Learn to solder together a way cool, powerful music synthesizer - and learn how to make cool music, sound, and noise with a computer chip! For total beginners. Participants will learn to solder well for life, learn the basics of digital signal processing, and bring home a working performing music synthesizer that is Arduino-compatible, open source, with a touch keyboard and a built-in speaker/amp.

Anyone can learn to solder! It is useful and fun. This workshop is for kids of all ages (and anyone of any age). Learn to solder by making a cool badge that you can wear and blink wherever you go. The “I Can Solder!” badge kit is a very simple open hardware kit that anyone can use for learning to solder. Mitch will also give a fun overview of how it works. This workshop is for total newbies to learn to solder. All ages. And Mitch guarantees your badge will work after you solder it!

Learn how to light up LED strips with a cheap Arduino and make your life trippy and beautiful! For total beginners - no knowledge needed at all. LED strips have become really inexpensive. People have created many way-cool methods of controlling their color and brightness. This workshop shows one way to control LED strips using open-source tools to make them do what you want. You will use a very cheap Arduino clone, and will learn everything you need to know to use existing programs - as-is or to hack on - to control the colors in your world with LED strips.

You’ve probably heard lots about Arduino. But if you don’t know what it is, or how you can use it to do all sorts of cool things, then this fun and easy workshop is for you. Arduino is an amazingly powerful open-source tool that is very simple to learn to use. It was designed so that artists and non-geeks could start from nothing and make something cool happen in less than 90 minutes. Yet it is powerful enough so that uber-geeks can use it for their projects as well. This workshop is easy enough for total newbies to learn all you need to know to get going on an Arduino. Participants will learn everything needed to play with electronics, learn to solder, and learn to use a solderless breadboard to make a TV-B-Gone remote control to turn off TVs in public places - a fun way to learn Arduino (and electronics) basics.

We all need community. Yet community is currently facing major challenges. Humanity faces major challenges. If we are to survive and thrive, an important key is solving problems in community. On top of how much hard work community always requires from us, mix in the rise of authoritarianism, manipulation through "social" media, the polarization of society, bad actors, trolling, the skyrocketing cost of real estate, the ability of all people (including left-leaning people) to fight one another - and the result is a serious threat to the future of our communities. Yet, our future depends on our ability to continue. How can we create communities that are resilient to the challenges we face? Can existing communities be made more resilient? This talk will draw from Mitch's extensive experiences with hackerspaces, as well as his lifetime of community organizing, to attempt to explore and answer these and other pertinent questions for our future.

Let's get together and geek out over music synthesizers, music synthesis, making sound, and creating music. Hardware, software - anything goes! All are welcome to come and talk synths, play synths, share projects, learn, and share. Some attendees have made their own synths at workshops at HOPE XV - please bring them! Please feel free to bring any synth or sound-making device.