Reminder – Tonight is an open hack night at Workshop 88. Bring a project out to work on with other makers. 7:30 pm.
Want to follow the schedule of open hack nights? Check out our meetup page: www.meetup.com/workshop88
The vinyl cutter is now cutting accurately! Here is a video of the first cut that it made:
And here’s the result of the cut:
What are you going to make with the vinyl cutter?
The ShapeOko now has home and limit switches for both X and Y axes. (Z is a little different.) The linuxcnc config has been updated to handle the new switches, though a little tweaking is still needed. Here’s a picture of Y axis switches while the epoxy cured:
We’ve got a new chat service that we’re trying out. Come try it out at https://workshop88.talkerapp.com/r/cf009d
With the leads to its steppers extended, we’ve been able to get the Shapeoko to move in x, y, and z under manual jog control. Here’s a little clip. Next steps are calibration of all 3 axes and at least temporary mounting of the controller board.
On Saturday August 25th, Jay held a NXT-G class at Workshop 88. He spent several weeks teaching kids at the Inzone program at Harper College, but this time he was teaching adults which is a very different experience! He quickly covered the basics of how each block works and how to use wires to pass data values around the program. He then explained how the programming can be applied to a sumo robot, and walked through the logic and the programming part-by-part to show how the settings affected the actions. There was even some of the Arduino code which he use with my NXshield to show how each command would look in a text based language in comparison to a graphical one. He also talked a little bit about NXC code for comparisons as well. After talking about programming and robots, the class started to discuss starting a FLL team. We are now seeing if we can get a FLL team together, and It is happening quickly! Jay been in involved in varying capacities with FLL for 10 years now. You can see his involvement here in this spreadsheet.
We’re collecting some information from current and prospective members, and people in the community who might want to take classes at Workshop 88.
If you’re interested in becoming a member of Workshop 88, or just want us to know what kinds of classes you might be interested in taking, take a minute to fill out the survey!
New member Jay Kinzie has posted some reviews on his blog of his experiences at the Workshop 88 Arduino 101 and Arduino 201 classes.
We’ll be scheduling more arduino classes real soon. Keep your eye out for these classes. And be ready to bring your ideas to Workshop 88 so we can build something together!
Workshop 88 is going to be at the Mini Maker Faire in Evanston on Sunday, August 5th! Tickets are now available for ordering on the MMF webpage. See you there!
One of our new members, Jay Kinzie, brought in a few of the things he’s working on: a raspberry pi hooked up to a lapdock and a few RC cars built out of LEGO Mindstorms.
