What sort of projects do people want to hack with at Howduino? You're more than welcome to bring your current project along with you, but we expect lots of you will be looking for something to do. Use this page to brainstorm ideas about what we could build.
There are loads of hardware hacking projects around on the Internet. Add links to your favourite projects here to show the rest of us what's possible...
Ideas for projects that someone with little or no hardware or software experience could get up and running. We'll probably run at least one of these projects in a workshop format to help people get started.
[word of caution: I've just started installing the arduino IDE on my computer and it is rather large - if you haven't already got it on your machine, make sure you leave plenty of time to get it unzipped and installed. Definitely something to do before you come to Howduino! nikki]
Suggestions for hacks that someone/some people could do
Even if you have no idea whether they could be done
That's not Adrians drawbot, it's just a photo I found on flickr, but funnily enough I have been planning one using the same concept, I wanted to get the basics done before Howduino so people can play with it and create interfaces - Thom
I'd be interested in working on this but I'd need someone to point me in the right direction on stuff to buy/read before the day - NickThere's more info about the Drawbot over at http://www.as220.org/labs/drawbot/, including some code for the Arduino to control it. It looks like it's just a couple of stepper motors using the bipolar stepper motor circuit from Tom Igoe. So you'd need two stepper motors, two 1K resistors, an L239D dual H-bridge chip and two NPN transistors. You can often salvage stepper motors from floppy drives, CDROM drives or hard drives, but the one I pulled out of a CDROM drive recently was a bit tricky to solder wires to. Or you could get the motors and controller chip from here for about £17 - Adrian