[Noisebridge-discuss] Circuit Hacking Monday, January 3, 2011

[miloh]

What: The first Noisebridge Circuit Hacking Monday of 2011!

Where:  Noisebridge electronics lab

When:  7PM-10PM, Monday, January 3, 2011


TL;DR History:
Noisebridge got its first space at 83c Wiese in Fall of 2008.  There
were regular sessions on learning to solder (anyone can learn to
solder!), building Open Heart kits, using arduinos as ISP's, and more.
 I started going to these sessions in Spring of 2009, and I often felt
like I was able to pick up more practical experience than I had in
many lab sessions from college days.

By April I started helping to run Circuit Hacking Monday, filling in
with others while Mitch was travelling the world visiting these things
called 'Hackerspaces' that were popping up everywhere.  Sometimes 83c
was quite cramped for Circuit Hacking Monday, and it was clearly too
small for other events (remember language classes with 8 people on 2
couches, Tuesday meetings with 50+ people, and Shop Fridays in that
weird glass closet?).  By the Fall of 2009, Noisebridge moved only a
few blocks away to its current location.

Circuit Hacking Mondays is a great place to learn how to solder, but
for many sessions it becomes much more.  It's an introduction to the
Noisebridge electronics lab, and for many, a first introduction to
Noisebridge.

This is where Sensebridge first met to develop the North paw and the
Heartspark ( http://www.sensebridge.net ), where we greenwired the
first versions of locally designed Volksduino and started surface
mount device (SMD) soldering sessions ( http://appliedplatonics.com/
), and more recently where the brain controlled electric wheelchair
was born into existence (
http://www.instructables.com/id/Brain-Controlled-Wheelchair/ ), where
Steve Castellotti reversed RC helicopters into the brain controlled RC
helicopters ( http://brainstorms.puzzlebox.info ), and where folks
from Rock the Bike ( http://www.rockthebike.com/ ) work on some of
their awesome bicycle powered sound systems.  It's where we can fix,
repair, and investigate a lot of our peculiar Noisebridge
infrastructure (hackerspace bootstrapping).  And finally yes, the
Noisebridge e-lab is you can learn how to bring your 'dead'
electronics back to life* (where countless laptop power supplies get
fixed).

You still learn how to solder and build kits at Circuit Hacking
Monday, but inevitably many folks end up doing much more.  Many people
learn to solder in a single session, then go on to learn how to
prototyping and program microcontroller projects, learning about
multimeters, bench supplies, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and even
getting into the frequency domain with our spectrum analyzer.  We can
even keep line level lab experimenters safe with our constant voltage
transformer.

Noisebridge can be your electronics lab -- all you need to do is show
up and get to work.

-rma