[SGVLUG] Caltech Science for March (3/31) recap

[Lan Dang via SGVLUG]

This year, I'm trying to raise the SGVLUG/SGVHAK profile within the local community.  I want to bring in new people, new energy, and new projects to work on.  I hope to also take advantage of collaboration opportunities with other groups, who can help us do things we can't do on our own. 
The turning point was our booth at the DTLA Mini Maker Faire last December.  Our involvement with the JPL Open Source Rover project resulted in the SGVHAK rover, which is now an experimentation platform for sensors and cameras.  We would not have had a booth at SCALE without the help of Repair Cafe folks.  And I would not have been able to pull off The Next Generation Playground at SCALE without some of the connections that we'd made at the Mini Maker Faire.
So we'll be participating in more STEAM events, bringing back our Saturday HAK meetings, and collaborating/volunteering with other groups.   And we'll have one or more booths at the next DTLA Mini Maker Faire, which I hear will be on December 1st.   

Last Saturday, we had a two-table booth at Caltech's Science for March. Photos and videos below.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1NKYjJWdAf7okjpIPKtc3nSVbYGSKAmmz?usp=sharing
Originally, it was just me and Scoops, but Ben Ben, who had helped out at TNG Playground, was a great help to us, as well as David Harbottle, who helps out at the PCC Fab Lab.  And Dave and Roger came by and drove the rover and explained how it worked.  
I wish I had prepared more for this event as it turned out to be a fantastic way of publicizing our group to the exact people who might want to join us.  Luckily, we had the SGVLUG/SGVHAK banner that we normally feature at SCALE, which made up for the fact that we didn't even have a single flyer with our URL on it.   Anyway, it attracted people's attention and we had several people ask us about the LUG and our meetings.   (Repair Cafe was much better prepared with little cards advertising the next event, which I think will be May 26th at the Altadena Library.)  

Originally, we had 3 exhibits on the tables--Scoops' hard drive disassembly activity, Dave's 3D-printed tile game, and the SGVHAK rover.  I wanted to spend the first hour explaining the JPL Open Source Rover project before we started driving it.  (Also, I had forgotten the mast head at Dave's shop, so I had to wait for him to bring it by.)

The hard drive disassembly activity is always enormously popular with kids.  It wasn't long after the rover left the table that the space was taken over by kids, hard drive parts and loose screws.  Looking to the future, we want to restructure this activity so we can highlight things that can be built with the hard drive parts rather than just letting the kids loose with screwdrivers.
The SGVHAK rover got a lot of attention on the table and even more attention once we started driving it.  It was pretty good at climbing over obstacles--just a couple of bricks from my garden--but we failed when it came to stairs.  But that did not faze its loyal toddler groupie.   https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AMpX18umTRX_3IRA5AxIBsIo6tn1P-Zw/view?usp=sharing
Roger has a great article about the event and what the rover did there.
 https://newscrewdriver.com/2018/04/01/sgvhak-rover-at-caltech-science-for-march/
Lan
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