altLab - DIT Creativity

After a well deser­ved hol­li­day, the altLab crew is back in the lab. We are still get­ting to know our new home, and it will still take a whi­le for us to get com­ple­tely com­for­ta­ble, but some of us are alre­ady back to work on their pro­jects. Here’s the play-by-play report of last Tues­day’s session.

Luis wor­ked on his Hacky­Ra­cers pro­ject, trying to get it ready to show at the Lis­bon Maker Fai­re. He also put the finishing tou­ches on a small elec­tro­nics kit to tea­ch kids about electronics.

Fer­nan­do set out to impro­ve the power con­sump­ti­on of our lab’s RFID door lock to only turn on when some­o­ne is actu­ally trying to use it. This week he dis­man­tled the door knob and mod­ded it to clo­se a cir­cuit when the lever is pul­led, check it:

I went to the lab to etch some PCBs for a wire­less sen­sor kit that detects tree hugs 🙂 Our usu­al toner trans­fer tech­ni­que wasn’t wor­king pro­perly, as the glos­sy maga­zi­ne paper wasn’t stic­king to the cop­per pla­te when pas­sed under the lami­na­tor seve­ral times, so I took a tip from Fer­nan­do and used some mad iro­ning skills:

The results were great:

Next week will be hec­tic as we will be pre­pa­ring for the Maker Fai­re and set­ting up our new shel­ves to sort all our mate­ri­als and tools and make the new pla­ce a pro­per workshop.

See you next Tuesday!