hackerspace

133 Articles

Minneapolis Hackerspace: Twin Cities Maker

February 2, 2010 by 13 Comments

After announcing the grand opening of a St. Louis Hackerspace, we received a tip that another group of our readers had an event coming up. Twin City Maker of the Minneapolis/St.Paul area are hosting a Maker Faire and art show next weekend. Unfortunately, we don’t have any writers in that neck of the woods, so there wont be an official Hack a Day presence, but we are sure all of you who make it out there will do us proud. Take pictures, wont you?

The Minne-Faire will be located at:

Hack Factory
3119 E 26th St. Minneapolis, MN 55406

Mini Maker Faire 2-6 PM
Art Show & Party 7-11 PM

St. Louis Hackerspace: Arch Reactor

January 26, 2010 by 22 Comments

Here at HackaDay, we are always a fan of a group of hackers coming together to create a place to share ideas, tools, parts, and stories. A group from St. Louis called Arch Reactor have managed to secure a new location, and are having their grand opening this Saturday. From 4-10pm on the 30th, they will be hosting an open house, and showing off both the area as well as some personal projects. We plan on being there to cover it, as well as support a hackerspace that is close to home for a couple of us.

They are located on the second floor of:

904 Cherokee St.
St Louis, MO 63118

and feel free to check out their location page, as well as their main web site.

Edit: Thanks to [kamikazejoe] from the Arch Reactor forums for pointing out the logo issue. Whoops.

Fabric Display

December 14, 2009 by 12 Comments

[Eli] is sharing the building details on her fabric based display. For lack of a better name she’s calling this a fabric Lite-Brite. This is because LEDs can be added anywhere to spell out a message or create a simple drawing.

The device consists of a positive bus of conductive thread sewn onto a regular piece of fabric. A second piece of fabric separates this from a ground plane made of conductive fabric. The LED leads are then bent into a spiral and can easily be wrapped around the appropriate part of the conductor.

We’re happy to see this creative design coming from a hacker that frequents a hackerspace; Pumping Station One in Chicago. This would be a wonderful application for banners or flags at hackerspace events.

Ionocraft Aka Lifters

December 8, 2009 by 40 Comments

It’s hard to believe that in five years we haven’t covered lifters before. This realization was sparked when [Tyler] tipped us off about a lifter project demonstrated at the Kansas City hackerspace called CCCKC.

Lifters, the casual name for ionocraft, fly without combustion or moving parts. We’re not going to tackle the particulars of what makes flight possible, but high voltage is required to feed the phenomenon that provides the lift. One of the first comments when we asked what to do with old CRT monitors was to use them for lifters. The flyback transformer puts out plenty of voltage if you can tap into it without killing yourself (no, seriously, that’s an issue).

This is the method that the CCCKC folks used. Take a peek at the video after the break. If you’re thirsting for more fun with lifters, stop by the Lifter Project.

Continue reading “Ionocraft Aka Lifters” →

Case Prototyping

November 16, 2008 by 11 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsqNPXCm3jc]

[Deviant Ollam], lockpicker and beverage cooling contest host, was recently in Vienna, presumably for DeepSec. While there, he stopped by the Metalab hackerspace and checked out their RepRap rapid prototyping machine. You can see video of his visit above. He had them construct a custom fitted cover for the flash of his point and shoot camera. That’s what we love about rapid prototyping. Many of the projects we cover here solve a particular problem, but would never be considered commercially viable enough to put into production. With the availability of rapid prototyping increasing, hackers can start moving toward producing even more complex objects specific to their needs with a finish closer to commercial products.

More Defcon 16 Events Announced

August 2, 2008 by 1 Comment


Defcon keeps announcing more and more interesting events for next week’s conference. A free workshop is planned for the soon to be released DAVIX live CD. DAVIX is a collection of tools for data analysis and visualization. They’ll be running through a few example packet dumps to demonstrate how the tools can help you make sense of it all. [Thomas Wilhelm] will be driving out from Colorado Springs in his Mobile Hacker Space. He’s giving a talk Sunday, but will be giving presentations a few hours every day at the van. Some researchers from NIST will be setting up a four node quantum network and demonstrating some of the possible vulnerabilities in the system. Finally, as part of an EFF fundraiser, Defcon will feature a Firearms Training Simulator. Conference attendees will participate in drills designed to improve their speed, accuracy, and decision making skills.