DorkbotPDX | people doing strange things with electricity

Dorkbot Open Lab -- February 26th

Fri, 02/17/2012 - 23:32 — jimmythehorn

Where: ADX, 417 SE 11th, Portland
When: Sunday, February 26 -- 1-5pm
What: OPEN LAB!

It's open lab time again!

What is that, you ask? We provide the space (and some power outlets), and you bring the tools and whatever projects your working on. This is also a great opportunity to ask your fellow dorks for help with a project.

Also good to bring: power strips and extension cords if you have any to spare.

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announcing the return of the group order

Tue, 02/07/2012 - 19:57 — drtwist

I am pleased to announce that I am re-starting doing the group parts ordering service.

deets are at: http://dorkbotpdx.org/wiki/dorkbotpdx_group_ordering

drtwist's blog

DorkbotPDX Bus Pirate Group Order!

Wed, 02/01/2012 - 21:19 — sircastor

After Jared Boone's excellent presentation on Dangerous Prototype's Bus Pirate, several members of our humble band have decided to put together a group order for components to build out own Bus Pirates.

As of this writing, our component and PCB order totals more than 10 Bus Pirates. The greater number we have, the better the component prices (in many cases) will be.

Why are you doing a group order instead of just buying them?

AltSoftSerial Arduino Library

Mon, 02/13/2012 - 20:31 — paul

I recently published a new AltSoftSerial Arduino Library. It's meant as an alternative for Arduino's normal SoftwareSerial library, for more demanding applications that need simultaneous data transfer.

paul's blog
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Building a Teardrop Trailer

Thu, 02/09/2012 - 21:30 — ioan

I plan to go camping a lot in the summer and to make the camping more enjoyable I decided to build a Teardrop Trailer. I created a website where I'll log the progress with as many pictures as I can, tools I use and materials. If anyone is interested here it is: https://sites.google.com/site/buildingateardroptrailer/

ioan's blog
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DorkbotPDX BusPirate Board Design

Thu, 02/09/2012 - 05:13 — doctek

For the many of you who are wanting a BusPirate, here are the design files. The Schematic, the Board and the Gerbers as a zip. Please review and comment - we don't want any errors in this!

Special thanks to Monty for the DorkbotPDX logo. Who knew what artistic talent he has? ;>)}}

Also thanks to Monty, Scott D. and Greg P. for comments and suggestions while I was editing the board and Gerbering.

Most of all, thanks to Greg for organizing this whole adventure and to Jared for setting us off on it to begin with.

Favorite Visualization

Sun, 02/05/2012 - 22:39 — WardCunningham

I have a favorite visualization that I apply to conversations. Each participant is represented by a string. Each character of the string is one hour. Activity in that hour creates a blip. Inactivity leaves dots (or comma at midnight). Here are five days of Dorkbot project blabber visualized. I share my methods in the remainder of this post.

I prepared this chart in two steps: first get the data in a file and then plot it. Let's work backwards. Here is the plot routine:

while (<>) { ($d, $t) = split /\t|\n/; $p{$t} = ("." x 23 . ",") x 5 unless $p{$t}; $h = int($d*24); substr($p{$t},$h,1) = "|"; } print map ",$p{$_} $_\n", sort keys %p;