Tom Avril came for the awesome bioengineering work that Jordan did at Penn and Hive76, but he stayed to write an awesome article about us and the Philly hacking scene. Here is the awesome article that’s also on the front page. And below is the awesome video Inky photographer Clem Murray shot during one open house. Hack on!
Intro to Soldering Workshop
Soldering is an essential skill to learn if you’d like to build your own electronic circuits. Come on in to Hive76 and we can teach you how to solder using Mitch Altman’s Trippy RGB Waves kit!
This specific circuit has a red-green-blue (RGB) LED that slowly changes colors over time. When you wave an object (like your hand) over it, you reset the color-changing pattern. With several boards laid out before you, this creates a wave-like effect.
You can check out a video of the circuit in action here!
When: Saturday, September 8th, 1-4PM
Where: Hive76
Cost: $20 (covers kit and instruction)
Hive76 Welcomes Raspberry Pi Developer, Rob Bishop!
Rob Bishop, a developer with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, is going to be taking a short tour of US hackerspaces. We are pleased to announce that Hive76 has been included on that list!
Because we are expecting a very high level of interest in this event, we have decided that our studio space is a little too small to accomodate the number of people we are expecting to attend. Philadelphia’s University of the Arts has graciously offered up some space for us to meet in. There are only 30 spots available, so act fast; this will sell out. Ticket purchased are limited to 2 per person. You’ll find the link below.
If you’ve been wanting to get a taste of the Raspberry Pi (:P), you will not want to miss this event. The event is free to the public, but space is limited! Rob will have Pi(s) for sale at $35 per board. They are still on back-order from major distributors, so now is your chance to grab one!
Here is what to expect:
Rob Bishop from the RaspberryPi Foundation is touring popular hackspaces in the US throughout September 2012 with the aim of giving talks and workshops about the RaspberryPi to both the hackspace members and also RaspberryPi users in the local community.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a charitable organisation founded with the aim of promoting the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level. The Foundation is responsible for the design and sales of the popular RaspberryPi single-board computer. You can find out more about the Foundation and the RaspberryPi here.
The event at each hackspace will informally consist of the following;
- Talk:
- RaspberryPi: Past, Present & Future – An introduction to the RaspberryPi, including an overview of its history and development, details on the technical specification and an outline of future developments with many cool tech demos along the way. Followed by a Q&A session.
- Tech Demos:
- A chance to demonstrate various OS’s and other demos
- Workshop:
- A chance to play with the RaspberryPi hands-on.
- Show & Tell / Prizes:
- An opportunity to display RaspberryPi projects from the community with prizes for notable projects.
The tour will be blogged/vlogged on the RaspberryPi website and we hope to attract RaspberryPi enthusiasts and hackers/makers from across the areas we will be visiting, allowing us to meet and support our community.
Here are the details on where we are meeting and at what time:
University of the Arts, Terra Hall, 5th floor
211 S. Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102
Monday, September 24th, 7:00PM-10:00PM
Update: Corrected UArts address
Experiments in Garden Hose Hydraulics
I recently decided to make a proof-of-concept for a simple hydraulics kit. Ultimately you would be able to take this kit, get some standard PVC pipe from the local hardware store, and very quickly build your own simple hydraulic devices. Use it to learn about the principles of hydraulics while staying cool on a hot summer day, or use it to power your homemade tools like simple presses, lifts, or even an articulated digging arm.
The pressure in your typical garden hose is nominally around 40 psi or so, so my first hydraulic cylinder should be able to develop about 125 pounds of force if it had really good seals. This is a proof of concept so I didn’t bother with o-rings or anything, so it leaks like crazy and thus is unable to develop quite those kinds of pressures, although it is quite strong. Moving from a 2″ to a 3″ hydraulic cylinder would bring this up to about 282 pounds of force, not too shabby for garden hose power!
The hydraulic cylinder is made of standard PVC pipe (2″ for the cylinder and 1.5″ for the ram), although I had to use my lathe to turn down a 1.5″ pipe cap to fit inside the outer cylinder. The control valve is made of 1/2″ CPVC fittings and tubing, with the exception of the spool which is a length of 1/2″ solid PVC rod. I had to turn down the spool on my lathe to the appropriate profile and also had to drill out the valve to fit it. The fit is fairly poor but it shows that the concept definitely works. Eventually I am hoping to be able to have all the custom parts injection molded to get the unit cost down cheap enough that it would make a good toy for DIY doodlers and budding engineers everywhere.
Hive76 @ Fosscon!!
Whoa! Fosscon is tomorrow and Hive76 is going to be there!!
What’s fosscon? From the fosscon crew:
Fosscon 2012 is a free and open source software conference, and will
include six general-interest talks, and workshops on topics including
development, community building, hackerspace activities, and more.
Learn about 3D printing, security, and protecting your privacy.
Network with the local tech community and discover new technologies.
Whoa, workshops?! That’s right! Some of which will be conducted by Hive76! We’ve actually been given an entire ROOM for the conference, so be sure to stop by when you’re there!
The workshops that we’ll be running cover Intro to soldering, Intro to Arduino, Build Your Own Flat Panel Speakers, and several workshops on Building Your Own Simple Square Wave Synthesizers.Several? Yeah, Sean will cover using 555 timers, MSP430s, and also Arduinos!
The costs for these workshops will vary from $10-$30 to cover instruction and also cost of materials used.
Make sure to register for fosscon! Seating is limited! If you’d like to financially support fosscon (you should, it’s awesome!), it will only cost you $25 and you get some nice swag! Otherwise, fosscon is a free-as-in-beer event, but you still have to register!
Intro to Game Programming with JavaScript: Aftermath
Huzzah!
I know I certainly had a really fun time last night with everyone.
To recap, we did a walk through the Pong example (play it here, or read the code here) and saw a lot of things that are common to games programming. We looked at some ways that simple changes to specific values can have a huge impact on the look and feel of the game. We discussed the discovery process of programming and how integral the act of testing is to finding good gameplay elements. And we discussed some tools and habits that are good to learn to be a more effective programmer.
I want to get everyone started with playing with code as quickly as possible now. The more you do, the more you will learn. There have been tons of times in my career that I’ve pontificated on how to do something with no good result coming from mere speculation, only to be able to figure it out within minutes by just trying it. So with that in mind:
Game Programming: A Pong Clone
Class Time!
Tonight is the first lab session for our series on learning how to program in study of games with JavaScript. Can’t wait to see everyone here in just a few hours!
Additionally, for anyone who couldn’t make the weeknight-at-7pm time slot, I’ve cleared some time this Sunday to do a repeat/additional session–Sunday, August 12th, at 3pm. You can get tickets here: https://www.wepay.com/events/intro-to-game-programming-with-javascript-weekend-edition
Or hell, just click the button:
Sunday, August 12th, 3pm – 5pm, @ Hive76 Register
Pong!
The first game is, as promised, Pong. You can see the game in action here: http://wedusc.com/games/pong.html
And you can read the source code online in my GitHub repository here: https://github.com/capnmidnight/JS_Game_Programming_Class/blob/master/pong.html
I’ll have printouts for everyone when you get here. If this is your first time trying to read code, try not to cross your eyes too much. We’ll cover how to read code along the way.
Though this game is pretty simple, it has a few interesting features…
Intro to Game Programming with JavaScript: Update
Only 5 Tickets Left!
Wow, these things are selling a lot faster than I expected. There is still a week left and most of the tickets are gone. If you’re still interested, you should hurry and buy one to secure your place. If you are interested but can’t make it to Monday, August 6th, leave a comment on what dates would work better as I’m looking to have an alternate class schedule as well.
Some Q/A
A few questions came up in the last post, so here are some answers summarized for anyone who doesn’t read blog-post comments.
- What time is the class? The class starts at 7pm on Monday, August 6th, 2012.
- Can I just show up? I would prefer if you signed up for a ticket first, so I know how many people are coming.
- Is there anything we should have/know before the class? You’ll need your own laptop computer, we don’t have enough public computers to go around at Hive. I will briefly cover some options for text editors in a blog post or at the beginning of the class, but if you already have a favorite text editor like Notepad++, Gvim, or TextMate, then by all means use that. Also, it would be advantageous for you to setup some sort of webspace. There are some free places like 110mb.com, or you could even use the Public folder if you have a Dropbox account, which is quite convenient.
- Is it just JavaScript in general, or does it include HTML 5 and Canvas? Various HTML 5 techs will definitely be covered, eventually. You can’t really do much graphically without it. JavaScript, HTML 5, and CSS 3 all go hand-in-hand. While there are some Dynamic HTML stuff that can be done (and we will certainly cover it just because DOM manipulation is a good skill to have), eventually Canvas and Audio are a necessities.
- Why not do <insert language> instead? That’s a really big question…
Hand-crafted Charlie-Plexed Tile
This 5×6 LED tile is a key component in a secret project that I’m developing (in secret) with some other folks (whose names shall remain a secret).
Why be so public about something so secret? Because this tile uses a layout technique that lets you build charlie-plexed LED arrays quickly and cheaply — and that’s something worth sharing.
You need to flip the tile over in order to see what’s special about it. Here’s a quick list of features that make the assembly what it is:
- The back of the tile has six “column” conductors and six “row” conductors.
- These column and row conductors are connected along the diagonal of the row/column array. At all other points in the matrix, the row and column conductors are isolated via a layer of masking tape.
- LEDs above the diagonal have their cathode connected to the conductive row immediately above the LED. LEDs on or below the diagonal have their cathode connected to the conductive row immediately below the LED.
- All LEDs have their anode connected to the column that is to their immediate left.
The resulting circuit allows you to individually address any of the thirty LEDs in this 5×6 matrix using only six lines from a micro-controller. Continue reading “Hand-crafted Charlie-Plexed Tile”
She Prints!
Modified MendelMax #2 was born today. Isn’t she purty. This bot is gonna live at Hive76 for the forseeable future.
Thanks to all at Hive76 for help and support during this build, especially to Rich and Andy for hanging tough in the trenches, Chris and Brendan for troubleshooting and tools, and Morfin for extra supply bits.
We’ve got big plans for this bot. Stay tuned. And here’s a video of the first print!