March Open House

J., J.J. (our newest member), and I hung out for a good time at our open house on Saturday. We got some good nerding accomplished. If you missed this open house you can keep better track of goings-on by following the meetup group.

J. and I discussed a balloon project he's coordinating with the folks over at Adler Planetarium (who were kind enough to let us tag along on one of their launches a few months ago). They are interested in getting all their concepts of operations, fabrication and launch techniques for doing educational balloon launches up on the web. J. is helping them get something up on opendesign engine. He's looking for someone in the Dayton Diode membership who is interested in heading up a balloon project in our area in which we'd apply the Adler concept of operations. J. wants to have a kick-off teleconference with the Planetarium folks on 27 March at 7p.m. at Dayton Diode.

Arduino Sampling Pin 2 Quickly

J. also helped me out with some "fast arduino sampling" fiddling around that I've been doing. It turns out that if you read the zero pin, you can only get ~30kHz sampling rates rather than ~60kHz you can get for small arrays that you fill in a tight loop. If you just sample the 2 pin then you get the higher sampling rates in a tight loop. If you write the pin reads over the serial line as you make them, then you can only get ~64Hz, which is a bit sloooow.

J.J. mentioned that he'll be posting some pics and information about plastic shipping skids that have some interesting project possibilities.

Lizi's Painting at the Open House

We haven't had a resident artist grace the space with their works since Greg moved out west (you can see his work over the table saw). We enjoyed having one of Lizi's paintings front and center during the open house this month.

Before we knocked off a bit early to enjoy some mid-March pseudo-Irish festivities, we discussed some of the next things we want to get built in the space as far as ``infrastructure'' for the space.

• Lockers for members to use for personal protective equipment and small projects bits
• Shelves to store our growing piles of parts and equipment
• Internet (we really need about 1.5 additional members to be able to reliably cover the monthly costs on this)

What else would you like to see in the space? What is something that we could build or buy that would help you with your projects?

In case you're interested, here's the Arduino sketch I was using to test different sampling rates: