Aachen Maker Meetup #151 Unfinished Projects

This months Aachen Maker Meetup had a rather interesting topic. In addition to presenting their completed projects, the participants also brought along their unfinished projects. After settling in and enjoying a few slices of pizza, some participants started working on their projects, while the others started to assemble their completed or ongoing/unfinished projects to present them.

Many interesting projects were brought to this meetup. One was a rather small and simple looking puzzle, where you had to extract a ring from a cross, a task that proved to be a lot more difficult than first expected. Another captivating project was a 3D printed lithophane of a picture. The varying thicknes of the printed layers allowed the image to appear when backlit. Of course the event also included a lot of electronics projects. Helge brought with him a radio transmitter designed for a radio fox hunt and attempted to programm an ATtiny microcontroller with another microcontroller, because the standard FTDI programmer would just not do it.

An intriguing project that stirred a bit of nostalgia in some was a NES case housing a Raspberry Pi to emulate a variety of vintage gaming consoles. Quite a few rounds were played during the meetup.

Among the showcased items there was a laser-cut puzzle showing the map of Europe and a 3D-printed PlayStation logo that was illuminated using LED filaments.

A newcomer to this month's Aachen Maker Meetup presented his magic mirror project, powered by a Raspberry Pi and a LCD screen concealed behind an one-way mirror.

Delving further into the world of electronics, an array of interesting and probably well-recognized projects were displayed by Roger. He presented a spark gap and a Tesla coil, both likely recognized from movies or the internet. Additionally he presented a detector radio, which, once callibrated precisely, could capture radio signals and play them back through the headphones without relying on an external power source. All the energy needed to play back the captured signal would be carried by the radio waves.

Here are two short videoclips showcasing the Tesla coil and the spark gap.