We had a great meet up at Gist Lab on Tuesday 17th August.

David has made great progress on the sweets4tweets project and we can see that we are now ready to look at the hopper issues to get the sweets actually being served. John came up with some great ideas for this.

We had new people coming along and getting hands on with Arduino for the first time which just goes to show that the popularity of Arduino is still growing.

Our next meet-up is on Monday, 20th September at 6.30pm till 8pm.

We are aiming to keep the meet-ups as being the 3rd Monday of each month from now on where possible.

There will be continued work on the sweetsd4tweets project and one of the ideas for a couple of quick projects for the nights is to create a Pomodoro timer with a dual 7 segment display and buttons and may be also a temperature reader displaying the temperature on an LCD or 7 segment display.

Another pet project of mine is to look at the RAD development environment, programming Arduino with Ruby. So how about some Ruby developers coming down and helping us get this going?

Let us know what ideas you have for small projects that could be completed on the night, or at least started to take away with you.

Looking forward to the next exciting meet-up.

Richard

1. Project Demo: Sweets for Tweets
2. Hackers Surgery: show’n'tell your projects and get help from others if you’re stuck
3. Your agenda item here …

Never played with Arduino before? No problem. Get there early to have a go.
We’ll wrap up by about 8pm, and the head off to the local alehouse for some food and drinks.

On Friday evening, 6pm-8pm, we will be at the Gistlab workin on the Sweets4Tweets project. This project is now at the stage where we are getting back search results from Twitter and the creative team have been working on designs for the sweet hopper and release mechanism (some prototypes in Lego). This is all very exciting stuff.

On Tuesday 17th August we will be holding the normal shacknet meet up at the Gistlab from 6.30pm till 8pm. Please do come along and bring your projects and ideas to discuss and show off. We may also be showing more of the sweets4tweets project.

The shacknet meet up is open to everyone, not just geeks or people who know about electronics or computers. Shacknet is about getting together and learning stuff or just coming for the chat and to see what it’s all about.

If you’re interested in making things light up and/or make sounds or interact with things, then this is the place to be.

Look forward to seeing you all over the next week.

The night was trurned over to actually doing stuff rather than talking about stuff (and eating lots of sweets).

The sweets4tweets project took hold with two groups taking on the challenge. One group was looking at the Arduino code to get the tweets and work out how many tweets had been sent since the last search and the other group were looking at how the practical side of storing and letting out a sweet at a time could be achieved.

We have the Arduino retrieving the search results from twitter and now we need the string parsing to get the number of tweets returned and the last tweet id. Once we have this working we just have to release a sweet for each of the tweets.

We still have a ways to go with this project but it is coming along. In order for everyone to become involved in the project we will be publishing Arduino code so that we can see all the different ways in which you guys solve this project. The code will of course be on an open source license and free to use.

We’ll be arranging another weekend hack day where we can continue to work on the sweets4tweets project as well as you bringing your own projects to work on and share with the group. As soon as we have a date arranged we’ll post an event on the GIST calendar.

This is the new home for shacknet and we hope to be growing the site over the next while using feedback from you all as to what you want to see on here and how we do it.

Please create your member login on thegisthub.net to be able to join the group and start to interact with us.

We had our first get together for a while last week at The Rutland Arms, opposite Access Space. This was a great get together. Thanks to all of you who attended.

The outcome from that get together was that we want to be able to get together to talk about ideas and how how the ideas could become reality, some hands on hacking to get some small projects working when we get together on the twice monthly get togethers, interact with the other groups on the GIST network or from anywhere else and see if there are any projects that we could get involved with. We would like to look at occasionally getting together for day projects at a weekend where we can meet up and work on a group or individual projects.

Our events will now be posted on this website so please do join up and get involved.

We would like to hear all your ideas and suggestions on the website, the get togethers, projects, etc.  no matter how whacky they may be.

My next step is to arrange a visit to the new co-working space that thegisthub.net can provide and to arrange a date for our next get together where you will be able to come down and see this new space. As soon as I have a date I will set up an event for you to sign up to. This will be at least a couple of weeks away due to work commitments and vacations.

In the meantime, please look around the site, make some posts on the forum with your ideas for the site or anything that you would like to share with the community.

Richard