i3 Detroit Power Racing Series 2012 Teaser

We’ve been putting blood sweat and tears into our most advanced power wheels racer yet. Here’s a little video we took during our latest benchmarking test. We’ve reduced our drag coefficient by over 40%! We can verify this because we have fancy expensive equipment which measure this!

Upcoming events at i3 Detroit, including two more classes

Friday, April 6, 5pm-10pm-ish: Open Shop Friday, holiday weekend edition! With so many members off work for the day, there’ll be someone around the shop earlier than normal to open the doors and host guests. This is an ideal time to drop in and see the space, meet the members, and work on a project!

Saturday, April 7 8pm-2am: Twisted Toys and Mad Scientists, Victorian/Steampunk show at District VII. (off-site) Several i3 projects and members will be there.

Thursday, April 12, 7:30pm: Arduino Meetup, newbies welcome. Good platform to get started in microcontrollers.

Friday, April 13, 7pm: Open Shop Friday for those sad souls not in Cleveland at the midwest’s finest tech/art/everything conference.

Thursday April 19, 7pm-???: Tabletop Gaming. Does Dominion ring a bell? How about Settlers of Catan? Guests welcome.

Friday April 20, 7:30pm: Lockpicking for Beginners. Please register for your seat now!

Saturday April 21, 1pm-4pm: Roadside Skills For Non-Greasemonkeys. Registration required. Learn to patch a puncture, install a spare tire, jump-start a dead battery, and more.

Friday April 27 thru Sunday April 29: Penguicon (off-site). Geek-interest conference, expanding to larger digs in Dearborn this year. Several i3 Detroit members are presenting, teaching, and otherwise involved. There may not be an Open Shop this day because most of us will be at the con.

(Also, hello Detroit News visitors! What do you hack? What do you make? Let us know in comments!)

Robot Knife Fight Development Day (4/1/2012 10am-6pm)

SWiT here. Ted and I have been working on a game we call “Robot Knife Fight”.  It’s 2-4 identical autonomous Arduino powered robots in a 6′x8′ arena.  Their power switches are held in place by a balloon and they have a sharp pointy thing on the other end.  Four robots enter one robot leaves.  All the files concerning the robots will be available on github soon.  We could use help with getting OpenCV in Python (or C) to process images from the camera above the arena.  Robot positions will then be reported to all robots via radio.  This Sunday Ted and I are sitting down with our 2 arenas, 2-4 robots, and as many pots of coffee necessary to make this happen. Stop by if you are curious, want to help, or if you want to compete. We will be at i3Detroit either developing or testing the new arena code from 10am until 6pm Sunday April 1st. Soon after competitors will write code for a randomly chosen robot and see how it does in the arena against the others. If you have questions email me at switlikm@gmail.com.

i3 Detroit members all over Instructables

Recently featured on the front page of Instructables: A portable electronics toolkit, by dustinbikes. You may know him better as Dustin White, long-time i3 Detroit member and knife freak. He also published the ammo-box speakers, which got a bit of attention last year…

Several other members have contributed to the ever-growing list of Instructables:

• JimK3038 has several, including automotive sensors and Lego Mindstorms LCD repair.
• Surferdude shows how to increase the capacity of a cheap UPS.
• Myself has an old one about Ricochet modem modding, and reportedly a new one in the works.
• Your name here…

Have you written an Instructable, or otherwise shared your knowledge and projects? Drop a link in the comments, please!

Remember games with physical pieces? You can download those too.

(Or, ‘You sunk my Monopoly!’)

Hackerspaces/makerspaces tend to accumulate certain types of stuff. One major category, measured by both money and square footage, is rapid prototyping. In concrete terms, this means things like CNC mills and lathes, 3d printers, laser cutters, and such. While many of these are a bit expensive for everyone to own just yet, that’s why we exist.

There’s a lot written on the subject of rapid prototyping, but it’s relevant to everyday people because it means a change in the way we think about products. As do-it-yourself gets faster and easier, it starts to displace traditional manufacturing in ever more situations.

When I explain the CNC area to guests, I compare it to a mechanical typewriter and a word processor. With a traditional machine, once you’ve made your first part, making a second one is almost as time-consuming. It’s like typing a whole second copy of a document, versus just clicking “print” again. With the machines here, you can “print” physical objects (though the setup is sometimes a bit more complicated than loading paper). This also means that certain design features, like curves and generated shapes that might be hard to do by hand, are easy to include in your digital design.

But the other cool thing about digital designs is that, just like documents, you can share them! Email a copy to a friend around the world, or post them online for anyone to download. That’s what Thingiverse is about — some of the people behind the Makerbot project started a website just for sharing digital designs for rapid-prototypable objects.

So when I spent a few hours last Thursday designing a simple laser-cuttable Battleshots board, I didn’t want that work to be spent on making just the single game I needed. With a few clicks to export the files in a Thingiverse-approved format, and a few minutes to upload them and write the description, I created my first Thing. Now anyone can download it, visit their friendly local laser cutter, and make a copy! A custom-made drinking game, the product of personal production.