TFI Friday

It's been a busy week at Nerd Towers, but only because we found ourselves in the strange position of having quite a few events in the social diary! While this does mean that we've managed to get out and see the sun for a few hours at at time it also means fewer hours in front of the computer/etching tank/soldering iron.

Wednesday was the Brighton and Hove Petanque Club Quiz Night at the Iron Duke. Luckily we teamed up with a couple of other members so that our ignorance of all things cool and cultured didn't become too apparent. In fact, we hid our ignorance so well that we won the quiz and each took home a bottle of bubbly!

A lot of the week has been spent in preparation for the Brighton Robot talk "introduction to microcontollers". Lots of kits had to be made up, containing breadboards, wire jumpers, microchips, resistors, leds - all the kind of junk you'd normally find attached to a microchip in fact. In a talk spanning a massive three hours (include beer and fag breaks) everyone managed to get an LED flashing in response to an input signal/button press. We're not quite ready to build a robot army to take over the world, but it's a step in the right direction!

Speaking of RobotBrighton, Robot Steve of BotBuilder fame, spent some time using MS Messenger and a webcam to demonstrate his exciting new Etch-a-Bot.
He's already using an LCD display for his project (pre-built from SparkFun) which allows the user to draw a path on the screen, using a small joystick. The bot can then be put into "playback mode" and it will rove about, following the path drawn on the screen. Pretty impressive stuff!