rippowamlabs

Join us at the Custer Street Community Center in Stamford on Friday May 20th at 5 pm. We’ll be starting work on our new Container Garden. Children of all ages are needed for this project!!! The more people helping us with this, the more bountiful our harvest will be!!! (There will be a movie playing afterwards, so this is going to be a big night!!)

We’ll have a booth at Stamford STEMfest again this year on Saturday May 14th in Mill River Park. Come on down to see our latest projects. Stamford Academy students will be there showing off the bots they built. Also, rumors are swirling that members of the Open Organization of Lockpickers (toool.org) will be there giving demonstrations and lessons. Thousands attended this event last year. don’t miss out!!!

When we arrived at the Community Center on Thursday night, we didn’t know if anyone was going to show up. Jeffrey Watt, the Resident Services Coordinator, had put the word out that Ron Morse was going to give a class on bike maintenance – but we couldn’t be sure.

But as the night progressed, people started trickling in with bikes that had broken seats, flat tires, wobbly wheels and creeky cranks. But Ron got out his toolbox and, in short order,  got each one of them  pedalling around the complex with big smiles.

The coolest part was when Ron noticed that one of the kids had what appeared to be a dent in his rim. With a few turns of Ron’s spoke wrench, the wheel was true and the kid was back in business!

We all thank Ron for his time and energy!!! We’ll be doing this again in a few weeks, so stay tuned.

**PS  A special thanks goes out to the people at Danny’s Cycles, who donated a couple of seat clamps to the kids!!

We’ll be conducting a bike maintenance class for kids at 32 Custer Street in Stamford on April 14th at 6 pm. Bring tools if you got ’em (wrench, allen wrenches, screwdriver, plyers). Otherwise, we’ll have some to borrow. You’ll be learning from the Master – Ron Morse (the creator of the SpeakerBike)!!!

We had a great time building robots at the Domus School in March with Stefan, Zach and Jay (left to right in picture above). These young men picked up soldering, microcontrollers and computer programming with ease – and we are already planning ways to take our autonomous bots to the next level.

Look out for us at the upcoming Stamford STEMfest, where we’ll be showing off our bots – and much more!!!!!

Here is my  bluetooth-controlled LED strip …

I think I’ll have to attach this to my LED Bike Helmet too.

I always thought that creating something that could think for itself (like my autonomous robot) would be the coolest thing. But, when someone asked me to create a bot that could be controlled by a cell phone (via bluetooth), I can’t honestly say now what’s cooler.

The really really cool part about this is that I can be literally on the other side of the house and the robot is still responsive as ever.

I’m hooked on this bluetooth-control stuff. Expect more on this from me.

We all had a great time at the Darien Library yesterday.  With little knowledge in computer programming, microcontrollers or soldering, every student walked away with a working robot.

I think everyone’s favorite part of the day was coding the bot to behave the way they wanted. Here is an innovative pattern that Arpita programmed her bot to execute …

But here is an example of the autonomous  version of the bot in action …

https://youtu.be/R1q1-n76qhc

I was so impressed with everything about the Darien Library. Not that the Stamford Library and Norwalk libraries are bad or anything. It’s just that Darien does everything so incredibly well! They are everything a modern library should be in our modern age. We want to thank Mallory Arents, the head of Adult Programming, for her foresight and wisdom for organizing these and other types of tech activities there.

Thanks go to the students as well. This was a bright and enthusiastic class. It was so great to meet so many interesting people!

I had a blast teaching the class at CT Hackerspace in Watertown on Saturday. The students were bright and building their bots came natural to them. It was great meeting Enzo, Franklyn and all the others! Looking forward to the next one, where we’ll control these bots with our smartphones!! CT Hackerspace RULES!!!

More and more of our friends have been hit with the scourge of unemployment recently, so we’ll be opening up our space for them in 2016. Anyone who is unemployed or under-employed can use our space during the day for FREE. We realize being without a job is tough – but you don’t have to do it alone. Spend the day coding and applying for jobs at our space, along with other talented professionals. Please contact management@rippowamlabs.org for more info.