DONOR-1 DOWN!

DONOR-1 is on the road again! This time it’s headed to The Idea Studio at the Fond du Lac Public Library. We’re very excited to have The Idea Studio hosting DONOR-1, however after it arrived at the Studio, we received a troubled message from Josh. Josh said the machine fired-up and for the most part appeared to work, but there were some intermittent problems with the controls. This wasn’t a complete surprise, based on how quickly we had to wrap the project up I was more surprised that it hadn’t run into trouble earlier. Also, this was the first time that DONOR-1 had traveled at “highway speeds” and experienced the associated vibration, shock and other forces which tend to liberate mechanical connections. In any case this gave us an excuse to take a short drive to beautiful Fond du Lac, Wisconsin and see what could be done about it. I was a little worried that something more serious than a loose connection might be going on, and I was really hoping it wouldn’t involve ordering parts. It would be a real bummer to have the machine at the Studio with an “out of order” sign on it for a few weeks while we waited for a component shipment. Fortunately Occam’s Razor was right and after snugging-up a few connectors the hardware diagnostics passed with flying colors and DONOR-1 was once again back in service. After a couple games of Mr. & Mrs Pac-Man (for testing of course) the cabinet was screwed back together and we were on our way. Minimally, DONOR-1 will be at The Idea Studio through July (perhaps longer depending on what the next stop of the tour turns out to be).  If you’d like to see it we highly recommend visiting and checking out all of the cool stuff The Idea Studio has to offer. The Studio is located in the Public Library (which itself is excellent) and is situated downtown surrounded by lots of great restaurants and interesting shops. There’s also a lot of other great stuff to do in Fond Du Lac, so if you want to try out DONOR-1, doing so while it’s at The Idea Studio would make a great afternoon or day trip, so check it out while you can.