill out this survey (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ArduinoUsage) they have put up. They are looking to use this information collected to assist in the development of the next model. It is very short, only takes a few minutes to do, and it could be Memphis’ way of helping out with such a great community. So take a few seconds, hop on over to the website and answer those questions!

We had a great meeting last Friday, if you missed it, you missed a good time and some really neat projects. Daniel and Mary brought their Hydraulic Letterpress and some examples of the work they’ve been able to do with it. Mitzi also brought in a handmade wooden basket that Brad made out of materials laying around the garage, and Rick brought in some picaxe microcontroller stuff to show off.

You can see the rest of the pictures from the meeting on Flickr and Facebook

We look forward to seeing everyone Friday @ CBU!

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 🙂

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.