Last night was Makers Local public night. Greg and Phil where playing with an aluminum forge.  Phil got the forge kit from BackYardMetalCasting.com and this was the first time it had been fired up.  It seemed to work fairly well.  The best part is that no one died!

A couple of nights ago, Bob and I started playing with a Maker Bot one of the Makers Local 256 members left at the shop.  I asked the member who owns it if I could try to get it working while he was gone on work travel.  Of course he said “Yes”.  He had been trying to get it to make a shot glass for a while.  Bob and I started playing around.  We installed the latest version of ReplicatorG and some new firmware.  Bob then determined that the head needed to be about .6mm off the printing service.  After he tagged me in, and I started playing with laying down a raft.  After a few failed attempts where the head didn’t seem like it was moving up the Z-axis enough, I learned to set the Flow Rate of the plastic to 230 instead of 250 in skeinforge.  Along with Bob’s findings we seemed to have found a very nice solution.  I was able to make a coin, most of a shot glass (something happen 3/4 the way through), and a companion cube.

When at The Next HOPE I bought The Brian Machine electronic kit for $20.  It’s a product I have heard lots about and really wanted one.  I figured I would spend the money and actually make it myself rather than buying a pre-made one.

The kit went together fairly easily once I figured out how to do it with a little help from other Makers Local 256 members.  It took me a couple of hours to complete the project.  I had a ton of fun making it and think I’m going to make more kits.

Yesterday Ratmandu and Myself headed out on a journey to find the last remaining Parallax RFID Readers from Radio Shack.  We headed to Decatur first, where we found 5 in stock.  From there we went to Florence and picked up another 4.  According to Radio Shack’s database, north Alabama and south Tennessee no long have them in stock.

Also while looking around the Florence Radio Shack we found the Palm Pre Touchstone charger on sale for $16.  We tested the output and its 5v.  So basically for $16 I now have a wireless charging setup.  I would like to put it in my phone, but it looks to be a pretty big challenge.

Raymond, Tim, Justin, and I decided to go to St. Louis for the grand opening of Arch Reactor the local Hackerspace up there. They had made a post to the hackerspaces.org mail list inviting everyone out to there space.  I asked a few members if they would like to go, and we made a weekend trip out of it.

I had spoken with a few of the Arch Reactor members beforehand and made arrangements to crash at a members apartment.   We left Friday night in the middle of a snow storm.  Lucky Tim is from upside down Vermont and thus knows how to drive in bad weather.  A 6 hour drive took us 10.5, but thanks to my Droid we never missed a beat with Pandora.

Once in St. Louis we found a McDonald’s to get food and then napped in the parking lot.  Then we traveled over to the Arch and did the touristy things.  We walked around the museum and rode up in the Arch.  Being about lunchtime we headed over to Arch Reactor were we hung out for the rest of the night.

The open house was tons of fun.  They probably had 50 or more people show up.  They had a Maker Bot and a CNC, along with a bunch of old and new computers.  There was some cool art, and a few talks.  Tim and I even showed off the photobooth and gave a short talk about it.  OH! and they had life sized Jenga!

As expected after only a few hours of sleep and parting all day with only caffeine to keep us awake, we crashed hard Saturday night.  Sunday morning we had lunch with a member of their space and headed home.  The drive home way way easier than the one going up.   On the way through Illinois we saw a sign for Metropolis, IL aka Superman’s Home.  Naturally we stopped and saw a giant Superman at the courthouse.

Here are the picture I took, I’ll update it later if anyone else has posted their pictures.