Tuesday 8 October - Programming - N Hoffman - 5:30pm - 8:30pm

At the September meeting David spoke of his PIC microcontroller tutorials published on gooligum.com.au. The tutorials have been revised to cope with the new MPLAB X development environment, the PICkit 3 programmer, and Microchip's XC8 C compiler. The circuits have been updated to suit the Gooligum training and development board.

Alex opened a discussion on cheap 3D printers, and we looked at the "Printrbot" at printrbot.com, and the "MakiBox" at makibox.com.

Martin showed the changes to his hotel door lock circuit to use a small servo, with a Sim card as the key. Bruce spoke about his novel car cooling system. Stuart spoke of programming a PIC32 as a Fortran interpreter.

Members of the group will demonstrate some new microprocessor applications and programming examples at Tuesday's meeting. - Neville Hoffman

Friday 11 October - Seniors - 9:30am - 12:30pm

The first iPad was released on 3 April 2010 and since then tablet computers have sold in their millions.

If you want to buy a tablet next week, would you select one with an Apple, Android or Windows operating system? What size tablet would you purchase? What apps are available to meet your needs?

These are just some of the questions that will be discussed at this meeting.

Questions about your desktop or laptop computers will not be overlooked as group will also consider these in the usual question and answer session at the meeting.

Friday 11 October - Communications - J Lucke - 12:30pm - 3:30pm

There will be times when you want to save some important information showing on your computer screen.

This meeting will show how this can be achieved in a review and demonstration of four free "Screen Capture" programs. Most of these programs allow for files to be resized, annotated, captions added and saved in different file formats. They also provide an impressive range of drawing features.

There will also be a question and answer session and a general discussion of communication topics.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

John Mathews

Please remember if your e-mail address is changed for any reason at all, unless you tell me your new address you will not receive these weekly updates! Any change of address should be notified to changedetails@sydneypc.com

SuperAntiSpyware