I will be starting a biweekly class / workshop on using AVR & Arduino-like microcontrollers. The first one will be 7 - 9pm on Wens. 3/16. We will have USnooBie kits available for a suggested donation of $20, and the first class will focus on putting together the kits (allowing you to learn basic soldering skills if you don't already), and writing some simple programs to blink a LED etc to get started.

Please send me an email, or post a comment here, or somehow respond to the google calendar event (is that even possible? I don't know how this thing works), if you plan on coming, so I can make sure we have enough tools for everyone. This class (like most) is open to the public, no need to be a member of AMT to check it out!

I own a lot of old or obscure books. Many of these are from small publishers who disappeared long ago. I've been moving more and more to ebooks during the last two years but I own something like 8,000 or more books. I'd like to preserve a lot of the hard to find books and something to scan them would make it easier to do so. I've stood over my share of digitizing photocopiers to facilitate them but they work slowly and often badly. Unfortunately, most of the time the easiest ways to scan a book will destroy the same books. There are other solutions though...

A current laser cut book scanner

Yesterday, I went over to Ace Monster Toys to work on a DIY Book Scanner. Daniel Reetz came up with this idea a while back for cheaply and easily scanning in books into computers without cracking the spine on his books.

In which our heroes frantically rework the RFID reader after catastrophic failure.

I have here visualized the security system as of our last update. We have a parallax rfid sensor feeding serial data to the arduino. The arduino sends that data (over serial) to the controller laptop. The laptop authenticates the tag that comes in, then activates the latching relay (through the parallel port), which then turns on the door.

So this next detail isn't clear in this diagram, but where I have marked 'Parallel', what I really mean is that we took an old parallel cable, plugged it into the computer, then cut it in half, and stripped some of the individual wires poking out of the frayed end, soldering them to the relay. This is something you might say is Not Robust (TM).

Guys, python night is on again tomorrow night. There's going to be snakes, and snakes. We're gonna talk about program structure, maybe some flow control, and all sorts of other nonsense. If that didn't make any sense to you, don't worry, it's still a beginner's class! We'll just have to kick those no-goodnik sandbaggers out to their own later class, if they keep showing up and asking their advanced questions about set theory and Big-O-Notation and runtime optimization.

The material I'm going to cover is roughly exercises 19 through 22 out of Zed Shaw's Learn to Fight Snakes The Hard Way. Try to read through it if you can, and bring questions!

I'm going to see about getting pizza again, so rsvp and so forth. Feel free to bring your own snacks (and even your own snakes, if you like), but remember, it's tough to get Cheeto stains off your keyboard.

So again, tl;dr:

Learn Python Something Something

7PM at 6050 Lowell

Open and free to all (but the quality of the pizza goes up and down with the size of the donations)

Twitter was kind enough to kick the name squatter off of the handle @AMT. Henceforth, our tweets will show up from @AMT and not @MonsterToys. Now that our name is shorter, I promise that our tweets will be that much more succinct. Thanks to our member, SuperQ, for making this happen.

OK, so the turnout is only 13 people, but for one of the first public events that AMT has hosted, this is pretty freekin' cool!  EPIC thanks to all who came out tonight.  We hope everyone learned something and we hope to see you again in the weeks to come.

Coming soon, the must have laptop accessory of 2011!  It's big enough to cover the Apple logo on your MacBook (in case you plan to appear on TV and don't want to give out free advertising), it's shiny, UV resitant, and it smells of yummy vinyl!  It's the AMT Robot on a sticker!

We're planning to print up an initial batch of 1000 stickers this month. We'd like your vote on which design to use.  If you are an AMT member, please visit the About the Logo page to view and vote for your favorite design! Voting ends Thursday night, so vote early, change you mind as much as you want, but please place a tally on only one design.

If you've ever wanted to learn to program but didn't know where to start, come on down to AMT on Tuesday the 8th, at 7:00 PM for "L2P", our new series of programming classes.

We'll start learning Python, the language of choice for MIT's introductory programming course. Don't be scared! It has simple rules and is a very easy language to learn. You'll be at "Hello World" in no time. Bring a laptop if you have one! We'll have a few spares, but having your own equipment is better. If you do bring your own, download the appropriate version of python from python.org. If you're unsure which version you need, grab "Python 2.7.1 Windows Installer" if you're on windows, and "Python 2.7.1 Mac OS X 32-bit i386/PPC Installer" if you're on a Mac. If you're on linux, then you probably know how to grab the appropriate package for yourself. Make sure you get anything newer than 2.5, but lower than 3.0.

Our textbook of choice is Zed Shaw's book, "Learn Python the Hard Way," which really isn't hard at all. The book is free and you can find it here. If you have time, try to work through Exercise 0 before Tuesday. If you run into trouble, don't get discouraged! The command line is a dark and mysterious place, and we'll be there to help.

The format will be as follows:

7:00-7:30 Eating pizza, me mumbling about how computers work

7:30-8:00 Hands on time with exercises out of the book

8:00-9:00 Office hours: work on more exercises, ask questions, learned advanced things like object-oriented programming

I'm looking forward to a fun and productive night!

TL;DR

L2P (Learn To Program, for complete beginners)

Tuesday, Feb 8th, 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM

Open to all, including non-members, bring a laptop, install python, and google "Learn Python The Hard Way" by Zed Shaw.

No cost, but donations are nice :D

RSVP in the comments or by email so I can get some pizzas