User:Ganly

Steve Ganly @ganly

Background

• Self taught 6502 assembler on a vic20 aged 12 in 1980 (yep - one of those...), had a few games released in the 1980's micro boom on the Commodore 64
• BSc degree in Computer Science graduating in 1990
• Founded an IT consultancy and grew it to 44 people servicing merchant banks setting up and maintaining large networks of Unix systems
• Long time Perl Hacker, been working with Ruby on Rails since about 2007

Skills

• Learned basic wood and metalworking as a child, did O'Levels in Technical Drawing and something called Modular Technology
• Last 5 years re-examining things from the ground up - doing some fine woodworking and accurate metalwork on lathes and mills
• Big time automation fan - CNC using Mach3

Goals

• Get a deeper understanding of electronics - I'm still not happy with my mental model of semiconductors at the molecular level and that bothers me
• Improve the CNC facilities of the Hackspace

Project plans and speculative ideas

• Build a bunch of CNC machines for the Hackspace
• Build a decent aquaponics system
• Solar powered lawn munching swarm of robots
• Scratch built radio controlled hovercraft
• Make some ferrofluid for the space and do some films of it's properties
• Make a 1D sliding saw tool
• Make a 2D sliding router tool (guides like CNC but manually set)
• Experiments with router height adjustment mechanisms
• Maybe make a wooden bandsaw like Mathias Wandel's
• Test making different gear types in the space, do some how-to videos for the available tool chains
• Learn about welding and brazing
• Try out some metal casting - Aluminium and maybe brass
• Build a chalk drawing robot
• Do some experiments with quadcopters and tricopters