NBC 2009July19

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Meeting Minutes, July 19th, 2009[edit]

Show & Tell[edit]

Eric brought in the ultrasonic listening toy, and many people tried it out, listening to the emitter and to coins, laptops, etc. You can even point the emitter and receiver in the same direction, and listen to the bounce, allowing you to know if an object is in front of you (but it only has a 1 foot or so range)

Chung-Hay showed off the conductive paint and a new edible silver glaze. Chris tried to impress her by buying some pastries and connecting them to arduino blinkenlights.

Chris showed Skory and Eric a new well-known standard circuit for using a PNP transistor which should save a little bit of power when using transistors as switches (but we need an extra resistor between the ATMEGA and the gate).

Jorgen showed a couple of flashlights from DealExtreme which are infrared and ultraviolet. They are very neat.

Skory showed off his new tongue electrode array, which he built with tiny stainless steel wires and silicone (not the stuff you can buy for your house, it contains fungicide, you must use the stuff intended for use in aquariums).

Eric talked about a talk given by Prof. Michael M Merzenich PhD at the Future Salon on brain plasticity. It was a great talk, although focused more on the sociological implications of our knowledge of how the brain works. Eric talked with him afterward and he is interested in doing studies on sensory augmentation. Eric will follow up with an email to him about what we're doing, and see exactly what he's interested in studying.