Cool!

[Jim Marshall]

Hi all,

I'm moving to Nottingham soon from Shrewsbury and my friend told me there were several "Hackspaces" in Nottingham. I think it's such a cool idea and I'd definitely up for joining when I move here in 2 or 3 weeks time! I think I'd get a lot of use out of your facilities and it would be good to meet some people with similar interests as I don't really know anyone in Nottingham.

I'm a software engineer, currently I work for a scientific instrument company working on PC software but I'm moving to Nottingham for a job in game development.

I'm interested in electronics and I really like it as a hobby, but don't really know a lot about it. I know just enough to write SOME firmware / embedded C and C++ code but I'm no professional firmware or electronic engineer. I've got a couple of projects on the go:

• I've got a Gameboy-esque console that plays tetris I've designed and made, I'd really like to design a proper enclosure and PCB for it and make it battery powered, perhaps even solar powered (no real idea how to do any of that). I do have a  prototype board version of it that uses a dev board and is powered by USB, I'd like to use the actual chip and my own circuit rather than a development board. I'm thinking a laser cut enclosure made up of stacked sheets would be quite pleasing.
• I want to develop a CPU replacement mod for my Roland tr-606 drum machine and new firmware, so it can save drum patterns to flash memory. By default you have to always keep it full of batteries or your patterns will be lost! A similar thing has been done before but the kit to do the mod is no longer available. This previous mod added a staggering array of new features including MIDI connectivity. I think this project is pretty ambitious and beyond my current skill level, particularly the hardware reverse engineering and electronics parts (although full schematics and information about which microcontroller pin does what are available online, so maybe it's not as hard as I think with the right tools such as oscilloscopes and logic analyzers).
• I've written a pretty compact interpreter for the programming language "Forth" (a true "hackers" lanuage ;) ), I've got it running on windows but I'd like to try and port it to some microcontrollers where it can run as a REPL over a serial line, similar to Mecrisp forth and many others that work in the same way. I've also got an idea to make PC software for it so that some of the "compile time" functionality and data such as variable names can be offloaded to the PC minimizing memory usage
• I'd be very interested in some kind of DIY motion capture setup, if anyone has any experience with this (it seems possible somebody here might).
• if anyone is interested here's the code (for the two of these projects that have code)
  • https://github.com/JimMarshall35/Microcontroller_Tetris
    
  • https://github.com/JimMarshall35/Forth
    

Thanks and kind regards,

Jim

[Paul Egan]

Hi Jim! Not sure that I've ever seen such a detailed introduction post here :)   if you haven't already discovered the Slack channel is a lot more active than the Google Group (http://slack.nottinghack.org.uk/) 

Have you made the move yet?

[Jim Marshall]

Haha fair enough! I'm not sure why I made such a long post here - I have indeed made the move and am signed up as a member of the hackspace - although haven't yet come in to use it. I was actually thinking of coming in tomorrow

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