Learn to Solder?

[Dale Grover]

Hello AHA!

The Ann Arbor Mini Maker Faire is coming up Saturday June 4 at a new location, the downtown branch of the AA District Library.

Will AHA be doing any demonstrations or exhibits? Let us know, especially if you need space for things like soldering.

More details at http://a2makerfaire.com/

Thanks.

—Dale

[N Y]

Hi Dale,

Yes, we are definitely interested in joining you at A2MMF! First and
foremost, we want to have more of our free, learn-to-solder "Blinky
Rhino" badges there, just like last year. I am already in the planning
stages with a couple other members to make this happen well in advance
so we're not sweating bullets waiting on parts. We will likely be
ordering around 200 of these kits, since we ran out early last year.

Another member has also enlisted our venerable EggBot in a fun "photo
booth" activity, which takes your photo, transposes it to vector-based
black-and-white, and then draws it on a ping-pong ball which is given to
the guest. We've had a lot of positive reactions to this, and it's fun
to watch.

Finally, hot off the press is another soldering project we'd like to
bring, and sell for $35. It's an ESP8266-controlled, Arduino-compatible
board, powered by a USB-rechargeable LiPo battery, which sports a 5x5
addressable RGB LED matrix. We made these for Penguicon, but they are
just as fun for any crowd. The Blinky Rhino badges don't have too much
soldering involved; so I think if people wanted to get more practice,
they could buy one of these and assemble it at our table, or do it at
home. In addition, we are encouraging people to delve into
microcontroller development with this board. Being WiFi-enabled opens a
lot of doors in terms of usefulness, and development fun-factor. As a
bonus, we also made this board completely pin- and footprint-compatible
with Arduino shields. With a rechargeable battery, it's a Swiss-Army
board that can do anything from scrolling text, to IoT in the field; and
we're pretty excited to see what people do with them.

I'm assuming Backyard Brains would probably also bring some of their new
tech out to demo, so I'd say we could probably make use of a few tables
for all this stuff!

Let me know what you think!

Cheers,
-- Nate Y.

[Dale Grover]

Hi Nate,

Sounds great. If you haven’t already, can you fill out the application form at https://a2makerfaire.wordpress.com/call-for-makers/

In the past you all have used soldering equipment from Maker Works—do you need to this year?

Thanks!

—Dale

[N Y]

Will do.

Yes, having the soldering stations again this year would be helpful!

-- Nate

[Corey Tebo]

I3 has a classroom-in-a-box of pencil soldering irons, about 14 I think, that will likely be available to barrow if that helps.

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[N Y]

Hey Corey,

Thanks for the kind offer.  I think the 7-8 stations Dale provides normally is all we could safely accommodate with the usual help crew, and also without much of a wait for new guests who want to jump in.  14 additional hot-n-stabbies sitting around might yield a little too much chaos for this guy to deal with. :)

-- Nate