Geeks? With games? Surely you can’t be serious.
I am serious. And tonight’s the first night for it, so let’s see what happens! Members and guests alike, are welcome to pull up a chair and giggle about sheep and wood. Sorry about the short notice, but now it’s on the calendar for next time…
*WARNING* HALLOWEEN PARTY IMMINENT *WARNING*
Just a friendly reminder. Put all those little final touches on your costume and head out to our halloween party tonight! Matt has rigged up a personal interactive LED display for people to mess with. Send tweets to @MattsCostume tonight (7pm and later) to display your tweet on his sign. Pretty cool! Be sure to do a twitter search for @MattsCostume after the event to read all of the past hilarity that he had to walk around with. Dont be too wordy though, the sign is only capable of displaying 76 characters at once, so you’ll get cut off if you ramble too much! See the video below:
We’ve got quite an event lined up. Halloween is fast approaching, and if there’s one thing nerds like to do, it’s wear nerdy costumes. JOIN UP! CHECK-IN, RSVP, YELP–SQUARE–TWEETLUR–BOOK or whatever you kids do these days. Just fill up all the internet tubes! yadda yadda. Spam this out to your friends.
We’ll have some phat beats dropping and mad costumes. We’ll also entertain serious discussions about how awesome Jurassic Park was, your favorite molecule, and hopefully… HOPEFULLY someone does the ninja rap, Go ninja go ninja GO!
The thing that makes this event extra exciting is it coincides with Ted’s 40th birthday. This means two things for you: free booze (thanks Ted!), and an excuse to heckle an old man about his age, you ungrateful people!
To cap it all off, we’ll be making ice cream with liquid nitrogen. Yeah, you read that right. LIQUID.NITROGEN. Insanely fast, insanely cold. What more do you need to know? Go get your calendar right now and put a big ol’ circle in the shape of a pumpkin around the 29th!
Despite our DIY ethos, there are many things we just can’t build ourselves. Subtract one from that list, because a formerly-unavailable component is now available in the US.
Pictured at left are the ubiquitous female jumper wires, used by experimenters everywhere. They come from China, via a number of suppliers. But if you want a different length or just to DIY for the principle of it, you’re out of luck. You could buy the pins and salvage the housings from PC case wiring, but that’s hardly a reliable source, especially for the useful single-pin housings.
The housings are available from all the usual suspects, except the single-pin version, which wasn’t available anywhere. Until now, that is! The story of how that happened is a bit more straightforward than you may think, and the details are after the jump. Read more
Wondering what we’ve been working on lately? Here is a tasty sample. Sorry for the awkward formatting. Probably a gallery layout would have worked better, but hey. You get what you pay for, and I pay what I get for, if you know what I mean! 😉
Want to see more? Stop by during our next open shop friday!
Keenan is hacking a one of the three Roombas he got on Craigslist for $60. He'll be adding his own custom controller board. Here he shows of the mounting bracket that was printed with our Makerbot.
Guest Eric came in to fix his cracked aluminum bike frame.
Steve is making some slick coolant pumps for the machine tools.
Dustin, Roger and Matt (our new president) are showing off some acrylic parts, hot off the laser cutter. They'll be assembling a spindle to hold material for the makerbot.