(photo by Cesare Griffa)
Last friday in Torino, Italy a new kind of company opened its doors.
Officine Arduino Torino is a combination of Makerspace, Fablab and an Arduino “office” dedicated to further the development of the platform and open source hardware.
Officine Arduino is born out of the experience of creating the first FabLab in Italy during an exhibition that lasted throughout 2011. We experienced the positive energy that came out of the encounter between the local community of makers, students, designers and our team based in Torino.
After the exhibition shut down we though that Arduino could act as an “incubator” to empower the people we work with to setup a company that would share our resources and equipment with the local community. Luckily we found the amazing people at Toolbox co-working (http://www.toolboxoffice.it/) who provided us with free space within an old FIAT factory.
Officina means “workshop” and in Italian it has the vintage sound of the name given to those small companies that made amazing products with limited resources and a lot of ingenuity.
We wanted to see what comes out when you connect open source hardware and software, digital fabrication, maker culture, hands-on learning, open design, alternative business models, co-working and a great community.
Torino is the “template” for more Officine Arduino we would like to open around the world so that more people can hang out with us and build amazing stuff.
If you have the chance go to Torino and have fun at the officine.
PS: We’re looking for some people to help us in Torino.
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Interns // Electronics Engineer
(please note that the Php developer and Intern position are based in Torino Italy and are open to people who have the legal requirements to work in the EU/EEA)
Bob asks:
I saw your article on the LED mod for old tubes . I have a box full and would like to do an array of tubes but I have no clue as to how to wire , power supplies etc. I can do the mechanical part . Could you help me as far the nitty gritty on making this project work ?
I’m glad to hear you want to tackle the LED Vacuum Tube Mod, especially because you’d like to repurpose some hardware that you already have on hand.
Wiring LEDs is a great way to sharpen your electronics chops, and there are some great tools to help you in doing this. First you’ll need to decide how many LEDs you want to use in your display and how much voltage will be driving the LEDs. Since this is a relatively low-powered project, a 9 volt battery should be just fine for testing purposes.
LEDs usually come with a datasheet indicating their forward voltage and amperage. Take these and the numbers you just came up with and plug them into an online LED calculator such as this one. As an example, I chose 20 red LEDs for the array, with 9v as my driving voltage. The calculator gives a schematic for a 4 x 5 array of LEDs, which can light up five of your vacuum tubes with four LEDs each.
The calculator gives resistor values, so you’ll need to pick up some of those for yourself, and I suggest wiring up the circuit completely to make sure it works before stuffing them into the vacuum tubes. Make sure you observe polarity with the LEDs: the longer leg is positive, and the shorter one is negative.
If all is well, install them into the vacuum tubes and hook up a 9V wall wart power supply to your circuit. You can find one of these at your local electronics store. Just snip and strip the leads, insulate with electrical tape or wire shrink wrap, and make sure you use a multimeter to check polarity before completing this step.
Good luck with your project! If readers have additional notes to add, please do so in the comments section.
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