HacDC

 

Join HacDC for a workshop series covering the fundamentals of digital logic design, from boolean gates to state machines, Verilog coding and eventually work with Field Programable Gate Arrays! This workshop will be taught through the Fall, covering a variety of topics and exercises each week. Be sure to check the course wiki page [1] for upcoming topics, past workshops and workshop requirements. This workshop is free and open to the public but may require additional resources as listed on the wiki page.

  

[1] https://wiki.hacdc.org/index.php?title=FPGA_Workshop

 

 

You may register for this workshop by sending an email to <teach me FPGA @ gmail> with the following information:

– Digital Logic Background (truth tables, logic gates, Flip Flops etc)

– C/C++ Background

– Time you’re willing to commit (outside of the class) every week

 

Disseminate!

We had a fantastic turnout at Tuesday’s LED Cuff workshop, the first in what may be a series of soft circuit workshops. We’re thrilled that so many people—many of whom were new to HacDC—came.

For those of you interested in conductive thread, Syuzi Pakhchyan (author of the tutorial we followed) wrote up a nice conductive thread overview; in this workshop we used the conductive thread from Lamé Lifesaver profiled there. I bought the conductive velcro from LessEMF, where you can also buy all sorts of conductive fabrics.

There are a few things I would do differently with this workshop in the future, so I started a Lessons Learned wiki page. Please feel free to contribute your thoughts to it. Much thanks to Ash (see photo) for the impromptu help explaining how the circuit works as well as assisting workshop participants.

What soft circuit would you like to build next? Personally I’d love to transform a WMATA SmarTrip card into a wearable cuff—I’ve already extracted the RFID chip from one—so figuring out how a suitable antenna could be constructed is the next step.

When: Tuesday, September 22, 2009 from 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM (ET)
Where: HacDC, 1525 Newton St. NW, Washington, DC 20010

Join HacDC for a workshop in which we’ll construct a simple soft circuit — in this case, a unisex fabric cuff with an LED that lights up when you’re wearing it. We’re charging a $10 fee to cover the cost of the materials, including the fabric, conductive thread and velcro, LEDs, batteries, and resistor. To participate in this workshop, you do not need to have any prior experience with electronics; this workshop is suitable for all ages (small children should be accompanied by an adult, though). We’ll be using a tutorial by SparkLab‘s Syuzi Pakhchyan, a media designer and tinkerer who weaves electronic circuitry with craft.

Register at https://hacdc-ledcuff.eventbrite.com/ or below:

https://www.nem-electronicafest.com/, featuring a whole slew of Balimore/DC local artists and electronic-music instrument makers. (For instance, https://www.ciat-lonbarde.net/) It’s going to be good.

And for HacDC’s part, we’re putting on a build-your-own-simple-synth workshop. If you made it to the space last Thursday, you have a good idea of how it goes (and probably saw a variable resistor made out of grape soda and a pencil!). If not, come help out anyway, and we’ll show you the ropes. It’s a very basic setup, but there’s tons of room for creativity.

For the workshop crowd: gates open at 10am in Lithincum MD, which means our caravan needs to leave HacDC at 8:30am. If you’re able to drive, we have a few folks who need rides, so please swing by the space.

It’ll be a fun day, a good opportunity for community outreach, and volunteers get in free. Can’t beat that with a stick! See you all bright and early tomorrow morning.

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And as if electronica-fest weren’t enough, if you’ve still got any residual electro-music hankerings, the Sonic Circuits pre-season opens up at Pyramid Atlantic later Saturday night. https://dc-soniccircuits.org/ for info. If you came to the Dave Vosh synth-toys demo/lecture at HacDC, you’ll note that he’s playing his real rig tomorrow night.