Monday Nov 28th, 7-9pm: RepRap Users Group & Workshop
Come to hacklab.to to play with 3D printers! See RepRap.org. We’ll have our MakerBot Cupcake working, plus a good chance of having a functional RepRap, and several other printers under construction. Bring your own and we’ll all help each other! Newbies welcome, want to come see what a 3D printer looks like and learn how it works? Maybe even get inspired to build your own? This night is for you!

Monday Dec 5th, 7-9pm: Soldering Workshop #5
RSVP at Eventbrite (limit 10 people)
For total beginners, or those with some experience. Learn how to solder. Soldering is a method of assembling an electronic circuit using a hot iron and solder, a metal which liquefies at a fairly low temperature. Instruction by Eric is free, and we’ll have a variety of interesting kits on hand for you to purchase as learning templates. You’ll take your kit home at the end of the night, working, guaranteed! Open to the public – you do not have to be a member of hacklab to attend.

Monday Dec 12th, 7-9pm: Arduino Total Beginners Workshop
Arduino Beginners Workshop. For total beginners. All are welcome, no RSVP required. Eric will show you how to get started with Arduino, the super-friendly microcontroller platform that even artists love. We’ll cover getting the software installed and going, hooking up the Arduino, and a little bit of basic programming, via explanation of the Examples. You too can cut and paste your way to a working project! You’ll need to bring your own Arduino (any kind will do) and a laptop on which you can install software. Also please bring any cables required to attach your Arduino to your laptop – typically this means an A to B USB cable. If you do not have an Arduino, you can purchase one at Creatron, only a few blocks away from hacklab at 255 College Street.

All workshops are free and open to the public.

Gamfternoon is free and open to the public!

Yay Burritos!

I organized vegetarian ingredients, Eric organized chicken, Nick brought Jalapeno peppers and Daniel lent us his grill/press. Our expenses were 40 dollars for generic ingredients and 6 dollars for the chicken. We made 65 dollars, after expense that left us with 19 dollars for hacklab. Yay!

Arduino Total Beginners Workshop
Monday Sept 12th 2011, 7pm-9pm

You’ll need to bring your own Arduino (any kind will do) and a laptop on which you can install software. Also please bring any cables required to attach your Arduino to your laptop – typically this means an A to B USB cable. If you do not have an Arduino, you can purchase one at Creatron, only a few blocks away from hacklab at 255 College Street.

As before, all are welcome, no RSVP required. Eric will show you how to get started with Arduino, the super-friendly microcontroller platform that even artists love. We’ll cover getting the software installed and going, hooking up the Arduino, and a little bit of basic programming, via explanation of the Examples. You too can cut and paste your way to a working project!

Monday Sept 12th: Arduino Beginners Workshop. For total beginners. All are welcome, no RSVP required. Eric will show you how to get started with Arduino, the super-friendly microcontroller platform that even artists love. We’ll cover getting the software installed and going, hooking up the Arduino, and a little bit of basic programming, via explanation of the Examples. You too can cut and paste your way to a working project!

Monday Sept 19th: Learn how to Solder. For total beginners, or those with some experience. Learn how to solder, which is one method of assembling an electronic circuit. Instruction by Eric is free, and we’ll have a variety of interesting kits on hand for you to purchase as learning templates. You’ll take your kit home at the end of the night, working, guaranteed! RSVP here: http://hacklab-soldering.eventbrite.com/.

Monday Sept 26th: 3D Printing. For hacklab members only. Come learn how to use the makerbot from Christopher. Note: this is not a modeling workshop, you will not learn how to design 3D parts. You’ll learn how to use the Makerbot to actually print them. RSVP here: http://hacklab-3d-printing.eventbrite.com/.

Hope to see you at a workshop soon!

So, on Monday, August the 8th, 7pm/19:00 I’ll be teaching an introduction to Haskell workshop! Come and learn about laziness, type classes and (the awesome power of) monads!

Please note: This is not an introduction to programming class. You will not be able to follow along if you don’t have experience programming. I am planning to do a day long weekend Introduction to

Programming/Python workshop sometime in the near future that would be much more appropriate for you.

(Sorry about the late notice. I posted to discuss and then forgot to put up a blog post.)

Update: And it went awesome! There was a much bigger turn out than I expected. Here are some notes:

This is the first file I made as we went along. Unfortunately, we don’t seem to have syntax highlighting…

import Text.Parsec -- we'll use this later

-- Things that would be good to install
-- ghc
-- cabal

-- also: tryhaskell.org

-- operators are what you would expect, except:
-- doesn't equal is /=
-- concatonate is ++

-- Some operators you may not have seen before
-- $, applies right to left (ie, does nothing) but
--     changes order of operation to get rid of brackets
-- ., compose right function with left

-- Operators are infix, other funcs prefix.
-- eg 1/2 but div 1 2
-- switch back and forth: (/) 1 2 and 1 `div` 2

-- Calculate the fibonacci sequence
fib :: Int -> Int
fib 0 = 1
fib 1 = 1
fib n = fib (n-1) + fib (n-2)

--Using a case
fib2 :: Int -> Int
fib2 n = case n of
	0 -> 1
	1 -> 1
	n -> fib2 (n-1) + fib2 (n-2)

-- calculate points in a Julia set (constant k)
-- notice that Float -> (Float -> Int) is the same
-- as Float -> FLoat -> Int by partial application
julia :: Float -> Float -> Int
julia k x = length $ take 100 $ takeWhile (\z -> abs(z)<2)$
	iterate (\z -> z^2 + k) x

-- Algebraic data types!
data Person = Eric | Jesus| Brian| Jane | John | Mary | Eve 

--To be able to output, we need to make Person an instance of Show
instance Show Person where
	show Eric = "Eric"
	show Jesus = "Jesus"
	show Brian = "Brian"
	show Jane = "Jane"
	show John = "John"
	show Mary = "Mary"
	show Eve  = "Eve"

-- gives you mother of a Person
mother :: Person -> Maybe Person

mother Eric  = Just Mary
mother Jesus = Just Mary
mother Brian = Just Mary
mother John  = Just Mary
mother Mary  = Just Jane
mother Jane = Just Eve
mother Eve = Nothing

-- Why didn't we have to make a show instance for Maybe Person?
-- It already exists, as a general definition, something like:
--data Maybe a = Nothing | Just a
--instance (Show a) => Show Maybe a where
--	show (Just a) = "Just" ++ show a
--	show Nothing = "Nothing"

-- Recursive Algebraic Data Types are possible.
-- List is something like:
-- data [a] = [] | a : [a]
-- data List a = Empty | Item a (List a)

-- What makes a monad a monad? >>= (bind operator)
-- eg. [1,2,3] >>= (\a -> [a^2])
-- eg. Nothing >>= (\a -> Just $ a^2 )

-- We'd like to implement Cartesian Product
-- eg. [1,2] [3,4] -> [(1,3),(1,4), (2,3), (2,4)]
-- [1,2,3] >>= (\a -> ([4,5,6] >>= (\b -> [(a,b)])))

-- Since that is tedious, haskell has do notation
prod as bs = do
	a <- as
	b <- bs
	return (a,b) -- return just monadifies things

greatgrandmother a = case (mother a) of
	Nothing -> Nothing
	Just b -> case (mother b) of
		Nothing -> Nothing
		Just c -> mother c

greatgrandmother2 a = do
	b <- mother a
	c <- mother b
	d <- mother c
	return d

-- see hellowrold.hs

-- Parsec, the best parsing library ever!

element = string "H" <|> string "He"

elmentPair = do
	elem <- element
	num <- digit
	return (elem, num)

-- do {a <- b; return a} = b >>= (\a -> return a)

And the second file:

-- Haskell handels IO by having main be an object that represents IO
-- It's a monad to make it easy to chain IO actions together :)
main = do
	putStrLn "Hello World!"
	putStrLn "bah sheep!!"
	putStrLn "spit! Camel case! Grunt"
	a <- getLine
	putStrLn a

Some great resources are Learn You a Haskell For Great Good, Real World Haskell, and the Haskell Wikibook. A number of my examples were inspired, by things from these.

We also talked about the library Parsec a little bit, and looked at some of ucalc's source code for examples.

Full information about the case, including links to media articles and other information can be found at: http://www.freebyron.org