Salutations IVU!

It was an unusually warm and moist Friday the 13^th meetup this month. We had a more intimate showing for the pre-meet for cigars and cocktails (and wine) at Gulliver’s. The pre-meet decided to do a throwback for the last hour of pre-meet and head over to El Torito for a few margaritas. Social lubrication intensified further before kicking things off for the official October 2017 IVU meetup.

This month’s meetup saw many new faces! Our group continues to grow bit by bit with new folks as well as some that haven’t been around in a while. We had two very engaging talks by IVUers. First, yaxis lead a talk on the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) and how the first ever team is shaping up at UCI. The process revolved around gathering interest, vetting said interested parties, and building up the skills needed to compete. The video can be found at our new YouTube channel here. You can find out more about CCDC here.

DaMan treated us with the second talk of the night. The talk featured DaMans prototype F.R.E.D. Actuating Arm (Firgelli FA-400-L-12-15) using an Arduino (MEGA 2560 rev3), lasers (Adafruit VL53L0X ), and other off-the-shelf parts he’s put together a robotics system to power the opening and closing of secret doors or anything else you want to push and pull. DaMan also explained his plans to add on private Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity to control the unit remotely.

Update: DaMan has provided a video of the secret door in action!

We also saw the power of the Voltron Sloth increase this month as Red Sloth joined the meet. Sloth and Blue Sloth were pleased.

The next meet-up is November Friday November 10^th. Come and join us!