Intro Meeting and Processing Workshop

The first TinkerSoc meeting of this year has now occurred!  It was held in KLSR4, in Keynes, and it was quite packed!  We hope that all of you that attended enjoyed it, and want to come back next week (same time, same place) for more Tinkering.

Omer did a presentation on what TinkerSoc is all about: we have the slideshow on the TinkerSoc slideshare.

Summary: TinkerSoc is a group of people that like to tinker; pulling things appart, putting them back together, inventing, creating, and all the while having FUN!

If you’re interested in joining, then have a look at our membership page for instructions.

If you’re not on the mailing list yet, email subscribe [at] tinkersoc.org from the address you want to subscribe from.

Upcoming Events and Things

Open Mic: Next week, same time, same place, we’re going to be holding an open mic evening, with quick talks from any of the members about anything they feel like talking about!  You can sign up for next Monday on the open mic page on the wiki, or just turn up and put your name down on the board.

Junk Trading: We’ve all got plenty of excess electronic junk that we don’t want, don’t need or simply do not have any space for.  Some people have more than others.  On the wiki you will find the junk trading page, where people have been putting up some of the junk that they have, and some of the junk they’d like.  You never know, you might see something and get inspired!

More workshops and talks! Watch this space for info on upcoming talks and workshops!  You can take a look at the calendar too, if you fancy seeing what sort of thing we have planned!

Intro to Processing

Matt and Chris also presented a basic introduction to Processing, a programming language that allows us to build graphical programs very quickly and simply.  We dissected the spiroID project, went on a tour of all the processing code (as well as the Arduino code that runs on the hardware), and how it essentially works together.

We also presented a couple of programs which Chris has written as an example of a fairly basic Processing project, which you can hack with and make your own!  The programs, called PiGen, approximate the value of Pi using the Monte Carlo method (see the handout for more details).  One program used a 2D representation to show the calculation taking place, and the other used a 3D representation.  The fantastic thing is, both of them too less than 4 hours to complete each.

During the workshop we did some lightning fast live debugging to get rid of a bug that we discovered in the PiGen3d program.

You can download the source code for yourself on the wiki page.

We presented a little challenge: make something cool with Processing.  You can use our code as a starting point, or you can do something completely different!  Come and share it at an open mic night or email it to us to showcase on the blog.

So, hope to see you all next week!