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Makers at Amherst Media Makerspace at NERDSummit

Makers at Amherst Media ran a Makerspace on the last day of the NERDSummit. I came up with a simple plan for the event: I suggested we get some old, broken remotes, recover the IR LEDs, and try program an Arduino to control some device, like a TV. Christine did most of the heavy lifting to get everything ready: she organized the kits and went to the Comcast office to get some broken remotes. I brought a few from my office.

If a lot of people had come, it probably wouldn't have worked well, but we just had a few people at first. More trickled in later and the room seemed comfortably busy the whole time, but I had a lot of time to play with the activity to see if it could be made to work.

In the end, I couldn't quite make it work. I didn't have a device to bring with me to control, so I tried to control the data projector that was in the room. But it was an NEC projector and it seems that NEC devices can be problematic to control: they have very long control sequences and aren't well documented. But I was able to get the IR LED out and confirm that it worked.

It was kind of creepy to not be able to see the LED with the naked eye, but yet see that it was shining when you looked at it through the camera.

Although I wasn't able to control the projector, I did find a lot of supporting code and documentation and I think with a few modifications, this activity could work really well with student. I need to find a small TV or maybe an old video camera that can work with a remote that uses a simple, well-documented protocol. Then, I think, the activity would be a great one to use with kids: the electronics are dead simple and the programming is relatively simple, conceptually. At the same time, it demonstrates recovering components from old devices, requires doing a lot of web research and reverse engineering something. And, in the end, who doesn't want to learn how to secretly control something at a distance: "No, Mom. I'm not touching the remote. I don't know why the TV keeps switching to My Little Pony."

In the end, the Makerspace was not a huge draw, but 20-25 people cycled through at one time or another. A few stayed the whole time, learning to program the Arduino. Some just watched, others came to chat. Many people were excited about the idea of building the Makerspace in the new Amherst Media building. It was a good fit with the event and worked out very well.