Background
I've always made things. I studied fine art/sculpture, did a stint fabricating custom and prototype furniture and have ticked along since tinkering and creating odd things. I've made potato buckyballs, a cardboard bed, swede sculpture, gourd vases and lego rope machines. Last year I made this sun chime - its like a wind chime but it uses the sun and a "solar engine" circuit to spin a motor occassionally to ring the chimes. I also built a little trebuchet, failed utterly to revive an old bench power supply and generally had fun taking things apart.
Plans for the new space?
I'm looking forward to getting out of my garage and making stuff in a group context. I've a long list of projects I'd like to kick off. As a noob, most of my electronics projects never quite make it. Having people around to bounce ideas off of and help troubleshoot will be awesome. I want to build more BEAM critters - BEAM is a style of robotics that favors analog circuits and reflex-driven autonomous behavior. I'm also planning on some energy-harvesting projects for low-power devices that maybe monitor their environment or wave silly things around perpetually. One day I'd like to have a crack at an electric car conversion.
My son is a budding geek and maker and he's keen to come along too and build a "death ray"; a focussing mirror built on a parabolic dish. He also has plans for perpetual motion machines, ark-scale submarines, siege engines of all kinds. As well as learning some programming.