We had a good session yesterday, although with a relatively low attendance.
@Joe did some regular maintenance, @Al_B did some research on user-friendly affordable website authoring, @Will did some endless updating of software on his laptop.
@hugo ran a 3D print job on the Make:Shed’s Prusa, a coil-former for an idea he has involving magnetic sensing. Watch this space.
Hugo also brought a couple of his projects, both musical instruments using lasers, light detectors and a small affordable microcontroller board based on the ESP32. (He’s doing his programming in the Arduino world, which would suit various microcontrollers. This one has lots of analogue inputs and also Bluetooth, and the processing power he needs to synthesise audio.) Here’s a detail of the laser harp (it’s battery powered, uses a green laser pointer, has 9 pairs of light sensors and 9 clear plastic beam-splitters.)
And here’s his other musical project, a prototype laser Theremin, again powered by ESP32, this time with a 3D-printed former to hold the laser diode and three light sensors:
Of course we played a bit with the laser harp! We also had a wide-ranging conversation covering time travel, science fiction, the latest AI chat bots, various perils and opportunities of modern technology, and more besides.
The 3D print finished exactly on the closing bell at 6pm, due to a carefully calibrated 116% print speed.
Oh, and Hugo also shared some samples of blue-green and green algae for us to conduct breeding or solar power experiments. See this other topic:
Algae batteries