Learning Posts « Site 3 coLaboratory

Course and Workshop Preview

An important part of Site 3′s vision is to share our skills and knowledge with the community. To that end we’re planning on having a diverse selection of courses and workshops open to the public, aimed at a wide variety of age groups. Many of our members are professionals in their respective fields, and so we’ll be able to offer everything from introductory courses for complete novices all the way up to master classes for more experienced students.

Schedules and formal registration will be announced shortly after we’ve moved in to the space. In the meantime, some topics we’re planning on covering soon include:

Beginner soldering
Introductory electronics and programming with Arduino
Networking with Arduino
Working with EL wire
Circuit board design
Introductory welding/metal shop
Laser-cutter basics
Wearable electronics
Geotagging photographs
Oil-based printmaking
Stained-glass workshop
Mold-making
Making music with Game Boy: intro to chiptunes

And that’s just our initial list!

If you’re interested in hearing more about courses as information becomes available, sign up for our announcement e-mail list or subscribe to our RSS feed. If you’d like more information, or to “pre-register” for a specific course, please email me directly at jonathan (at-sign) site3.ca.

By Jonathan | 21 June 2010 | learning | | 0 Comments

First Site 3 Workshop – Arduino by Blinkenlights

We had our first workshop yesterday: Arduino by Blinkenlights.

The goal of the workshop was to put together a lxpl light board, and learn enough of the basics of the Arduino environment to control it. We had limited space, but just enough for six participants to assemble the kits with help from Seth and Jonathan.

The light boards have 16 individually addressable RGB LEDs, controlled with a shift register and LED driver. They’re designed to be easy to assemble, using only through-hole parts. Most of the workshop participants had not soldered much before, if at all, so this was a great beginner project to get people comfortable with assembling electronic components.

Before the assembly started, we talked about how the circuit works and went over what the parts are and what they do. After the kits were completed, we tested the boards with a simple Arduino program. Although we didn’t get much time to work on the software control side, the soldering lesson and practice was definitely worth it, and there will be more time in the future to work on writing software for controlling the light boards.