News

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Hive76 Management Elections – 2010

Here ye. Here ye.
Let it be known the results of the Hive76 Management Election [so far.]
These positions have incumbents and they will roll on through for 6 more months:
Instigator: Far McKon
CTO: Adam K.
Events Coordinator: Jack Zylkin (This is a kind of a new position.)

But there has been a change in the Secretary where “lame duck” Adam E. has decided not to run again. The candidates were Dan and Chris and Chris was chosen. [and so I get to blog more I guess]

Also, Philip will be taking over for Brian as Bookkeeper and ran unopposed.

Lastly, the voting was a tie for Quartermaster between PJ and Brendan, so we will be re-voting.

Thanks for the hard work past management peeps, and here’s to a good future new management!

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Symmetry Design for 3D printing

Printed half-object. Print its mirror image (see instructions above), then glue together.

If you are designing objects for printing on MakerBot, the convention is to not try to print anything with overhangs. Well, what if you really want to? Simple… just cut your object in half, digitally. If you design with symmetry in mind, you can save yourself a whole lot of time and effort. Design and model half of your object. Print it out. Then invert your x or y axis, and print again. Bang, you get the exact mirror image of the first half-object. You won’t have to do any more modeling, processing, skeining, or converting to .s3g. bonus is that a single .s3g file on your SD card will be able to print both the left and right half-object. you will need to glue them together at the end, but this trick is most useful if your object has a lot of overhangs when trying to print it in one-shot. Just glue or epoxy them together to get a complete object.

This works really well for sphere-like (not quite spherical) objects, such as heads. See here: Symmetry Design — Blender Monkey Suzanne

Symmetric Monkey Head Print

Best of all, editing your hardware settings to flip either the X or Y axis means you can print the same .s3g file twice, once for each “half-face” of the object. Because the gcode is identical, this will always necessarily produce an exact mirror image.

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Guitar Effects Workshop – DIY PCB Etching – Monday, May 3rd @ 7:30pm

PCB Toner Transfer

This coming Monday at our monthly Guitar Effects Study Group we will be hosting a workshop on fabricating your own printed circuit boards at home. We will discuss a few of the different ways to transfer a PCB layout to a bare copper-clad board, including the toner transfer method, and show you how to make your own etchant out of chemicals you can find at your local hardware store. We will be providing a few small designs and a blank PCB so you can etch a board to take home with you. If you have a specific board that you would like to make during the workshop, just send us the layout files before the class so we can evaluate the feasibility of etching them with this process. There are a ton of circuit board layouts available for free online, so if you have a specific project in mind, let us know and we can help you find a design that might work for you.

Since we will be working with chemicals, you probably don’t want to wear your best clothes, and try to bring rubber gloves and safety goggles. We normally order pizza about halfway through the night. We would appreciate a $5 donation for materials we are providing for this class, but if you can’t afford that, don’t let that keep you from coming out. There’s plenty of material for everyone. If you have any questions before the class, feel free to email us. See you Monday!

For music-specific circuits, check out the following links:
http://www.generalguitargadgets.com/
http://runoffgroove.com/
http://geofex.com/

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Pictures, or it didn’t happen!

With the recent formation of Hive76’s Flickr pool, I thought I would take the opportunity to post some of the great pictures we’ve been capturing during our Teh Art of Electronics (sic,TM) sessions!

Originally designed to be a book study group, our introductory offering on the subject has morphed into quite the full-fledged intro course! Thanks to our resident gurus, the curious world of electronics has begun to unfold for some of Philadelphia’s creative minds. As a starting point, our students have learned about the relationships between charge, voltage, current, and power. We’ve since moved on to more complex topics and hope to finish out with learning about creating sensors!

So, if you’ve got some pictures of the space, or the the folks here at Hive76, and would like to share them with us, take a minute to hop on Flickr and join the group!

Hope to see you at our next [ open_house || class || event ] !

Disclaimer: These particular photos were taken with my phone, so please excuse the graininess for now. I’ll be sure to improve their quality with a better camera in the coming sessions.

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Herbie Hancock on Sesame Street

The worlds funkiest electrical engineering major  shows the Sesame Street kids the joys of technology and music! Check it out!

Also, check out him and Q talking shop about rad 80s synth technology here.

Though I’m personally more of a fan of his 70’s work with analog and electro-acoustic instruments: here and here

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Beer Brewing Classes

The University Arts League has tons of cool classes this summer…everything from pottery to “Reggae Aerobics”. Saturday was the first session of a 10-class series on Beer Brewing! hopefully some slots are still open for anyone who wants to sign up late. Go to http://www.ucartsleague.org for details.

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Wikipedia Takes Philadelphia

This Sunday (April 11) at Noon a there is a Wikipedia scavenger hunt and photo shoot that is happening in and around Philadelphia. There is a huge list of places that need Wikipedia Photos around our city. The goal is to get as many of them photographed and into Wikipedia in a weekend, and get a better set of city photos up.

If you have a camera and want to run/walk/bike around and get some photos of the city. Sunday’s event would be a great time to do that.

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Our Calendar is Moving.


Tonight I’m going to switch the website calendar over to run off of our domain (Hive76@Hive76.org) instead of having it on Hive76@gmail.com. Please email Contact@Hive76.org if/when you notice any missing or problematic calendar events in the next week or so!

Make things awesome, Make Awesome Things,
– Instigator

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April Philly Robotics Group Meetup

It’s almost time for robots again!

Come join us for the April Philadelphia Robotics Group Meetup. We’ll be having our normal robotics discussion/showing, and member Nelson Brown will demo an AVR-based video game.

Info: April 8th, starting at 7:30.

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3 Hour Game Jam with GameDev.net

Next Saturday at Hive76 we will be hosting an international 3 hour game jam with gamedev.net. Contestants have 3 hours to complete a small game based on a secret theme, to be revealed at the beginning of the contest. This contest has a secondary requirement that all of the games have to be puzzle games.

Any programming language and API is acceptable, as long as it will run in some way (app or web app) on the judges 64-bit Windows Vista machine or their Mac Mini.

Third and second places are premium memberships (3 months and one year, respectively) to gamedev.net First prize is a $75 gift card for Amazon.com!

Organizer: Sean McBeth (Philip Fominykh at the assist)
More Information at : http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=566163
Saturday, April 10th, contest starts at 5:00PM