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K-LUG - Rochester, MN Area Linux Users Group
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We can use presentations for upcoming meetings, please see a list of ideas if you're willing but lacking a topic.
LUG News
Social #2: Saturday October 26th
Creative Reuse build day at the Rabbit Hole.
They're going to undertake several re-use activities. Planned are:
-Junk bots creation
-Construction of a secret door for the server room, with a bookcase and a fire alarm door pull
-Kalidescopes using some glass and mirrors
Then they're going to make a stop action video contest submission, this may happen after the 26th due to time constraints.
The Instructables general instructions are here: http://www.instructables.com/community/October-2013-Build-Night-Creative-Reuse/ .
We're meeting at the Toymakers hacker/maker space again. http://tymkrs.com/rabbithole/
547 Northern Heights Dr NE
Rochester MN 55906
Start time is 8 am, but since it's an all day/1 day event for the build, they expect people to come and go throughout the day as their schedule permits.
If you want to play at the Rabbit Hole on Friday night October 25th too, you can take a pumpkin (one you bought at Northwoods Orchard?) for soldering pumpkin lights and pumpkin carving night. Bring your own pumpkin and knife. Need to learn to solder? This will be a good night for that, bring your own kit or talk to the Toymakers in advance about other potential options (candle flicker simulator). I'm assuming this one is 6 pm. They typically order cheap pizza and pop, bring your $5 to pitch in if you want to partake.
For anyone who haven't been there before, their house is on the north side of the road up a steep and twisted driveway; park on the road with a parking brake. Walk up the driveway, up the steps, and ring the doorbell. into the open garage door, and into the house without needing to ring the doorbell.
Planned Technical Meeting: Thursday November 14th
Dennis DeLorme
AATiny remote project, Dennis has provided the following description.
"Many of you know the Ardunio as an easy to use hardware and software development system for the ATmega328 microcontroller. For many projects the Ardunio board may be too expensive to dedicate to a project. There are smaller, cheaper ATmega328 boards that can be used if not all the options of the full Arduino board are needed.
But what if that is still too expensive for a very simple project? The Ardunio system can be used to develop code and program smaller Atmel chips like the ATtiny84A and ATtiny85 chips. The ATtiny84A has 14 pins, the ATtiny85 has 8 pins. The chips have a subset of the features of the ATmega328, for example only 8K of flash and 512 bytes of ram. They are less than $2 in small quantity and include an internal oscillator, so minimal external parts are required.
ATtiny84A http://www.atmel.com/Images/doc8183.pdf
To use the the Arduino environment some addition files need to be downloaded and added to the sketchbook to describe the chips to the compiler and loader. Then the code can be written and the chip programed with just a few extra mouse clicks.
I will show how to set up the environment for the ATtiny84A and ATtiny85. After that we will go through a project to use the ATtiny85 to decode an IR remote control and control a couple of output pins."
6 pm, in or near RCTC Heintz Center's HA107.
Lunch: Thursday November 21st
11:30 am, Apache Mall food court, near B&N.
Planned Social: November TBD
Ideas can be found here or invent your own. What would you like to do? Tell Tim or Tina. We've got lots of potential indoor activities at the bottom of this page, speak up if you have preferences.
Lunch: Thursday December 19th
11:30 am, Apache Mall food court, near B&N.
Planned Social/"Technical Meeting": December TBD
What geeky hanging out activity do we want to do together this year? Last year we went to Hobby Gobblins, and I think they've managed to stay in business; want to go there again? Tina and Tim will work on trying to get this scheduled there.
Planned Technical Meeting: January 2014 TBD
Speaker needed, please let Tim or Tina know if you're willing to volunteer. Willing to present but want to know what people have expressed interest in? Check out our requested topics page.
Planned Technical Meeting: March or later, 2013
Oculus Rift, "the first truly immersive virtual reality headset for video games"
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/oculus-rift-step-into-the-game
Peter Shabino
Planned Socials: Fall or winter
-Jim Henderson, "Silicon Valley" documentary
-Children's Museum. Don't have a kid and feel akward about wandering around to check the place out without one? This is your chance, we'll have at least one coming with the group to salve any feelings of stalking stranger's children.
-Rock climbing at Prairie Walls before they take down the sign we constructed for the Red Bull Creation contest.
-Liquid nitrogen ice cream. This needs a non-Tina organizer. Dennis DeLorme has 2 recipes. We need safety equipment and someone trained enough to keep us from freezing ourselves.
-MAME/foosball/ping pong at Tim Massaro's.
-Parallax build contest ~Christmas
Upcoming Meeting Crisis!
Well, not really a crisis, but we do need some meeting topics (& speakers) for 2013. We'd like to know what you want to see and hear about. Please email Tina or Tim with suggestions for topics. Should we run some previous sessions again (maybe something you really wanted to see but missed out on)? What type of topics are good, what type are bad? Also see this page for a list of suggested topics http://www.k-lug.org/Meetings
Old News Items
See the OldNews page.