Inspiration For Those Harvesting Our Future

Today I got to meet a fellow Robot Geek, Joe Beam, who brought his 8 year old daughter along (also enthusiastic about robots). I am seeing an increasing desire in little girls to program and build and hack and get their hands dirty and their minds strong. I can only hope that any parent (especially fathers) who see this in their little girls please please please buy them some LEGO blocks and help them put together their first tool kits. Please do this for the future of our species. Thank you.

OPEN LAB - First Day In New Location

We'd like to send out a big thank you to Black Design Associates, LLC for hosting more than 50 members this past Sunday. They have also offered to continue to do so for upcoming events in their office space in El Segundo. Black Design is an incubator and product development consultancy. They have an amazing 3,500 square foot, three-story space with Terrazzo floors (I personally love Terrazzo), lots of sunlight and a nifty Objet 3-D printer. Their machine shop, boasting a vacuum form, mill and laid, produces wonders of design, and their irreverent, no-nonsense campaigns take quality and simplicity, and jelly-roll them in style. Check out this Leica i9 concept that Black Design developed. It's hipsta-geek cool.

Some other shout-outs from today’s lab go to Junix from Robotis who is very graciously donating one of their OLLO kits to the LA Robotics club for us to test. Junix showed us a line following program, and little Kutya, our club mascot was terrified and curious of this being that moved, but was without smell.

We also had some fun with DARwIn-OP. There may be other donations and tutorials coming from Robotis, who are interested in being involved in STEM programs for young children, so we’ll keep you posted here and on the meet-up site.

The LA Robotics Club will also be promoting and supporting the Robotis booth at Maker Faire this year. Hopefully, many of you can join us. So far, 16 club members are planning to attend. If you'd like to RSVP, you can get tickets here.

Today our featured member project comes from Tahnee, and it’s a “KIT-e-CAT.” I just made that up. :) She is using an Arduino Uno, conductive thread, LCD displays for eyes with IR sensors on each side for motion tracking. It's almost(!) cuddly, and its audio output purr is a delight. We'll post video when this cat comes to life.

And lastly, Michael and I worked on the next installment of the ArdBot project for Lab. "Mood light" will include a piezo buzzer and RGB LED combo. We soldered the current limiting resistors for each LED in-line with a cut jumper wire and then protected it with short lengths of shrink tubing. Pink heat guns are hawt!!

We are off for Mother's Day this weekend, and then Maker Faire is the following weekend of the 19th and 20th. So if members would like to bring their ArdBot kits in that last weekend of May, we can ready some of the bits and pieces that take quite a bit of time, like the heat shrink resistor wiring. Prepping this will help things move more smoothly on the day of our next ArdBot class.

See you at our next lab. 'Til then, happy tinkering!
-Sashibot

New Location in El Segundo

I am going to visit the new location tomorrow where we will be hosting the Open Labs. Excited? Heck yeah!