MightyOhm

This Friday, March 11th, Austin’s Dorkbot chapter is holding a science fair in conjunction with Ignite Austin for SXSW Interactive.

I’ll be demoing my Wifi Radio project and showing off various other projects.  There is a list of presenters here.

General Admission is $10 ($0 for SXSW badge holders), but if you RSVP right now on Dorkbot Austin’s Facebook page there might be some free passes left.

While I was visiting Portland last month, I had a chance to check out a DorkbotPDX meeting.

This meeting was unlike any other Dorkbot I have seen before (in San Francisco and Austin).  Instead of formal presentations, everyone shows up at a cafe/coffee shop called Backspace (that serves beer!) and brings a project to work on or show and tell.  And, instead of meeting once a month, they meet every other week!

It was awesome.

I didn’t get to take very many pictures, but I just uploaded a few photos to Flickr.

Last night, I dusted off my Wifi Radio project and gave a 15 minute presentation about it at Austin Dorkbot 27: Electric Boogaloo.

Dorks who want to download the slides can do so here: Jeff_Keyzer-Wifi Radio Project

I had a particularly challenging evening because the hastily assembled wireless network in the ACTlab refused to hand out an IP address to the radio.  After wrongly suspecting that the 802.11n network was causing problems (my home network is b/g), I discovered that if I set a static IP and default gateway, I could get a stable connection to the router.   That process of discovery took something like an hour of tweaking settings, trying to remember iwlist arguments, how to set up routes, etc.

In the end I got it all working and gave a very successful demo of the radio.   Whew!

when:    nov 18 2009 wed 7:30pm
where:     noisebridge
2169 mission, SF, 3rd floor

speakers:

anselm hook – augmentia: scratching the surface of augmented reality
http://hook.org

shelly farnham – steve the robot h.e.ai.d.: a large scale generative
music and laser play space
http://shellyfarnham.com

david gessel – stalking slanderizing trolls
http://blackrosetech.com

gian pablo villamil – 360 degree panoramic video without the megabucks
http://villamil.org/?p=621

I’m planning to head over around 7pm and will hopefully see some mightyohm.com readers and dorkbot regulars there tonight!

Dorkbot-SF is meeting tonight at 7:30PM at TCHO on Pier 17.

Speakers include Mark Pauline of SRL, Timothy Childs of TCHO, and ITP graduate Michael Ang.