SHACKNET
What is SHACKNET? SHACKNET is an abbreviation for SHeffield Arduino haCKers NETwork. The website can be found at http://shacknetwork.co.uk
SHACKNET is a group of individuals who have found that playing with Arduino is fun. Most of us have no, or very little electronics knowledge so the Arduino is fantastic for being able to get us in to physical computing. With just a few components and/or shields, great projects can be made.
I have recently used the tinker.it ethernet shield to connect to my Twitter account (@richardrixham) and pull down my friends timeline and show the last tweet I receieved on a 20×4 LCD screen. This is all possible without the Arduino being connected to a computer. As long as it has power and an ethernet connection it will sit and display the last messages all day, every day.
This simple project could be modified to add the ability to use keys or buttons to scroll through the available messages. It could be changed to pick up information from various RSS feeds and then publish the information on the LCD. It could be taking weather information and displaying this for given locations (in fact I think I may look at this soon).
SHACKNET is basically, as my darling wife explains it is, a knitting circle for Geeks. We meet up at the Showroom Cafe/Bar in Sheffield an can discuss projects that we are working on or have built, see what other people have been working on, have a forum for helping others if they are stuck with a project or have an idea that they want to put past everyone to see how it may be possible and get feedback and generally learning from what others are doing. This is not a HackSpace where we can sit with soldering irons and get down and dirty, although putting things together on breadboards is acceptable.
The group meets on the 3rd Thursday of each month at the Showroom Cafe/Bar for 7pm. The first meeting of the group is on the 20th August 2009. Everyone and anyone is welcome to attend. If you don’t know what an Arduino is or what it can do then come along. There are lots of people around who would love to sit with you and tell you all about Arduino.