Introduction of HAB nut, laser cutter owner and evil genius

[Nick McCloud]

Hi,

I'm the guy that came to talk about High Altitude Ballooning, went away, helped with the village Panto, ran robot workshops at the Quad, delivered activities for the Robot Triathlon at the Quad and then got struck down with real flu and various lurgy's.

When I'm not being ill, I write software for large retailers to keep track of product image creation for their websites and provide tech support for my security electronics company. To keep me sane, I'm a pretty active STEM Ambassador working with local schools and so forth and the father & mother of ChickBot, a low cost robot kit. I work with the IET on various public activities, mostly to do with robots as I appear to have rather a lot of them & parts.

As I live and work in Bradwell in the Hope Valley, I guess I'll be more of an honorary member as Derby is 75 minutes drive for me. To solve the commute time to any maker space, my wife has set aside a table in her craft workshop at Hope Valley Garden Centre to build my next generation evil genius inventions - so the laser cutter, 3D printer and other bits are now out the house, the stuff in the house has expanded to fill the space left and I'm still distracted when working in my cubby hole office. Go figure.

As well as light engineering kit, I've a mangled collection of abused Raspberry Pi's, more broken Arduino's than Frosties and a still working collection of BBC micro:bits. Can code for food, prefer beer.

I'll stop now. Feel free to ask impertinent questions. I'll start another thread for the ballooning.

Nick