Robots & Dinosaurs is located in Gerard Lane, Gladesville . We’re open Saturdays from about 11am and some weeknights, but you should check by asking on our mailing list.

Invasion from DorkBot!

This Saturday we were kindly invaded by the denizens of DorkBot, an electronic art group in Sydney. They’re described as “People doing strange things with electricity”!

Check them out if you haven’t already:

http://dorkbotsyd.boztek.net/

It was great to have new faces attend, and get a two-way brain-picking session happening. There’s a lot of overlap with our two groups, so I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of them in the future. 

Just a reminder, the MakerBot’s going pretty well at the moment. We had a few large (1hr+) prints come out really nicely:

So next time you’re at the space, jump on Thingiverse.com, find a model you like and start printing!

Also, here’s a nifty time-lapse Max made of the ‘bot in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdqVL1dPKyc

Movie Night, Parabolic Death Ray and Talking to Space

Hi Folks, Gav here. We had our movie night tonight, which was a lot of fun. If anyone gets a chance to see the amazingly cheesy Indian robot movie ‘Enthiran’, I’d highly recommend it. 

David had some success with his new radio setup. We actually heard the signals from passing satellites in low earth orbit overhead! We were hoping to be able to talk to the International Space Station, but sadly didn’t have much luck. The rain and other factors conspired against us, but hopefully we can try again soon. (In case anyone’s curious about the photo, using umbrellas was out, as they’ll behave a little like a faraday cage, but luckily we had a large chunk of acrylic as a makeshift rain shield!)

Also, Bec and I finally found a use for the parabolic dishes we picked up surplus last year. With the addition of some aluminium tape from the hardware store, it becomes an awesome solar concentrator that should be good enough for cooking/melting things/smiting enemies, etc! Sadly the sun disappeared behind the clouds just as we finished making it, so we’ll have to wait for next week to get our fire on.