I’ve always loved the idea of getting smart people together and seeing what new ideas can be created. Everybody always thinks it’s weird but I always use the image of rubbing a bunch of brains together and seeing what sparks fly off, what fires can be created. The thing I really loved about going to New Mexico Tech was having a bunch of smart nerds in one place, building off each other, sharing ideas, challenging everything. So I want that to be a big part of the Idea Propulsion Lab, sharing ideas and teaching/learning about hardware, robots, electronic art, whatever.

We’ll be having regular physical meetings so people can show their projects or teach classes. I’d love to have classes where somebody can teach a bunch of people to solder, or make LED art, stuff like that. I want meetings to be live action Instrucables, if you’re familiar with Instructables.com (and if you’re not, you should be). My primary inspirations are MAKE: magazine and Instructables.com.

The most important thing to me is that I want this club to be for people of all skill levels. I just learned to solder in the last month and have only just started my explorations of all this stuff. I have no interest in just having a bunch of experts sit around and talk expert stuff that’s over the head of everybody else. I want club members to teach, to show people just how easy fooling around with electronics has become.

This is going to be fun.

My first actual circuit built using my new Arduino board. I built it using a Protoshield and tutorial from LadyAda.com. If you’re interested in Arduino or just want to start building little circuits, I’d recommend Lady Ada’s site. She’s got a bunch of cool projects you can build, Arduino stuff, and the tutorials are 100% awesome.

My first Wiimote whiteboard experiment, running on my laptop.