Dorkbot!
When I growing up in Detroit, there was this store called Allied Radio. It was about the twice the size of a Walgreen's store, and it was all electronics gear. They had aisles of resistors, capacitors, TTL (and later, CMOS) chips, vacuum tubes, Heathkit parts, soldering irons, oscilliscopes, and a bunch of other stuff for which I didn't yet know the name. On Saturdays, I would ride my bike there, with a fresh schematic from Popular Electronics magazine, and make whatever the thing of the month was. Sometimes I was successful, sometimes I wasn't. I remember blowing the fuse to the basement multiple times, blowing out perfectly working electronic devices, and even starting a small fire in a radio that my father gave me for Christmas. I sure did have a lot of fun. In the process, I learned about all sorts of nifty things like impedance, which came in handy when I was trying to tweak the reverb and preamp circuits on my guitar amp -- or when I lived in the Ambassador and was trying to figure out how to bridge my neighbor's circuit to get more amperage.
In the mid seventies,I bought a Yamaha mixing console. When it broke, I discovered that the whole mixer was on a single IC chip. Nothing to fix. You take it to the Yamaha repair shop, and the replace the chip. I began to notice that more and more of the objects I bought were built the same way. It breaks, you throw it away. The opportunities to take something apart, learn how it worked, fix it, or maybe just make it better were becoming less frequent.
When I first saw Make magazine, I knew something was afoot. If you can't open it, you don't own it. Yeah, that's exactly what I felt.
With the emergance of the first Dorkbot events, it's appears that this philosphy is becoming a movement. I couldn't be happier. For those of you in Austin, we have some of the biggest dorkbot events right here. The next one is Saturday, March 10th. If you're downtown (and you should be), and need a break from Barcamp, you've got to check out the Dorkbot event in Brush Park.
Dorkbot
Saturday, March 10, 2007
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Brush Square Park
5th and Neches
Austin, Texas
In the mid seventies,I bought a Yamaha mixing console. When it broke, I discovered that the whole mixer was on a single IC chip. Nothing to fix. You take it to the Yamaha repair shop, and the replace the chip. I began to notice that more and more of the objects I bought were built the same way. It breaks, you throw it away. The opportunities to take something apart, learn how it worked, fix it, or maybe just make it better were becoming less frequent.
When I first saw Make magazine, I knew something was afoot. If you can't open it, you don't own it. Yeah, that's exactly what I felt.
With the emergance of the first Dorkbot events, it's appears that this philosphy is becoming a movement. I couldn't be happier. For those of you in Austin, we have some of the biggest dorkbot events right here. The next one is Saturday, March 10th. If you're downtown (and you should be), and need a break from Barcamp, you've got to check out the Dorkbot event in Brush Park.
Dorkbot
Saturday, March 10, 2007
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Brush Square Park
5th and Neches
Austin, Texas