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Events News

Fundraising, Lightning, and More

Summary

3D Printer Updates

We’re all amazed and humbled by the support being given to the 3D printing Fundraiser. We’re proud to be the first ‘Technology’ entry on Sponsume, and we’re so very nearly there you can almost taste it.

In terms of some of the awesome ways people are planning to use the printer, some have really stuck in my head;

  • Theatrical set design models for lightning tests,
  • Architectural prototyping,
  • Customised Bow Riser (Handles) for Archers
  • CCTV Camera Camouflage
  • 3D Printed 3D Scanner (3D-Ception…?)
And it goes without saying that the mad group that is ‘our community’ are going to come up with more crazy and strange ways to experiment with the new hardware.

If you’ve been watching Farset from the outside, now is a brilliant time to get involved; the top two tiers of donation include a year’s Enthusiast and Freelance membership respectively.

With 8 days to go and just under £300 to find, if you haven’t already, please consider making a donation, and you’ll get cool stuff in return.

Town Hall

The Last Town Hall meeting was in late September, and it’s high time, given the changes ad improvements in the space since then, that we all had a face to face chat.

As such, we’re going to have a Town Hall meeting booked this coming Friday between 5:30 and 7:00. It’s hopefully not going to take that long to sort everything out.

On the agenda at the minute (if you want to add anything, let us know in one of the many ways):

  • Financial Update
  • 3D Printer Update / Purchasing / Consumable Selection (i.e., if you want to pick the colours of the 3D printer, come to this meeting!)
  • Potential Project Funding ideas
  • Equipment rollout (Workshop)
  • Establishment of Training for members in how to use the space / Health and Safety
  • AOB (All other business / opportunity to rant)

 Flack-Lite?

Since this holiday season is a bit heavy on the tech-events, such as the brilliant  Buildconf this week (Good Luck Andy!), Kainos’ HealthHackNI in the city hall in early December, and the wealth of ‘Office Nights Out’, we decided that there’s little point in scraping together another Full Blown Flacknite before ’13.

So instead, we’re going to have a casual, BYOPizza Flack-Lite weekend, where the space will be open to all, and the theme will be improving Farset Labs’ infrastructure.

Current projects in the todo list are:

  • Real Membership Management
  • Redo Website
  • Improve door control (and possibly a proper app!)
  • Improve FarBot to be smarter
  • Exposing *something* from the CCTV system to the membership
  • Building Time-Lapse table for the 3D Printer
And More I’m sure will come to us.
There will be the usual selection of muchies and drinks, but these will be paid for from the community fund, so please, either BYO or make a representative donation.

Hopefully we’ll have a great deal of awesome projects to show  next week, or at least will have moved along some of our more stubborn issues.

User Groups

We currently have a full roster of User Groups this month:

  • 14th: SuperCollider (Algorithmic Music Generation)
  • 21st: BelfastJS (JavaScript, currently with Arduino and Cars)
  • 28th: BLUG (Everything Linux and Open Source)
  • 5th: PyBelfast (Python, possibly something Raspberry Related, see below)
Since we’re now technically ‘At Capacity’, if any other user groups want to run, we’ll shuffle things around to try and be fair to everyone, and this will be on a case by case basis.

Raspberry Jam

On Thursday the 29th, we’re hosting a Raspberry Jam.

Raspberry Jam is a rapidly growing global network of user groups that meet every month to support hobbyists, developers, teachers, students, children and families – in fact, anybody that would like to put their Raspberry Pi to good use. While Raspberry Jam is not endorsed, sponsored or associated with Raspberry Pi or Raspberry Pi products or services, some of our regular members are volunteers for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. At our meetings we have helpful people who can help you with everything you need to get what you want from your Raspberry Pi.

This will be Farset Labs’ first Raspberry Pi centred event, and if successful, will be built into the event calendar.

Raspberry Jam is a Farset Labs Members event, so visitors will be expected to make a small donation either in the form of an online ticket, or chucking a few coins in the tin in person.

You do not need to have a Raspberry Pi to come to a meeting. In fact, not having a Raspberry Pi is an excellent motive for coming along. You will discover what you can do with a Raspberry Pi when you do manage to get hold of one.
Stuff we’ll be trying out:
  • A ‘beginners guide’ walk through of how to get started with your Pi
  • Some show-and-tell demonstrations of cool projects people have already done with their Pi’s
  • Breaking to a relaxed evening of Pi-Jamming, where everyone is encouraged to share their experiences.
Children are welcome to attend the event, when accompanied by a parent or guardian.
We will try to get our hands on as many HDMI compatible monitors as we can, but please try and BYO monitor. We have plenty of mice and keyboards, but few HDMI compatible monitors.
This event is in high demand so please book ahead of time to avoid disappointment

And Finally: NI Tech Show

Light one to finish things off.

I was invited onto the #NITechShow podcast last week leading to one of the longest editions that Chris or Matt have done recently (sorry guys) covering a fair amount of the local and global tech news, including the Good the Bad and the Ugly of Microsoft software and hardware (specifically my clicky keyboard), Geeky Christmas gifts for kids (and big kids), a load of events coming up in the NI area, and a big ‘ol rant from me about Farset Labs right at the end.

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