Philadelphia Robotics Meetup – Postponed

UPDATE: This has been postponed. We will update when it’s rescheduled.

Join us for the first Philadelphia Robotics Meetup Group of 2010!

This month’s meetup will feature a “spinning cube” demo of my complementary filter based Inertial Measurement Unit code for our Quadrotor controller board (that will make more sense when you see it) and Xbee-based wireless communication between the controller board and a laptop. Also, Foster Schucker of STEM Robotics will demo some VEX robots.

When: January 14th, 2010 at 7:30 PM

Guitar Event Tonight MOVED

Just to clarify:  The guitar effects Study Group is meeting on Sunday, the 10th,  for a class (which is now sold out).   There will be no Guitar Effect Study Group tonight.

Guitar Effects 101 – again

Its Alive!Back By Popular Demand:
Build Your Own Effect Pedal!
Where: Hive76 (915 Spring Garden)
When: Sunday, January 10 at 1:00 PM
Cost: $50
Open to all abilities, ages 14+.

Hive76 has wanted to host an introductory electronics class for some time now. But instead of teaching folks how to solder together some dinky LED circuit, we decided to teach them how to make vintage guitar effect pedals!

Whether you are an old hand on the DIY electronics scene, or if you have never touched a soldering iron before, you will leave this class with some learnings about electronics, invention, and music, and, best of all, your very own home-brewed Tube Screamer clone, a classic distortion pedal if there ever was one.

For more info, contact jack@hive76.org
Print out the flyer here.

Register Now
Get Academic tickets

Project Operation completed

About a month ago, Body Worlds 2 (currently at The Franklin Institute) contacted the crew from Make:Philly about making a giant version of the board game Operation for an event at Body Worlds.

Make:Philly had the skill to build it, but no place to work on such a project, since their regular home (at the Industrial Design Department of UArts) is a presentation space, not a build space. So Make:Philly turned to their friendly neighborhood hackerspace (us) as a place to build the project.

So after 5 weekends of tinkering, tweaking, and painting, the Make:Philly and Hive76 crew(s) deliverer the finished game to the event last Friday. Unfortunately, the event got snowed out, and Body Worlds is working on snow date for it.

In the meantime, here are some photos of the project.

Party Photos

Here are some very pink, and very blurry photos I took at our super rad party (The more beer I had, the blurrier they got I think..)

We hope you see you at the next one.

Hive’s first Board of Directors!

Hive76 has got gotten in the results of it’s first round of elections for Board of Directors. I, for one, welcome our insect overlords. The Board (in general) does overseeing and big-picture naval-gazing for a group(wikipedia explains it a bit better), and Hive elected a great group of people watch our collective navel(s).

Our Board is:
Adam E – Is an active member of Hive76, and has a pretty great weblog about making things.

Jack Zylkin –  A founder of Hive76,  Jack is an inventor who makes laser trip-wires, tesselated puzzles, synaesthetic synthesizers, manual cnc machines, and the like. He graduated Drexel University with a BS in Electrical Engineering in 2008 but is old for his age.  He cares deeply about conserving fossil fuels.  His interests include bicycles, jazz fusion, chinese food, and funny hats. He has taught classes for Hive76 and the Hacktory concerning chocolate mold-making, talking gift cards, singing pencils, and DIY guitar pedals.

Jordan Miller – (@jmil) is a founder of Hive76, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. His research combines chemistry and rapid prototyping to direct cultured human cells to form more complex organizations of living vessels and tissues. Jordan has been a member of Hive76 since it’s inception and spearheaded the fundraising, assembly, and maintenance of our MakerBot, 3D-PO.

Steph – Is pleased as punch to serve on the board. She’s a Unix/Linux admin by trade, treehugger by training, and tinkerer by habit. She will preach about environmental justice and appropriate technology indefinitely if you let her, and alternately scowls at gratuitous gadgets, and jumps up and down at provably cool tech. She like bikes, plants, homebrew, diy renewable energy, Brazilian pop, Philadelphia, and figuring out what the heck polymerization has to do with natural wood finishes. With any luck, she’ll soon graduate from the 2010 Master Gardener program through the PSU Cooperative Extension, and finish up her Master of Environmental Studies at Penn (for which she’s doing a study about electronic waste), at which time you may call her “mistress.”

Far McKon – A loud mouth and general instigator, and is a founder of Hive76. He is often the first one jumping of bridges, and and can convincing others to follow. 87.4% percent of the time he is correct about landing on giant marshmallows at the end of the fall. 12.6% of the time the landing is just deep (sometimes hot) water. When he is not coding or building stuff, he’s coding and building stuff. Far has co-founded a Housing Cooperative, a City Wiki, 2 hackerspaces, and 1,000 weird and wonderful friendships.

[Edit: This post has been updated as Bio’s have come in from Board Members]

Guitar Effects 101

Its Alive!
Build Your Own Effect Pedal!
Where:  Hive76 (915  Spring Garden)
When:  Monday, December 7th
Cost:  $50 (purchase tickets)
Open to all abilities, ages 14+.

Hive76 has wanted to host an introductory electronics class for some time now.   But instead of teaching folks how to solder together some dinky LED circuit,  we decided to teach them how to make vintage guitar effect pedals! 

Whether you are an old hand on the DIY electronics scene, or if you have never touched a soldering iron before,  you will leave this class with some learnings about electronics, invention, and music, and, best of all, your very own home-brewed Tube Screamer clone, a classic distortion pedal if there ever was one.

For more info, contact jack@hive76.org
Print out the flyer here.