Arch Reactor Blog

Arch Reactor is happy to announce that we have received a grant from the Boeing Employee Community Fund.

“One of the largest employee-owned and managed funds of its kind in the world, the Employees Community Fund (ECF) of The Boeing Company has been empowering employees to make greater impact by pooling their tax-deductible donations for more than 60 years. Employee advisory boards provide combined employee donations to nonprofits in their community through ECF grants. Boeing pays all administrative costs so 100 percent of every employee dollar helps strengthen local communities.”

This grant will be used to purchase a presentation microphone system, standardized laptops, and multifunction robots to improve the quality of our programming classes. Again we thank the employees at Boeing for their generous support of our mission to increase STEM education. Check back soon to learn about classes in programming and robotics to be offered with these amazing tools.

We had a reallly fun time at the Kansas City Maker Faire. I talked with at least 10 people that either live in St. Louis or wanted to send somebody they know to visit us. We had the telepresence robot, The NVidia Jetson robot, the pixy bots, face dectection bot, 3 different LED Matrices, and Diane's Paracord Card Weaving on display. We just had 1 table although we had requested 2. It was a tight squeeze so we occasionally moved to open areas with the bots. We had steady streams of people throughout each day.

On Saturday Night we went as a group to Char-Bar. We ate some nice although slowly served BBQ before heading over to Hammerspace the for profit Hackerspace in KC. The had a huge shop with Vaccum ports every 3 feet on the work benches with a on off switch as well. They had modified a dead Lithum Ion battery for use with their low voltage system. With that battery installed it was not a portable but a working drill none the less. It could still be cordless with a charged battery but a corded one when that flexiablity was needed. In the clean room area of the shop they had about 6 differnet 3d printers available for use. Ultimaker's and Oni were the kinds they had. There were no deltas on hand. They had 6 Laser Cutters - 2 epilog, 2 half beams, and 2 full beam lasers. The epilogs where roughly the same size as ours maybe a little smaller, The half beam ones were big enough that I could just about lay in them like a single bed, and the full beam one was big enough for two of me. My favorite part was the google fiber connection. While they had no open wifi they did however leave a running logged in computer alone in the space on which I quickly jumped on and ran a speedtest. 352.46 Mbps Down and 325.28 Mbps Up was their Google Fibre Speed. There was at least 5 other computers in use so they might have been downloading at the time to lower those numbers some.

There where 3 Predators, a Cylon, Iron Man, War Machine, Groot, and a Stan Lee look-a-like walking around the Faire. I saw steam punk costuming, motorized deck chair, power wheels, a powered uni-cycle - Solowheel, an Oxboard - like a Segway without the handle bar, Low-Riders, and a rock wall. There was a Dunk tank that instead of water they shot fire into. It was called the Dunk Tank Flambe'. Click to see Rob's nice Slo-mode video. Here is a video of some of the highlights of the faire in which Arch Reactor demos appear.

Our letter is now mounted at the Science Center!  Guess which one it is...

Image from the Science Center's Facebook page

Tonight we learned about relays, 555 timers, op-amps, diodes in circuits.