Kriston and I built Lady Ada’s Game of Life kit over at HacDC a while back, and it roused the interest of a few folks. Sommer asked that I be on the lookout for another kit that might be a good candidate for learning to solder. I eventually suggested another Lady Ada kit: the MintyBoost, a simple circuit that lets you top up your USB gadgets’ batteries through the use of a pair of AAs. By the time I got my act together, six(!) people had expressed interest in building the kit, pushing supplies of my tools (somewhat scarce) and electronics knowledge (decidedly meager) to their limits.

But it went surprisingly well! Everyone’s kit worked immediately; in fact, they even seemed to work with the iPhone 3GSes that were on hand — something that the MintyBoost can’t necessarily be relied upon to do.

You can find more photos here.

I think that my favorite part was watching everyone mess around with the Dremel. That’s some advanced nerdery for you.

I think that folks had fun; we might do this again, perhaps with more of an Arduino bent. If you want in, let me know.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 11:21 am and is filed under DC, tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.