Thursday 14 June 2012

Gold Coast TechSpace meet-up review

Cool.
Very cool.

Small crowd but very enthusiastic.
Not surprisingly as it was freezing cold and late on a Wednesday night.

Newcomer helped fix the magnetic sensor controlled roller door.
Ben, amongst others, tried unsuccessfully to open an ancient vending machine with a barrel lock of some kind for which there was no key. One guy will be bringing in a grinder to get at the back end of the lock.
RepRap running printing parts for a new Raspberry Pi case.
Arduinos running lasers and LED displays.
LEGO mindstorms running a Rubiks cube solver.
Raspberry Pi's being used in LEGO boxes to control TVs via XMBC.
Resolved a long standing issue with what to do with 20 or so busted OLPC machines with one of the newcomers having fixed various PCs in the past. They will shipping up for them to be fixed or frankensteined and given to needy school kids.
Young kid getting the goss on what languages and systems to learn to program in. (Python btw since Raspberry Pis and XOs use it)

Loads of talk as well as action.

Met a very nice man, Walther, who has this great idea for... Well... I was going to say 3rd world bootstrapping and transforming communities. But not really since it applies to everywhere from inner city places to remote Aussie towns to India or wherever. The idea is so simple is frightening. I could go into detail, but would need approval.

We suggested contacting the Global Village Construction Set (http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs.php) or just crowd fund it. Only $3,500 to get started and he has it planned in great detail.

So. If you wanna help or have ideas on how to get this going, go to http://gctechspace.org/ and leave a message!

And if you wanna muck about with robots, LEGO and just hang out with makey-people, then go!

There's a meet-up/hangout on this Sunday afternoon from noon or so on. See here: http://gctechspace.org/meetings-and-events/ and see their details at http://meetup.com/gctechspace/

We're definitely going and will be joining. If you can't, then just check out the web-cams from the site.

Oh. One more thing. They need shelving. Hammer lock style. They did a blog about it here: http://dalts.net/blog/2012/06/12/gold-coast-techspace-storage/ They need shelving!

Frickin' love it.

(Update: Forgot to add the facebook link: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Gold-Coast-TechSpace/355794701099212)

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