We meet a lot of people who want to play with the Arduino, but they don’t know where to start. Back when I was getting started with the Arduino I was in the same boat. I’m an English major. I had no electronics knowledge to speak of, and nothing like Twin Cities Maker to turn to for help. It would have been so much easier if there had been a friendly makerspace offering a class…

Good news, everyone!

Arduino for English Majors is a two-night class in the basics of the Arduino and electronics. It’s designed for people with no background in electronics or programming. Taught by an actual English major (with help from someone who actually knows electricy stuff), Arduino for English Majors will get you started down the path of microcontroller-y goodness.

Students will need to provide their own Arduino board, and a laptop for running the software. The class is on 11/10 and 11/17 (Thursday nights), from 7.00pm to 9.30pm. Details and prices are on the course registration page.

The science fair runs Friday, February 25th and Saturday, February 26th at the University of Minnesota Field House. About 400 students will need to have at least 3 judges evaluate their projects on Friday, between 4.00PM and about 9.30PM. It takes 10 – 15 minutes to judge a project — if you do the math, that means they need lots of judges!

Judges are also needed to evaluate student papers. This is all being done online this year; paper judging is running right now, and will go until Feb. 16th.

TCRSF also needs other volunteers to help with the logistics: Setup and teardown, checking in the kids, scoresheet wrangling, and all sorts of other duties. 400 students, 200 teachers, 1400+ scoring sheets — it all adds up to a huge undertaking.

I know there are plenty of talented technical folks in TCMaker, and I think you’d have a blast doing this. The curiosity and enthusiasm of the kids at TCRSF is amazing, and inspiring. I hope I’ll see some of you there!

A few notes about the new wiki:

Getting access to the wiki: Right now registration is disabled. If you’d like access please PM DanBackslide on the forum with the following:

• The login name you want to use
• The real name you want to appear on your edits (yes, they can be the same if you like)

I’ll set up your account and PM you back with the (randomly-generated) password.

I’m looking into getting logins integrated with either the forum or the blog. Hopefully this will be ready by Next Sunday A.D.

Namespaces: The wiki has some namespaces set up already, which you can see by following the Site Index link in the nav bar. Current namespaces are:

• :facilities
  Information about the Hack Factory
• :facilities:equipment
  Information about our tools and toys
• :playground
  A place to play. Don’t put stuff here that you want to keep, it will get swept out semi-regularly.
• :tcmaker
  Information about Twin Cities Maker
• :wiki
  Info about the wiki itself.

Feel free to add other namespaces as you see fit.

Plugins: DokuWiki has tons of plugins available, to do all sorts of neat stuff. If you’d like to have one installed, let me know either on the forums or at a meeting. I’ll look it over and see if we can use it, or if the functionality is already there. I’ve already installed the wrap plugin, which gives formatting options for boxes, columns, alignment and such. I’ve also loaded GeSHi syntax highlighting defs for Arduino and Processing code, so you can add nifty-looking source code directly to a page.

That’s all for now — hit me up on the forums or at a meeting if you have any questions/comments.

Atwater-Kent Model 20 chassis

This spring I’ve been taking a hands-on class on vintage radio repair at the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting. The first radio I brought in (an RCA 96T1, ca. 1938) I thought would be simple. It turned out to be in pretty bad shape — bad power transformer, bad speaker, almost all the caps need replacing… In short, it’s turned into a major project.

So I switched over to my other radio, a 1925 Atwater-Kent Model 20 “big box.” It’s a lot simpler than the RCA: 5 01A tubes, 3 condensers, a handful of resistors and capacitors. I also thought it’d be simple, and I was again wrong. 3 out of the 5 tubes tested bad. The grid-leak detector had been replaced with a soldered-in fuse in an earlier repair attempt. Thanks to the museum’s massive supply of vintage parts those items were fixed in short order, but when power was applied I found none of it was getting to the RF tubes.

Luckily, this radio was made at a time when manufacturers expected people to repair things. Remove 8 screws from the front plate, and the entire chassis lifts out, revealing all the components. A bit of poking with a multimeter (and a trip to Google for a better schematic) soon revealed a bad solder joint. And a wound wire resistor that’s open, so I have to fix that next. Then I’ll have to build a power supply — did I mention this thing runs off lead-acid batteries?

I keep reminding myself that, with all the troubles I’ve run into, I’m learning a lot….