Raspberry Alpha Omega

Raspberry Pi from start to finish

A new meeting place for the Ipswich Makerspace

Jun 27, 2014 - 2 minute read -

Yesterday I went along to another meeting of the Ipswich Makerspace. This time we were in a larger hall at Holy Trinity Church, just across from the small room we met in last time. We had a few more people turn up, but there's still plenty of room to grow!

This week we had a mixture of a session. While two of the team did a a lot of drilling, hammering and grumbling to fit a wi-fi bridge to the new space, the rest of us had an informal show-and-tell session. On the tables this week were a hand built "CNC dremel" with precision three axis control from an attached computer, a slideshow of computer history and an introduction to the Gertboard and how it can help with exploration and prototyping. Some of us also got to see some samples from a 3D printer.

We also had my contribution: I had lugged a large portion of my microcontroller development board collection, as well as a load of extension cards, odd projects I had made, and some of the development tools I use. The collection on show ranged from my very first development board (a Tangerine Microtan 65 I bought in the late 1970s which I vividly remember soldering together in my bedroom at home) to my latest (the Raspberry Pi Compute Module) passing through a heap of ARM and Atmel boards, a few PICs, and a strange collection of oddities such as the Parallax Propeller and Gainer PSOC.

If you find yourself in Ipswich and are interested in making stuff with technology of all sorts, look us up on facebook, follow us on twitter, and come along to our meetings!