Join us for a Meetup on Saturday, September 12th near Washington DC. The Hackaday Crew is headed out to the DC area a week from Saturday and we want to hang out with you. We’ll be hosting a meetup at Nova Labs hackerspace in Reston, Virgina which is on the Northwest side of DC.
We’ll get things rolling at 6pm on Saturday, September 12. The event includes a few lightning talks, some food and drink, and a lot of socializing. This is free to all but you do need to RSVP to let us know you’re coming. We want you to bring a hack to show off. We love to see what people are working on no matter the level of complexity or stage of completion.
This all started when [Anool Mahidharia] mentioned that he’d be at Nova Labs on September 11-13 to lead a KiCAD PCB design workshop. This 2.5 day boot-camp starts with installing the Open Source EDA software on your laptop and ends when you have a completed PCB design ready to be submitted to a board fab. There is a charge for the workshop and attendance is limited so if you’re interested in it you should sign up now. Our events page is a good collection of information on both events as well as directions to get to Nova Labs.
The workshop is being organized by our friend [Bob Coggeshall] who we first met (and interviewed about his work on the Linux ‘sudo’ command) back in 2014 at Bay Area Maker Faire. Since then, [Brian Benchoff] swung by and visited [Bob] to talk about his company Small Batch Assembly and to tour Nova Labs. He will be conducting his own surface mount soldering workshop, will speak about Design For Manufacturing, and will show his Pick and Place machine during the weekend.
It will be fun to visit with [Bob] and to meet everyone who can make it to the Saturday evening meetup. So far [Mike Szczys], [Brian Benchoff], and [Sophi Kravitz] are all planning to be there. [Anool Mahidharia] will of course be there since he’s leading the workshop. The following weekend [Anool] and [Brian] will both be headed to Philadelphia for the 2015 Open Hardware Summit for which Hackaday is a proud sponsor. [Matt Berggren] and [Amber Cunningham] will both be at OSH as well, talking all things Tindie.
I’ve run a few pcb workshops at conferences & hackspaces. I’ve just transitioned to kicad and am planning another workshop for this years OSHCamp (UK, end of Sept, lots of good stuff happening http://wutheringbytes.com/days/oshcamp/workshops.html)
Anyway, this time I’m trying something different. I’ve made some very rapid screencasts that take someone all the way through to making and ordering a pcb (15 mins in total). I’ll be using these to support the workshop. May try a flipped classroom idea where I get participants to watch the videos before coming to the workshop.
Hope someone finds these useful!
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmcDgdDpcaPjIBy60y22XzG036ckQI7bC
These quick tutorials are awesome. Thanks for sharing. I suggest you submit the links at https://forum.kicad.info/ too.
The one weekend I’ll be out of town. Hope you have a huge turnout!
See a commercial pick and place machine in action ! Free e-scrap for the kids ! :) http://www.nova-labs.org/blog/2015/08/21/hackaday-is-coming-to-nova-labs/