Joshua Pritt
Posts by Joshua Pritt
Another Interactive Art Project
A local artist, David Burton, asked if I could add some electronics to his art so that it will play a song when a person stands in front of it. So of course I immediately set to work on making a shopping list of parts and built a prototype. Luckily there is already a single […]
Custom Wooden Thread Spool Wall Hanger
Another great project built by one of our members, Steve Newell: I have a commercial sewing machine and I make big stuff, which means I go through a lot of thread. I couldn’t find a wall storage unit that would accommodate the bigger spools – all of them seemed geared to the smaller spools with […]
Scratch Built Motorola 68000 Computer Project
A project by Melbourne Makerspace member, John Gay: My first computer was a TRaSh-80 (TRS-80) from Radio Shack for my 14th Birthday. As the name implies, it was an 8 bit computer based on the Z-80 microprocessor. It had a whopping 4K (4 thousand bytes) RAM and ran at somewhere around 1Mhz (1 million cycles per […]
Wooden Urn Project
One of our members used the woodshop tools here at the Melbourne Makerspace to create a custom, wooden urn for his friend’s dearly departed dog, Bella. This shows a good use of the wood lathe and drill press in our wood shop. If you want to take a tour of our wood shop and the […]
Neighbor Dog Tracking Device
So my neighbor and I have a fence between us that we can’t see through. Their dogs fight with our dogs through the tiny slits in the wooden fence boards and cause a real ruckus that surely wakes up any sleeping neighbors. So we tried to think of various ways to let each other know […]
Outdoor Solar WiFi Sensor
Here’s a project by one of our members, James Dinsmore. It shows his experimenting with a completely off grid, solar powered, wifi enabled, remote sensor package. It would be useful for things like monitoring temperatures and humidity around a yard or small orchard for example. Other sensors could be used as well such as moisture […]
4th Annual Retro Game Night Recap
We had another great Retro Game Night held on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. This is the event where we bring all of our old video game consoles and hand held and computer systems that were released before the year 2000. This year we had the original Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, and Nintendo Virtual Boy again. […]
Solar Light Holiday Upgrade Project
Here’s another project one of our members put together. Project- Solar Landscape Color Lights for Holidays. DIY Solar Light Christmas Upgrade For these particular lights, use the process.. 1) draw circle on the transparency film – top of spray paint can is the right size for these particular lights 2) cut out the film 3) […]
DIY Stand Up Paddle Board
As another great example of a project one of our members used our space and tools to create is a stand up paddle board. Instead of buying one they were able to build one with just a few supplies and the hot wire foam cutter tool that a different member at the makerspace built for […]
Coder Dojo Robotics Class Recap
Our third set of official Coder Dojo classes (5 Sundays in a row) was held back in Nov-Dec and covered beginner robotics. To make it fun we wanted to make fighting robots. To keep the costs down we chose mini sumo style competition where the robots push each other out of the ring instead of […]