(with at least 10 minutes to go before midnight PST, whew!)

"Feltronics"

Teachers today are facing a difficult problem with far-reaching   consequences for all levels of education.  One of the world’s most   required skillsets is not only difficult to teach, but conceptually   difficult and hard to develop a passion for.  With FELTRONICS,  electronics theory and design can be presented to  any age with hands-on  experimentation rewarded with instant feedback  from a completed  circuit.

Large-scale discrete components are marked with IEEE standard   graphics, and mounted to easy-to-manipulate felt bases.  Magnets on  every  trace end of each part make for easy circuit completion.  The  benefits  of this approach are many, among them familiarization with  component  function, basic circuit-design skills, and above-all,  engaging low cost  education in one of the world’s most necessary  skills.

http://www.feltronics.org

addtional pictures found at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/teddyacklen/sets/72157626511270035/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/teddyacklen/sets/72157626643623474/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/teddyacklen/sets/72157626322989263/

Today we met with Cathy from the Charlotte Community School for Girls to  demonstrate our Fuzzy Logic (Feltronics) circuits. She gave us a lot of  positive feedback. She said she thought the concept was "really cool"  for both demonstrating circuits in front of a class and having students  build their own circuits in small groups. They typically teach  electricity and magnetism to 10-year-old children in North Carolina, so  we demonstrated a simple circuit (a battery, a resistor, a switch and an  LED) that would be suited for that age group.

We discussed using Feltronics to build a FM transmitter as a way to  engage a class and show them the power of simple components.

Cathy liked the low cost (under $1 per constructed felt  component) and thought that would be feasible for many schools to make  their own sets.

She confirmed that kids like things that light up and make sounds, so we should try to have LEDs and buzzers in our circuits.

She  liked the felt, but also liked the cheaper and faster paper-version  where the teacher would print templates, cut them out, and tape the  component to the front or back.

Check out Acklen's brief discussion of unconventional flow and how it affects our project here: http://www.element-14.com/community/videos/2111

We'll be returning to Great Global Hackerspace Contest content later this evening with a dissertation on our design, but you might be interested in this article from our local paper, the Charlotte Observer, which covers one of the other project we have been working on; rebuilding salvage laptops for use in Haitian schools.

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2011/03/27/2169270/hackers-reach-out-to-help-haitian.html

Carbon and non-carbon based lifeforms, hello from Hackerspace Charlotte.  We are forty members strong, located in Charlotte, North Carolina.  You may know Charlotte as the home of NASCAR, the home of western Carolina BBQ, and as the home of the reigning NFL champion Carolina Panthers.  One of those isn't right.

Charlotte is also a surprisingly strong tech city.  There is a close-knit culture of technology, innovation, and technological innovation through the Queen City, as the cool kids call it.  We at HSC are lucky enough to call forty of the hardest-core digirati members.

HSC is fit into a 1200 square foot space that was formerly the machine repair shop for one of the larger cotton mills that powered the Carolinian economy at the turn of the century; tech is literally soaked into the walls of HSC.  No, really, soaked.  I spilled some ferrofluid several months back and it's still there.  That stuff doesn't come up.

Some of HSC's greatest hits project-wise, aside from our Great Global Hackerspace Challenge entry, are our first Hacker Friday open-house door game, Dry Ice Jenga; and something a few of you may be familiar with, the Cupcake Challenge.  Our final device, rare-earth magnets and delicious Belgian chocolate shipped to Revspace in the Netherlands, came in fourth? place after all the judging.  Our prototype device was a cupcake made with fifty grams of iron powder and is still stuck magnetically to the ceiling.  It's beginning to rust.  I'll come back later and make all those links to things you would enjoy looking at.

So that's us.  In the future, expect more pictures, videos on the tubeyou, and more of this until they tell me to write something different.

Advantia?  No, that's a pill, right?  Eh.  So it begins.

Max Wallace
Jenifer, HSC