On Friday, September 16th, a team of gamers from the Quad Cities area will hold their first annual MegaMan For Healing fundraiser supporting Child’s Play Charity.

MegaMan For Healing is a multi-day charity drive broadcast live online. The event starts with a group of gamers attempting to complete a list of levels from the MegaMan video game franchise by CAPCOM. Viewers add levels to the players’ queue by making donations to Child’s Play. This live-streamed cat-and-mouse game continues until the team successfully completes all of the unlocked levels or the team runs out of levels to play, whichever comes first. During the event, viewers will be encouraged to interact with the team via the website, as well as through popular social media services Twitter and Facebook.

“While I’ve never benefited from Child’s Play’s programs, I know the power of their vision first-hand,” says Cody Wilson, Event Coordinator, who was inspired to organize this event in part due to a life experience. “As a boy, I broke my arm right before school let out for the summer. Due to the nature of the break, I was placed in an immobilizer and wasn’t permitted to play outside. My mother saved money until she could buy me a Super Nintendo, which kept my spirits up through the summer.” As for why he chose to organize an event like this, Wilson answers, “It works. Gamers love reliving classic moments from childhood, and people love watching other people do silly, entertaining things on the Internet. Combine those two things and add in the fact that you’re doing it all for charity, and you see why over 12.7% of Child’s Play’s 2010 donations were raised by two events that inspired our own.”

The Child’s Play Charity (www.childsplaycharity.org) is a game industry charity dedicated to improving the lives of children staying in an international 70 hospital network. Child’s Play has distributed over $10 million worth of video games, toys, books, and money since the charity formed in 2003. “Child’s Play is fortunate to have such incredible community support,” says Jamie Dillion, Project Manager for Child’s Play. “Events like MegaMan For Healing really make a huge difference: the funds raised go directly to buying games, consoles, and handhelds for children in hospitals around the world.”

The event will stream live over the Internet at www.megamanforhealing.com beginning September 16th at 12 PM CDT.

Any counterculture movement inspires change in the way people perceive and interact with the world. People that reject the ideals of the mainstream and seek out something that can be uniquely their own. In my opinion, they respond to a basic need to find a culture small enough to be relevant in, large enough to be relevant to others, and who’s ideals resonate with their own.

Every generation inspires their own counter culture. Their own beatniks, hippies or rebels without a cause. These ideas are alternatively rejected, accepted, re-ordered and recombined in a multitude of permutations that make up the dance of memes in human generations as their progenitors are born, rebel, conform, and die.

The cycle of life continues, and we each live it in or own way, in our own small timeslice of the great simulation (Wave Particle Paradox) that creates the illusion (Michael_Talbot, Wikipedia: Holographic Principle, Wired) we call reality.

So people call me. They write me emails. They want me to announce that they’re coming. They work their way across the country, one hackerspace at a time. At each stop, they teach a workshop, sell some kits, and earn enough money to buy a hamburger and put gas in the car.

The next day, they wake up on some one’s couch, and leave one step closer to San Francisco California or New York New York.

They are always welcome, they bring with them eclectic knowledge and the story of a romantic, sometimes spiritual, experience. The service they provide is to keep us entertained on a quiet weekday night. They teach, we learn, together we build. It’s our mission.

They are the new “Backpacking Across Europe”. The new “Hitchhiking to Woodstock”. They spread ideas and hacker culture with them wherever they go.

Some of them, like Mitch Altman, do it to spread word of a movement. Some of them, like CMKT4, do it to pay their way to Maker Fair in California.

As a matter of fact, CMKT4 stopped by this week. We made some contact mics, learned about Piezo’s, and had a good time. After which they played some of their music for us.

Dave Langkamp has produced a very detailed set of plans for a traditional British Police Call Box. These plans grew out of a discussion on our mailing list as we considered building one for our space. Designed to be dismantleable and portable, this Call Box will serve the traveler well. Check out the video preview below or click here to place an order. For travelers not interested in a Call Box: towels, portable hand held wikipedia readers, and panic resistant paint coming soon!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66gqNXl0jxk&rel=0

The Arduino micro-controller class has been moved to Saturdays to coincide with our weekly open house. I’ll see you all there!

The QC Co-Lab is proud to participate in Element 14’s global hackerspace challenge for education. This competition involves 30 teams from all over the world competing for best educational innovation or invention.

 

We’ll release more details in the days to come as our product goes from idea to invention, so check back soon!

Becky Taube brought her screen printing kit to the lab and Neal Meeker taught an impromptu class covering the basics for a couple of Ladies on Sunday. Check out the gallery on Drop Box.

This Saturday was our yearly meeting. We had food, greeted new members, talked about past successes and discussed upcoming projects.

The QC Co-Lab received the keys to this space almost a year ago. In that time, we’ve met many new members, been on television twice, been in make magazine, won our first contest, contributed to a major community documentary, produced a kick-ass website, made hackaday raised over $10,000 and spent over $10,000.

We also talked a lot about what we need to do. We need to have some basic procedures for inducting new members, managing the space access controls, and monitoring inventory. We need to get our membership system integrated with our door locks. We need to get a sign on the outside of the building.

The QC Co-Lab had a great year, and I’m excited to see us have another one.

Time to break out of the confines of your Arduino! Join guest speaker Ray Scheufler of KSU, Steve Hamer and David Hinkle of the QC Co-Lab for a step by step demonstration of how to design and fabricate your own custom Arduino board!

As many of you may know, the Arduino is what we in the industry call a “dev board”. It’s the sort of thing Microcontroller manufacturers load with goodies and ship to professionals to allow them to prototype their projects and test their designs.

Generally, however, these dev boards do not end up in finished projects. A custom board is manufactured that contains only the parts required for the product and in a layout optimized for said product.

Join us and our guest next Saturday, March 19th at 7:00PM as we explore how we design, manufacture and assemble our custom Arduino compatible board.

We will demonstrate designing the board with open source board layout software Kicad and the commercial package Eagle. We will then route the design out of copper clad using a CNC router, populate the board with required components, and if everything goes well…. Demonstrate the final product.

Our latest vlog takes you through the process of designing a more complex program and introduces the concepts of variables and control structures.

For those that missed it, here’s the story news channel 4 did on the QC Co-Lab.