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Make Philly on Nov 11th

Make:Philly is back after a summer vacation, and is kicking off a fall round by events by hosting Peter Bressler of Bresslergroup. From the Make:Philly website:

Peter’s expertise includes user research, human factors application, manufacturing processes and innovative criteria conflict resolution. Peter has authored or co-authored over 60 design and utility patents and has received over 40 national design awards. He is a Past President of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA).

Make:Philly is happening on a new time and date, (Thursday night, at 7PM sharp) instead of the classic Sunday afternoon, but the place ( University of the Arts, 211 S. Broad Street, Terra Hall, 5th Floor) is the same. And the Make:Philly meetings are still 50% a great talk by local maker and 50% build challenge, where you build something on the spot to meet a challenge announced at the start of the meeting.

In Short:
What: Make Phily with Peter Bressler
Date: Thursday, November 11th*, 2010 (revised date)
Time: 7PM sharp!
Location: University of the Arts, 211 S. Broad Street, Terra Hall, 5th Floor
ID: Bring your ID with you to sign in at the front desk
Cost: Free!

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DIY BOOMcase

Today Brendan and I bodged together a powered audio suitcase, aka a BOOMcase. It’s not quite the same as one by Mr. Simo, but it does rock pretty well. I cut the holes and Brendan did all the hard stuff like soldering and wiring.
Brendan asked to get more credit then me because he provided the big speaker and the amplifier. Go Brendan!
Details: The amplifier is from old computer speaker system. The suitcase is an American Tourister. I got 8Ohm speakers form a cheap stereo system. A 10″ guitar speaker acts as a passive radiator. The BOOMcase is plugin now, but a battery is in the works.
Video of it being awesome.

Pics:

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Help Hive76 buy a laser cutter

Hive76, like all hackerspaces, is in need of a laser cutter. The simple engraver I own is not nearly awesome enough. We have been talking about this for a while but I have finally launched a Pledgie to collect funds for a serious-bizness laser cutter.

There is some guidance on what to expect and purchase on Adafruit’s wiki about owning a laser cutter and there are a few members with direct experience.

This process will include some sort of awesome laser fundraising party. If you have any other ideas, leave a comment.

Oh yeah one last thing: DONATE HERE!

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Light Graffiti with The Hacktory tonight!

Our favorite chums at The Hacktory have a cool laser graffiti event tonight, featuring art projections and a chance for the audience to play with light graffiti. It sounds awesome:

Tonight’s our big night as part of DesignPhiladelphia’s Kick-Off. Join us in the Design Lot on South Broad Street across from the Kimmel Center to explore space and time, video and graffiti, technology and art, and play with laser graffiti. More details can be found in city paper’s article.

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ICM7228 Libraries in Development

Here’s a video of a preliminary version of PJ’s ICM7228 library for Arduino.  The 7228 is an LED driver chip that is particularly suited to driving 8×8 LED matrices.  We have a lot of these chips at the Hive, and plenty of 8×8 displays as well, so we’ll see what gets created as a byproduct of the library.

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Microcontroller Class Getting Blingy

You can never have too many LEDs. One way to run a whole bunch of LEDs is using the MAX7221 or MAX7219 display interfaces.  These devices allow you to run 64 LEDs per chip using an SPI interface.  The demo below is showing an early prototype of an MSP430 library for the MAX chips that was developed here at the Hive.  These particular displays have three MAX7221 chips on them — and we happen to have these displays in abundance due to some fortuitous dumpster diving (the secret — dive to the very bottom, and disregard the smell).

At any rate, the library is a nice introduction to the SPI protocol and MAX7221 chips, and it’s pretty useful besides.  Here’s a link to a zip file that has the library and some demo code.

Also, I tossed in a video of the LaunchPad controlling a laser scanner mirror — just because it looks cool (the program is extremely simple)

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Neighboorhood Bike Works Odometer Class

This summer, Hive76 embarked on a mission to teach more than 100 youngsters how to solder, and to promote making and inventing as a life skill.  We teamed up with Neighborhood Bike Works, a bicycle co-op and youth program which we have a huge crush on, to offer a series of classes for their summer campers.  After raising money by selling kits at the Trenton Arts Fest, and receiving some generous donations from our members, we bought a truckload of class supplies and recruited great teachers from Hive76 and the Hacktory.   The classes taught basic soldering skills, some elementary electricity, and applied these ideas to building electronic odometers and safety lights,  which were developed here at Hive76. 

We had a blast, and hopefully we’ll be doing more events for young ones in the future.  If you have an idea for a youth-outreach class, let us know!