[SGVHAK] HAK recap 12/6

[Lan Dang]

We had a great meeting last night.  There was a big turnout with many new faces.  The library set us up with their overhead projector, so we didn't have to rely on my AAXA pico projector.

I know I'm not going to get everything, so feel free to chime in.

We tried to schedule  a time to visit John Wang's workshop, but it seemed that due to the holiday season, it might be better to try this in January.  We would aim for a Saturday--maybe during the evening.

I talked about some of the things I saw at Loscon over Thanksgiving weekend, including an Arduino panel where Kevin Roche talked about building his Thinbot, an Arduino-powered bar-bot that made really good drinks.

I also showed off my MK802, which is a PC on a stick (which looks like a super bulky thumbdrive)  that runs both Android and Linux.  It runs Android 4.1 by default, but it will run Linux off a microsd card.  I booted the Miniand  image, which we found out was based on Ubuntu.    I think it's meant for the A10 ARM processor that are in many of these mini computers.  Unfortunately, the GUI is pretty slow.   

Braddock provided the speaker I needed to  complete my Arduino project.  Unfortunately,  it didn't have any wires and we  couldn't do any soldering.   Mic Macguyer'ed the wires using wire twist ties, and we had my dinky  little 8-key piano working in no time.

Doug already posted about the PengPod.

Dave had his Bukobot 3D printer, which I believe he got from Deezmaker.  He was  printing parts to build a tank.  

Matt got rid of some of his X10 home automation stuff and Raspberry Pis.

John(?) showed a version of something he used in an elementary school classroom, where the students could type on individual keyboards and talk to a single computer.   The program he demoed was a multiplayer math game where the screen was filled with simple math problems.   Each wireless keyboard controlled a line on the screen, and the goal was to solve the math problems on your line as quickly as possible to earn points and win the game.   I would be highly interested in seeing a presentation of this at LUG so I can learn more about the technical challenges of this project.

After the meeting, most of us continued socializing at Stonefire Grill until  they kicked us out around 10:15.

It  was a blast and I look forward to next month.

Lan

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