I’ll be using the XNA framework, you can get the XNA installer here but you need visual studio 2010 installed first and all the downloads are here. You should probably install c# 2010, but i think the ‘Express for windows phones’ might work too. If you want the full Visual Studio, talk to me in person about student pricing.

After you’ve got XNA installed, you can start playing around on your own with XNA and any of the tutorials at Riemers website will help you with that. If you want to download what I’m working on and help out, you’ll need to sign up with GitHub and go to the new Git repository for THE GAME and Fork the Repo. Next, download and install the newest version of Tortoise Git. That should install a git bash as well for some of the more complex commands. Once that’s done, you’ll want to set it up so you can pull from THE GAME repository you’ve forked, and there’s some more information at this website (or this website if you’re brave) to help guide you through that.

Once you’ve downloaded your own fork of THE GAME, start playing around with it and making changes. This is your own working copy so go nuts! when you do decide to contribute, if you’ve got something we just can’t live without, you’ll need to read through the help files on GitHub on Contributing and creating pull requests. That’s a little more involved, but we can cross that bridge when we get to it! I hope that anyone that wants to help isn’t turned away because they think it’s too hard, anyone can learn this stuff. Email me with any questions, post a comment if you need my email and I hope to see some serious forking in the near future!

If you’ve got any ideas on what you want the game to be, or how it should turn out, let me know! post in the forums here and give your input.

League of Legends seemed to be a very popular game, along with the DayZ mod. We might think about having a more formal League of Legends tournament soon.

My hope for the Lan Party was to raise awareness about our group, and I hope that anyone that’s interested in the Minot Makers group will attend this week’s meeting! (Hint: Thursday at 7pm)

Telepresence Zen Garden – Our friends over at Harford Hackerspace put together a zen garden that you can control via a web interface.  A CNC machine then transforms the drawing you do on the website into a zen drawing in the sand.

Blimpabullduino – Atomic Robotics built a blimp that will seek out the loudest person in the room and give them a kiss.

Turret-Mounted Predator laser – Over in Buffalo NY, our friends @ Buffalo Lab built a pip-boy style interface & body suit attachment with a turret-mounted Predator style laser.

Fully automated, pneumatic Can Dispenser, Drink Extractor, Drink Cooler, and Can Crushing machine – Kind of a mouthful, but the acronym of it isn’t much better.  Fortunately the machine is awesome.  One of our early ideas was simply a red bull opener. Glad we didn’t do that after seeing how badly we would have been crushed!  (no pun intended(?)  You decide!)

Romance Pants – When the zipper goes down the lights dim, candles light, and the mood music comes on.  Build From Instructables.

Redbull Random Number Game - Tom Bourke over at the Wausau Collaboration Center built a pub style random number game.  It reads from an old hard drive disk that you physically spin to create a random number.  Lights and sounds for the winner!

Redbull Validation Robot – Granted that might not be the real name of it, the project is pretty slick.  You feed an empty can into a robot which then validates it as being a redbull or not.  If not it is quickly rejected.  If it is a redbull can, the machine puffs our some smoke and lights and delivers a new one for you.

Better Fish Trap – This little project detects when you have a fish on the end of your line and plays a melody.  Presumably to wake you up so you can reel in the beast.  Although with all the beeps coming from your smartphone, you might actually need something a little more intense.

Hack a Day’s Cannon – We weren’t the only ones in town with an air powered RedBull Cannon.  Hack a Day produced an excellent cannon and parachutes to deploy the energy drinks.

School Desk Simon – In this project you sit down and play the simple memory game of Simon, although you really don’t want to get the buttons wrong!

Roller Coaster Simulator – Using footage of actual roller coasters, this maker has put together a virtual ride where the Bullduino controls the environment and syncs it to the video so it is like riding that actual roller coaster.

Alarm Clock – The LI4E Makerspace Project Team came up with a giant alarm clock that throws Red Bull at you, my kinda clock!

Did we miss your project?  Let me know in the comments below and I’ll add more Bullduino projects from the Redbull Creations 2012 contest.

It was a great project to work on and there is always more features that we talked about adding on.  The project really helped to engage the members of our group and get us working together well.  Can’t wait for the next project.

We need to turn in something fun by July 3rd! This Thursday (6/28) is brainstorm day, and this weekend is BUILD OFF WEEKEND!  The project entries are submitted via a video of up to 2 minutes in length.

The grand prize is over $10,000 worth of tools!

The only rule: Build something you love. Have a great time in the process.

—–UPDATE——

Found a few more bullduinos out in their natural habitat: the workbench!
Software and Sawdust
23b shop

—- UPDATE 2 ——

We had a good weekend of building on the project and can’t wait to unveil it soon.  Just a little more polish and video editing remain.  The deadline is fast approaching!

This meeting was an intro to Arduinos for some and general experimentation for others.  Electronic beeps, melodies, squeaks, tunes, and tones could be heard nonstop with each successful compile.

The turnout was good and everyone had a great time.  As a result of the evening’s success, we will be hosting additional Arduino experimentation days in the future.  We’re doing another one on 2/16/12 titled ‘HACK HACK HACK!’

Sleep Inn – Executive Board Room
Starting @ 7:00

All interested people are welcome to attend regardless of skill level.
No fee for members, otherwise freewill offering accepted.

We hope to see you there