Hive’s Valentine Hackshop – February 9th

 

1:00 – 5:00 PM   $10/ at door

Leave a comment below for RSVP 🙂

Got a sweetheart?  Want to meet a sweetheart?  David and Leslie are back to share the Valentine’s love.  Make sweet gifts and  learn about 3D printing and paper circuits at the same time.   For the gamer in your life,  there’s  a Valentine  Creeper.  Got an inspirational do-gooder?  Here’s a movie inspired MockingJay pin.  Just want to show you care?  Well, they’re working on a pixel heart necklace/keychain, that is sure to please.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While your piece prints, make a Valentine card that will illuminate your sweetheart’s soul.  Bring some materials from around your house and combine them with a variety of papers, copper tape, LED and battery to create the perfect paper circuit.  If you love crafting and electronics, you are about to experience  maker heaven.  If you’ve never been here before, you can tour the space and find out more about other member’s projects.  Munchies will be on hand.  Don’t forget to comment below so we know you are coming!

 

Diagnostics by Design Workshop and Hackathon

Hot on the heels of their wildly successful Build My Lab contest (still 5 days left to enter!!), our friends at Tekla Labs are putting together another breakthrough event to unite DIYers and the science community (NOTE: These events are happening in Berkeley, CA).

Julea Vlassakis writes:

The Point of Care Diagnostics IdeaLab, Tekla Labs, and the Center for Emerging and Neglected Diseases is excited to announce a series of coordinated events to promote global health design and innovation.

January 9, 2014 Diagnostics by Design: A Workshop on the design, development, and implementation of Global Health Technologies (details/registration here)

January 10, 2014 The 6th Annual CEND Symposium. Academia and the Global Health Pipeline: Basic Science Innovation and Translation (register here)

January 11-12, 2014 Diagnostics by Design: A Hack Day for Global Health (register here)

The Diagnostics by Design workshop is an interdisciplinary forum for discussing the challenges and lessons learned in developing and implementing global health technologies, specifically at the point of care. Through interactive talks, a panel discussion with experts from industry and academia, and a hands-on build session, we will explore the challenges associated with translating technologies beyond the lab. This workshop will draw on the expertise and experience of individuals from across disciplines to explore collaborative solutions to global health issues. The workshop will feature Columbia Professor and mChip inventor Samuel Sia as the keynote speaker. See our eventbrite page for a full list of speakers and panelists and for registration.

The Diagnostics by Design hackathon is an interdisciplinary effort to bridge the gap between makers and do-it-yourself innovators and the sphere of global health. The event is posed as a challenge to participants: with minimal materials or through innovative coding, tackle a technological or informatic need in the space of point-of-care diagnostics. These can range from generating DIY lab equipment alternatives for medical clinics with limited resources, informatics for disease monitoring, or redesign of diagnostic tools for resource-limited settings. Attendees will be given a kit with some materials and have access to 3D printers, laser cutters, mills and more. Visit our eventbrite page for more details and to register.

Civic infrastructure hacking: laser-controlled streetlight.

Three more things in my house require a remote control now, and one of them is the streetlight in front of my house. Ever since I heard about a hacked streetlight at the Guerrilla Drive in for Back to the Future in 2009, I have been turning off the streetlight on Darien Street by carefully aiming a laser dot at the light sensor on top of the streetlight. The light sensors on most streetlights face west to catch the last photons from the fading sunset before illuminating for the night—and this one faces right into the third floor of my house. It is very important to me to be able to choose to sit in the cozy dark, save my city some money, and not contribute to light pollution for a minute.
Just recently I revamped the process with a new, permanent laser and remote control system. Here it is in action:
I’ll show you how …
Continue reading “Civic infrastructure hacking: laser-controlled streetlight.”

Delaware RepRap Prusa i3 Mendel Build Class

Our friend John Abella (of the Maker Faire 3D Printer Village and Delaware Makerspace Barrel of Makers) is running a two-day RepRap build workshop in Wilmington Delaware, October 5th and 6th.   Attendees will be building Prusa i3 printers with all top-shelf parts:  milled frames from Josef Prusa, genuine J-head hotends from Hotends.com, stainless threaded rods and hardened chromed smooth rods.

The workshop is being held at the Wilmington DoubleTree Hotel, and will have catered food for attendees.   Every person attending will leave with tools and basic supplies to maintain their printer and get started printing.   The workshop fee – all inclusive –  is $999.

Click here for the official flyer for the event

More info and class registration can be found here:  http://botbuilder.net/classes/

FREE EVENT THIS THURSDAY: Through the Looking Glass

This Thursday, please join us at a FREE exhibition of the work of Cornelius Varley (1800-1860) put on by the venerable American Philosophical Society. It is a fantastic exploration of the life work of this fellow tinkerer and inventor who’s insight and explorations reminds me a lot of our Hive76 members!

A few of us will also be presenting at this event! We will have live 3D sugar glass printing, exhibitions of Brendan’s boom cases, Dan’s 8 mm RockBox, PJ’s electronics, Corrie’s textiles and artwork, Chris Terrell’s wood burning, and maybe a few more things.

We hope to see you there! Deets and directions below.

 

Deets:
Free Refreshments (wine, food, music) will be provided at the event!!
APS Requests your RSVP HERE: museum@amphilsoc.org
Thursday, June 6th, 2013
5:30-7:30 pm
APS Museum in Philosophical Hall
104 S. Fifth Street, Philadelphia, PA


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Getting Raspberry Pi to control your 3D Printer

We got some Raspberry Pis and began jumping through some tutorials. Adafruit has a particularly thorough and easy to follow series. We’ve had good luck with the Raspbian Wheezy distro and it works just like familiar Ubuntu since it’s based on Debian. Remember to run:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

upon first launch. That will make things a lot easier since the release is rather old by now.

I got some time to explore the Raspbian distro.

 

After seeing all of my efforts, Morfin couldn’t wait to give it a shot.

 

Eventually we got my favorite light-weight print controller github.com/kliment/printrun running an active 3D print. It really was incredible to have a $40 computer connected to the interwebs and sending gcode with a full GUI over python->USB-serial. It’s a bit too slow for computational slicing, but would probably be GREAT for a bot-farm. Note that you should also use pianobar instead of full-blown pithos for pandora audio. Note that the audio worked great after we ran the apt-get upgrades mentioned above.

 

And remember to grab our desktop background! It’s only 1.2 MB.

ShopBot as a 3D Printer: controlled by a RepRap RAMBo

suggested by Kliment via IRC (/ht), the way to have a heavy toolhead moving about in 3D with high speed AND precision is to modify a ShopBot instead of a Rostock. Recall, the Darwin suffered this design challenge which led to the Mendel.

With RAMBo bypassing the stock motherboard we can drive the ShopBot to scary speeds (10x faster in XY and 100x faster in Z.). Precision should also be ~10x better than belt-driven motion, but needs more fine tuning.

and did i mention it was freaking awesome?

My ShopBot RAMBo Marlin firmware branch is available via GitHub (of course). Follow along in the GitHub log to understand our process.

Thanks to ShopBot and Ultimachine for all your help and schematics!!

Illustrator to OpenSCAD to 3D printing

For Philly Tech Week, I will be showing visitors how to take a shape from Adobe Illustrator into the popular open source CAD program OpenSCAD and make a 3D model suitable for 3D printing.

I’m sure you know Illustrator. It’s the most successful vector drawing program <clarkson>in the world.</clarkson> OpenSCAD is less well known. It is best described as coding for objects. You make a solid with the function cube() and cut a cylinder() out of it with the difference() function, etc. But sometimes you want a more organic or complicated shape to start with. That’s where artist JK Keller stepped in and made a script that automates some of the process for you. What you need for this workshop:

There may not be time to print everyone’s design, but you should go home with something 3D printed.

Monday 4/22 5pm – 10
Gratis and Libre (free)

Hive76, suite 519
915 Spring Garden St
Philadelphia PA 19123

RSVP by commenting below.

Why I’m Registered to be an Organ Donor

 

The critical shortage of organ donors in our healthcare system is the reason I’m registered to be an organ donor and motivates my research to develop suitable replacement technologies in the field of regenerative medicine. Video below! It was an honor and privilege to take part in TEDxYouth@SanDiego, which brought 400 San Diego high school students together to interact and think deeply about the future. It was incredible to speak with so many students who are truly the Architects of the Future.

From TEDxYouth@SanDiego:

Using simple yet illustrative analogies to help non-scientists understand his scientific discovery process, Biomedical Researcher Jordan Miller explains to his young audience how he developed vascular structures through 3-D printing. This exciting research is an important complement to advances medical researchers have made in 3-D printing bioidentical human tissue and organs in the lab. it’s a remarkable prospect for the future of organ transplantation.

Deriving inspiration from a cross section of bread and the sugar structure arcing over his dessert, Dr. Miller describes how he combined his background in regenerative medicine, a passion for the maker movement and reliance on worldwide open sourcing to develop viable 3-D printed vascular systems that he demonstrates actually transporting blood.

Jordan Miller, Ph.D. is a post-doctoral researcher in the Tissue Microfabrication Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania. Involved with the 3-D maker community since its infancy, Jordan uses a 3-D printer in his work in biomedical research and regenerative medicine and credits open-source collaboration and the maker movement as important contributors to the success of his research.