Welcome Freshers!

Hi everyone,

Welcome to TinkerSoc, the only society at the University of Kent that introduces you to the skills, knowledge and motivation to tinker with everyday objects and have a fun time while doing so.

I’m Matt, and I’m the president of TinkerSoc for the 2010/2011 academic year. I’m a computer scientist by trade, and am currently in my final year. I’ve been involved with TinkerSoc for three years, and am enthusiastic about playing with electronics in a fun way. My role in the society is to make sure we can do more, that we do it well, that we enjoy ourselves and that your views are taken into account as to where the society goes.

Emma (our treasurer) and Mex (our secretary) are the rest of the committee and do much of the event planning and session organisation on top of their stated roles. Emma is a PhD student in the Electronics department and Mex is a PhD student in the School of Computing.

We have put together an exciting and varied year in tinkering, and it’s one that we hope you will thoroughly enjoy. We’re starting off the year with a hands-on and messy introduction to electronics and tinkering.

We can’t wait to see you!

Cheers,

Matt

TinkerSoc President

Welcome!

Just wanting to welcome our new members! We have lots of fun things planed for you this term, so if you havn’t joined us yet on Kent Union site then please do. Membership is only £5!

If you havn’t done so already please like us on facebook.

Rundown of the term :)

So it’s only taken me 2 months to put this up but never mind! It’s here now. I hope everyone has had a good snow-day, but if you’re a more than a wee bit bored now read this!

So what have we done this term? We started with a fun freshers fayre where we had a record number of email addresses gathered (may’ve had something to do with our epic giveaways, including some handmade items by yours truly). Drawing a lot of attention was K-9, a funky replica of Doctor Who’s canine pal made out of boxes, coat-hangers, foil and foam! Of course this did lead to explaining more than once that we weren’t a Doctor-Who society, and instead pointing them towards the SFX society.

Crazy creation winners

Our first event was a fun campus-mod of sorts, where we asked you all to make some crazy creations, and put them all around campus. We made it interesting giving aways some prizes and these guys were the winners, and a lovely bunch they are too. This event gave us a chance to see the inner workings of the average Tinkerer. Needless to say we won’t be looking there again :p

Scary bunch aren't we?

After that we had our Treasure Quest,  the task- to find photos of things and then to answer some questions to find more photos of things…

I guess you had to be there to quite get the whole “questing” nature of it ;p

All our participants were brave (climbing lampposts being a true test of courage after all) and it was a close run competition.

Next up was an Open Mic session, where we got to hear about making presents, metadata, possible projects (see previous post) and Geocaching.

A knitting workshop followed that session, this seemed to go well with everyone leaving knowing how to knit whether they wanted to or not ;)

We did have some pretty spectacular starting pieces, and one finished piece that ended up somehow looking like a stocking, I figured they must be a knitting prodigy or something. That or just lucky ;)

We had a couple of pub socials next, these were very fun and we found out who was good at table football, and who was… not so good. Let’s just say plastic mini footballs are obviously attracted to some people judging by how often they found a way into certain people’s goals :)

Programming 101 set us a challenge to make a morse code decoder  which many of you started and a few completed. While the rest of us had a neat little crash course into how to program a morse code generator. Maybe at some point in the future we can make some sort of game out of the two. :)

Prototyping saw many of us making some funky projects, a notable one being an Arduino that could sing (they are still working on making it hum “God Save the Queen”). Hopefully we can do it again sometime, only this time with more power!

The last session was with the few of us who braved the snow making some awesome little doohickys including a Christmas spider and some good old-fashioned stained glass windows out of cardboard and sweetie wrappers (remember making those out of black card when you were a kid?) Come along next week for more of the same, only this time we are making presents for people and hopeful yet more sweeties!

Our last session will be a chance to say “toodle pip” for over the Christmas holidays and have a Campus Mod. Hopefully see you all there!

So overall we’ve had some great fun, and looks like next term will be even *more* awesome, so watch this space!!

Please if you haven’t already, fill out our questionnaire so we know what you think :)

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dC1GUmtwcElZVUUtM3hLUWVSVndWR3c6MQ#gid=0

TinkerSoc Projects!

Hello Tinkerers!

In a break from the norm, I (Chris, TinkerSoc President) am posting on the blog.  Don’t worry, I’ll be quick :p

Since our humble beginnings as “the Electronics Club” back in 2008, the School of Engineering and Digital Arts have been very interested in us and what we do – and not to mention supportive.  This year we hope to further our relationship with the Department.  (to show this: observe the banner on their website.  Then, observe the workshop we ran last year making LED Christmas Trees.)

We have been asked to design and build an interactive electronicsy exhibit to be shown in the social area in the Department.  If you’ve been into the building, you’ll probably have seen the lounge area just as you walk in the front doors.  In particular, they would like us to build a large, full colour LED matrix to be hung on one of the walls, which can display an animation of Conway’s Game of Life, amongst other things.  They’ve also shown an interest in making it interactive in some way.

The rather nice thing about this project is they’re willing to financially support us in this endevour.  There are a few requirements (like it needs to be safe, and have a way of disabling it if required).

If you, the TinkerSoc member, would be interested in working on this project, then please get in touch with me ( chris [at] tinkersoc.org) !  There are lots of areas that you could work on: embedded software, hardware, interaction, PC software (for editing/programming animations), woodworking, wiring and more!  We’re hoping to start work on this in the Spring term, but will probably be ordering parts in the near future.

Stay tuned: normal programming will resume shortly :-)

First Meeting!

Hello and Welcome back everyone! It was lovely to see so many people taking an interest in us at Fresher’s Fayre, and we hope that we can interest you further still with what we are putting on in the next few weeks.

Our first meeting will be this week, Wednesday 29th September. We will be meeting outside the main entrance to the library @ 6pmso everyone can find us, and then will troop down to the Rutherford JCR (junior common room) to do some Tinkering. The plan is to do our first Campus-Mod of the year. For those of you new to TinkerSoc, this is where we decorate campus in glowing LED balloons to brighten up everyone’s night. This year we are also planning a few extra decorating ideas, so come along to see what it is we have planned. There will be some free snacks, and plenty of fun to be had by all. Once campus is sufficiently glowing we will head to a bar on campus (or a few :P ) for a well earned drink!

The second meeting will be Monday 4th October and subsequent meetings will be held on Monday nights most likely. Further details will come later in the week.

If you want to sign up for TinkerSoc this year, you can do so through the new (but I wouldn’t say improved) Union website. I don’t say improved as they have the prices wrong, so please hold off on signing up until after Wednesday when we will send out more specific details on how to guide the maze that is the Union website to sign up. :)

Well that’s all for now folks, see you Wednesday outside the library at 6pm!

Freshers Fayre

Hello everyone, just a reminder that we will be at Freshers Fayre. Soon it will be time to renew memberships, and encourage others to sign up! Please do come see us to say hello! There will be plenty going on, and hopefully some goodies too! See you there!

The Tinkersoc Team

Recent News

Hello all!
I hope exams are going well for you, and wish those of you unlucky few, (like me) with plenty still to go, lots of luck!

Well this week Chris and I went to the delightful Societies Federation meeting. Nothing really to report~ a few new societies ratified, and more vague hints towards the new website societies are being promised. We’ll let you know more on that front when we know, but it should be the end for OnCampus (hurrah I hear you cry).

There was also a meeting of old and new committee members. We decided on an official handover date of the last day of term (18th June) and started planning some exciting new events for the year to come! So watch this space everyone, and in the meantime keep tinkering!

Tinkersoc Committee Elections

Greetings all fellow tinkers! This is Kezzy, your new communications officer elect! As many of you will know it was the Tinkersoc AGM last week. Thank you everyone who turned up and voted, it was great to show the union officers the effort you guys put into Tinkersoc, and great to see you all. So without further ado here are the new positions.

President~ Chris Roberts (formerly Vice-President)

Treasurer~ Emma Johnson (formerly Treasurer)

Secretary~ Martin Ellis

Communications Officer~ Kezzy Robins

As you will have noticed, there is now no longer a vice-president position and there has been the creation of a communications officer. As comms officer I’m taking some of the jobs the secretary did last year (as there are loads), and I am also here if you have any feedback. The president and treasurer jobs will be the same, and the secretary will be doing some of the stuff they did last year.

So congratulations everyone on their new positions, voted in unanimously nonetheless, you’ll be hearing more from us soon. Until then fellow Tinkerers, ttfn, ta ta for now!

TinkerSoc AGM This Week!

The time has come again for the TinkerSoc AGM and for us all to choose the committee for 2010/2011.

The meeting will be at 6.00pm on Wednesday 7th April in KSLR4; we will give a short presentation on the past year, a discussion about the state of TinkerSoc and last but not least,we will hold our elections. As this is a meeting that directly affects every member, you will all need to be there. If you cannot make it, please email matt@tinkersoc.org with your apologies.

Next year’s committee is going to be slightly different from this year’s. We will have still have 4 positions, but they will be slightly different:

* President
* Secretary
* Treasurer
* Media/Communications Officer

If you want to apply for any of these positions, or just learn more about them, please go to our wiki page at http://tinkersoc.org/wiki/agm2010


Remember: This Wednesday, 6PM, KSLR4. See you there!

Kit BuildFest 2010 – MintyBoost and MiniPOV

Last night we built some kits.  We were aiming to just do the MintyBoost kits, however they were so quick and easy (most people took about 20 minutes) we decided to start off on some MiniPOV kits as well! (As seen above).

Some people have been having some issues charging Apple devices with their MintyBoost.  For the answer to this, have a look at the MintyBoost FAQ with the answers.  It will require putting some different resistors into the kit – so if you’re having problems with it then come to the OpenLab next Monday (same time same place) and we will give you the required parts from our stock.

Also, we’ve got a page about our custom MiniPOV firmware, TinkerPOV.  We’ve burned a custom firmware to them to make them easier to change the message, and that requires slightly different instructions to the normal MiniPOV kits.  They can still be burnt with whatever firmware you like, but you can more simply change the message by uploading the string to the EEPROM memory (it’s also a lot quicker!).

NOTE: If you are having problems with the kits, please contact US at kits [AT] tinkersoc.org. Because we’ve used our own parts, Adafruit can’t give you technical support.  They won’t want to know :p

If for whatever reason you couldn’t make it to this week’s lab, fear not as you can pick up your kits at any of the sessions.

In other news, Animesoc and SFX and Adventure Gaming Society are having GeekFest tonight in the Lighthouse, from 7PM.