Octoscroller Takes The Hexascroller To The Next Level

September 17, 2013 by Adam Fabio 8 Comments

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The folks at NYCResistor have a new toy in the Octoscroller. For a couple of years now the NYCResistor crew has used the HexaScroller as a clock and general alert system. Now that RGB LED panels are cheaply available, the group decided to upgrade both the number of sides and the number of colors.

Octoscroller uses eight 16×32 RGB LED panels. These panels are relatively easy to interface to, but require constant refresh even to display a static image. This makes them both memory and CPU intensive for smaller microcontrollers. Brightness control via PWM only increases the difficulty.

On the plus side, the panels are structurally strong. This allows the Octoscroller to avoid the plywood ring which made up the frame of the Hexascroller. 3D printed brackets and hardware were all that was needed to complete the Octoscroller frame.

The brain of the this beast is a BeagleBone Black running LEDscape along with some custom software. Imagery comes from the Disorient Pyramid.

If you’re in the New York area, NYCResistor plans to offer classes on building your own Octoscroller. You can also see the Octoscroller in person at MakerFaire NYC this weekend.

Many Iterations Of A Plywood Stool That Requires No Glue

August 29, 2013 by Mike Szczys 36 Comments

cnc-router-stool-design

At his local hackerspace [Vincent Sanders] noticed an interesting problem. The stools that they had were great in most cases, but there was one workbench which was very much the wrong height for them. So began his quest to design and fabricate plywood stools which use no glue for their joints.

The Cambridge Makespace (in the UK) turns out to be a perfect environment for this type of project. They already had a CNC router which can cut the plywood pieces, and there are other members who were willing to help train [Vincent] on the equipment. He found a design on Thingiverse which fit the bill, except for the actual measurements. He needed metric units to match the sheet stock available to him. Once converted he put together a stool that didn’t work at all. The thickness of the plywood just didn’t mesh with the tolerances of the joints. After wandering around to different suppliers in town, digital calipers in hand, he came up with a range of actual thicknesses and adjusted his joint design accordingly.

Of course this wasn’t the last revision. Even with the joints working the seat was still a little rickety. He moved to the next plywood thickness offered, redesigning the files to match. His final stool works like a charm, with five or six of them fitting on one standard sheet of plywood.

Twitter Knitter Combines 40 Year Old Hardware With Modern Social Media

August 20, 2013 by Michael Ciuffo 12 Comments

When presented with a vintage Empisal Knitmaster knitting machine, members of the TOG Dublin Hackerspace worked together to not only bring it back from the dead but to also add some custom hardware that allows for computer generated patterns.

At first the Knitmaster was in fairly bad shape requiring a few custom machined parts just to function. It was originally designed to feed in special punch cards that mechanically directed the many moving parts of the machine (called “dibblers”) to knit patterns in yarn. Using an Arduino, a number of servos, and a microswitch to detect when the knitting carriage is pulled across, this card-read system was replaced with a computer controlled mechanism that can direct the machine to print out images one row at a time.

Of course, you don’t get too many opportunities to name your project something as cute as “The Twitter Knitter”, so once the system was working, it was only a matter of writing some code to snatch tweets from the web and generate images out of the text. Visitors of the Dublin Mini Maker Faire got to watch it in action as they posted tweets with a particular hashtag which the machine happily printed in yarn (as long as they weren’t too long).

Video demo after the jump.

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Your Hackerspace Needs A Biology Lab; Here’s The Inspiration

August 15, 2013 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

biology-hackerspace

When you think of Hackerspaces what pops to mind? For us it’s electronics first, then machining related stuff (3D printing, CNC milling), followed by welding, woodworking, auto mechanical, we could go on and on. But biology hacking doesn’t really make that list. The New York based Genspace is a strong case on why we should add a biology lab as a viable hackerspace option.

What are Hackerspaces other than a collection of tools and skilled members that helps to bring the mad scientists of the world out of their basements and into the light? Pretty much every Hackerspace teaches classes that are open to the public. This is basically a requirement of being a non-profit, but is also driven by the virtue of making knowledge open and available. Offering biology themed classes is an incredible tie-in for helping to see our young learners through to a career in the sciences.

Vice-President and Co-Founder [Daniel Grushkin] was inspired by college students who hack organisms for a one semester long project. He wanted to try his hand at it, but needed help with the resources. He gathered a few others who were interested and, with encouragement from NYC Resistor, they got Genspace up and running in Brooklyn. The organization holds safety as a top priority. Each new member learns about the Biosafety Level 1 guidelines used by the space. For less involved experiments they even use tools of their own making, like a glovebox similar to this one.

24-hour Hackathon Project Adds Object-based Automation To Hackerspace

July 10, 2013 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

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[Jeremy Blum], [Jason Wright], and [Sam Sinensky] combined forces for twenty-four hours to automate how the entertainment and lighting works at their hackerspace. They commandeered the whiteboard and used an already present webcam as part of their project. You can see the black tokens which can be moved around the blue tape outline to actuate the controls.

MATLAB is fed an image from the webcam which monitors the space. Frames are received once every second and parsed for changes in the tokens. There are small black squares which either skip to the next track of music or affect pause/play. Simply move them off of their designated spot and the image processing does the rest. This goes for the volume slider as well. We think the huge token for the lights is to ensure that the camera can sense a change in a darkened room.

If image processing isn’t your thing you can still control your audio entertainment with a frickin’ laser.

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UK Hackerspace Builds Mobile Spaceship Disaster Simulator

May 20, 2013 by Mike Szczys 38 Comments

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A spaceship simulator sounds fun. But a spaceship disaster simulator is pure win. Members of the London Hack Space poured their hearts and souls into this build which they call the LHS Bikeshed. Now they’re taking the show on the road, letting attendees of Maker Faires all over the UK try their hand at beating the ~~Kobayashi Maru~~ disaster simulation.

The real question is how do you take your simulator on the road with you? You build it in an old camper (or caravan as the Brits call it). The towable sleeping quarters were gutted to make room for the well-crafted command center seen above. The demonstration video also shows off some bulkhead doors which open to reveal a wiring mess that must be fixed to prevent a disaster. Not only does the physical build really sell the concept, but the audio and video produced for the simulator look fantastic too. The link above is a recent post, but you should dig through their archives see multiple steps during the project build.

It makes us thing we should keep going with our VW Bus hacking.

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Pranking A Hackerspace IRC For April Fool’s Day

April 4, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

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Like most hackerspaces, when the folks at DIYode, the Guelph, Ontario hackerspace, aren’t in the workshop, they’re on IRC. It’s a great way to build a community, complete with a bot that collects and catalogues to-do items, meeting topics, posts events to IRC, and even does a bit of text-to-speech so members currently at the DIYode can listen in on the IRC room. There’s also a webcam for the DIYode space that members check constantly. [Simon] thought it would be a great prank to freak out those members that constantly check the webcam, and we’ll say he succeeded with a little help from the Alabama Face Guy.

The build listens for a specific phrase in the IRC room – “Hey, someone just entered the shop without the doorbot noticing” – and sends a command via Python to an Arduino to raise and lower a cardboard cutout of a sneering face in front of the web cam. For an April Fool’s build, this is probably one of the most creative and creepy we’ve seen this year.