Sunday Meetup 29th September at the Welshmill Hub

After a bit of a break, it’s time for our regular last-Sunday-of-the-month afternoon session! Do join us. We’re meeting from 14:00 til 16:00 on Sunday 29th at the Remakery/Welshmill hub. (Note that it’s only 2 hours, not the usual 4)

Feel free to bring any projects you’re working on, use the tools, discuss any interesting tech you’ve been looking into, ask questions, or just catch up.

The 3D printer is ready for action, as is the laser cutter, and also the CNC machine (but that needs a training session and a bit of supervision to use.)

When: 2pm - 4pm Sunday 29th September.

Who: members and prospective members.

Where: The Remakery, upstairs at Welshmill Hub, Park Hill Drive, BA11 2LE . (Park Hill Drive is off Welshmill road, near the Play Park/Bump Track)

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What happened…

  • @hugo brought his prototype hydrofoil sailing yacht, which is by far the largest show-and-tell we’ve had (nearly 2m long and over 1m tall, I’d say)

  • some mention of Viking sails (wool! linen!)

  • we had plenty of discussion about the latest in LLMs and how they can be useful, or entertaining, or misleading

  • @Will recommended perplexity.ai for LLM-assisted technical assistance and searches (and more besides) (and we mentioned several other ways of searching and getting assistance: from startpage.com to pi.ai and grok.

  • some chat about open air swimming at Farleigh Hungerford and/or Tellisford

  • some chat about electric vehicles, clean air zones, road damage vs vehicle weight, type pressures

  • some chat about maker spaces and empty premises in town and the economics of that (and of tattoo parlours)

  • and surely more besides

Did I miss the shed on Sunday?

Ah, yes, you did - sorry to say I lost track of time and didn’t do any publicity. In fact we failed to book the venue, but fortunately it was available and we booked it retrospectively. Sorry we missed you - we’ve booked up the next one, the last of the year, for Sunday 24th November.

October’s event, then, was very small scale: me, @Will and @hugo only. We discussed, as I recall, various aspects of green energy and climate change. Hugo brought a couple of prototypes - one a fish-friendly self-centring turbine, and the other a sea spray device for ocean cooling. I’m pretty sure we talked about solar power, and possibly about nuclear power.

We briefly talking about particle detection, with reference to optical smoke detectors (link).

Also about Iron Age tunnels in Cornwall. (Halliggye Fogou) (See also here and here)

We had a look at the old maps online here. And mentioned the Nautical Mile near Talland Bay.