Hey, did you know Hackaday is starting an Open Access, peer-reviewed journal? The Hackaday Journal of What You Don’t Know (HJWYDK) is looking for submissions detailing the tools, techniques, and skills that we don’t know, but should. Want to teach everyone how to make sand think? Write a paper and tell us about it! Send in your submissions here.
Have you noticed OSH Park updated their website?
The MSP430 line of microcontrollers are super cool, low power, and cheap. Occasionally, TI pumps out a few MSP430 dev boards and sells them for the rock-bottom price of $4.30. Here ya go, fam. This one is loaded up with the MSP430FR2433.
lol, Bitcoin this week.
Noisebridge, the San Francisco hackerspace and one of the first hackerspaces in the US, is now looking for a new place. Why, you may ask? Because San Francisco real estate. The current price per square foot is triple what their current lease provides. While we hope Noisebridge will find a new home, we’re really looking forward to the hipster restaurant that’s only open for brunch that will take its place.
The coolest soundcards, filled with DOS blips and bloops, were based on the OPL2 and OPL3 sound chips. If you want one of these things, you’re probably going to be digging up an old ISA SoundBlaster soundcard. The OPL2LPT is the classic sound card for computers that don’t have an easily-accessible ISA bus, like those cool vintage laptops. The 8-Bit Guy recently took a look at this at this neat piece of hardware, and apart from requiring a driver to work with any OPL2-compatible game, this thing actually works.
NVIDIA just did something amazing. They created a piece of hardware that everyone wants but isn’t used to turn electricity into heat and Bitcoin. This fantastic device, that is completely original and not at all derivative, is sold in the NVIDIA company store for under five dollars. Actually, the green logo silk/art on this PCB ruler is kinda cool, and I’d like to know how they did that. Also, and completely unrelated: does anyone want ten pounds of Digikey PCB rulers?
NoiseBridge isn’t the only hackerspace getting kicked out of their accommodation by the landlord:
https://forum.hsbne.org/t/2018-location-priorities/2428/5
Property developers around Brisbane seem keen to grab any large areas of open space and put large concrete monstrosities on top of it as quickly as possible. Even the State Emergency Service isn’t sacred; “Southern” group (formerly C group) also found themselves having to shift from their base at Rocklea.
They will likely get help from Emergency Management Queensland, HSBNE on the other hand, probably won’t be so lucky.
I think it’s a common cycle to happen. Most Hackerspaces in NL have moved at least once in the past two years. In case of Revspace the Hague, the building was being torn down. We got plenty of advance warning (early October and we had to move late April) and we have a good financial basis with a decent cash reserve for just this thing.
We also are very fortunate with the guy who leases out the buildings for the owner, he is a close friend of ours and helped us to our third accommodation. We started construction early January, building walls in an open ‘basement’ area and finished construction mid March, with over 40 meters of wall built, completely rewired and now safe electricity, ventilation, etc etc. It was a huge investment in both cost and labour (we estimate at least 3000 human-hours of work that went in building the space). On several weekends we had over 30 volunteers come in! It was a huge energy drain on a few people who volunteered to lead and coordinate but in the end it gave us such a wonderful place to hack every day.
The one thing we feared was losing too many participants due to the move. We did lose a few ‘sleepers’ who woke up due to the move but in the end we are growing at a steady pace and looking towards a very healthy future as a hackerspace.
Not bad considering we were in a state of panic mid december when we were slowly losing participants and were unable to find a decent property to lease.
10 pounds of PCB rulers, so about 370?
I can guarantee they’d disappear at MRRF:)
Speaking of the journal, shouldn’t journal.hackaday.com redirect to journal.hackaday.io instead of the main site?
“Want to teach everyone how to make sand think?”
Then create a horror movie out of it called, The Mummy.
How on earth (or any other planet…) would you mummify a silicon based lifeform ?
Add perfume and teach it to kiss your booboo’s
Now I miss my mummy…
OMG. White silkscreen AND green silkscreen? Believe it or not, you can do as many silkscreen layers as you want. You just have to find a fab house willing to disrupt their workflow for that. OR, they may have done the green after getting the PCBs from fab. Screen printing is a pretty low-tech process.