Category: Cool Projects

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A service for instantly selling DIY kits

Humanities major and business guy here. Since joining Hive76, I’ve been blown away by how easy (and fun!) it is to make stuff yourself. But I also noticed that sourcing parts for projects you read about isn’t always that easy.

And – a lot of my friends here have great ideas for DIY kits, but they don’t want to take care of sourcing, shipping, collecting money, etc. Who can blame them? There’d be many more interesting kits out there if someone solved the sourcing problem.

That’s why I launched Kitify a few weeks ago. Kitify makes it easy to document and list a bill of materials for a DIY project (a little like Instructables, but you have control over the presentation), and with one click you can also sell your project as a kit that we put together for you. You tell us what’s needed to build the kit, we sell kits on your behalf, and you get paid.

Kitify was fun to build, I had to learn quite a lot to get it off the ground. Check it out! And if you’re interested in selling a kit, let us know through our contact form and we can either help you get it set up on Kitify, or give you other advice on marketing, logistics, design, and lots of other areas.

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Timelapse: Building a RepRap MendelMax 3D Printer

We got Matt Wettergreen’s MendelMax up and printing in two days. Thanks to all those at Hive76 who helped out with the build, especially Chris, PJ, Brendan, and Rob! Here’s a timelapse from the first day:

Below is a video of the finished bot printing with the latest Marlin firmware (smooth acceleration and fast travel times)! It turns out PLA sticks to a heated aluminum bed provided in the MendelMax kit. Wow. Completely Awesome. I couldn’t believe how little of the heat from the aluminum bed actually radiates away (you can only barely feel the heat an inch off the bed at 75 degrees celsius). That’s a huge feature.

Congrats to the Mike Payson and the MendelMax Team on their inspired Mendel remix. It’s a fantastic RepRap 3D Printer.

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Event: Art Hackathon @ Hive76, March 10th and 11th, 2012

Hive76’s Art Hackathon

March 10th and 11th, 3pm to 7pm

For the second weekend in March, Hive76 is hosting a day of smashing, cutting, gluing, taping, painting, and general making and frivolity. We’re calling it “Art Hackathon”. Inspired by the Bravo TV Series Work of Art, and following closely in the footsteps of Art Hack Day, the event will focus on the rapid creation of meaningful works of art out of a provided supply of recycled materials.

Hive76 will provide massive piles of cardboard, tubs of glue, masking tape, tubs of spackle, box cutter blades, and a few cans of various colors of spray paint, to let every participating individual or team create a work of their choosing. The works will be based on a single theme, to be announced at the beginning of the event.

The event is split across two, four-hour days. While participants are free to use the time as they wish, the time is designed to provide time for planning on and a moderate amount of building on the first day, with some drying and curing time overnight before finishing up the next day.

A fee of $25 per person will be charged at the door, to cover the cost of materials and food that will be provided during the event for both days. Please RSVP for the event before March 6th by emailing smcbeth@hive76.org.

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P3D: 3D Model Viewer in the Browser, No Extensions Required

P3D.in is a new beta service (currently free, prolly will change) for rendering 3D models in the web browser, no flash or plugins required. I guess it works via HTML5?

They only take .obj files at the moment (which you can export to from Blender). It’d be much much more useful if they automatically imported STL files, and all of Thingiverse, among other sites. I’ve logged a bug report and feature request along these lines.

Here’s a yoda head converted to .obj and imported and hosted by P3D in their demo iframe. pretty cool. (NOTE: I guess it needs a while to load in the browser, apparently. So if it’s not showing up yet in your browser, give it a minute).

CONTROLS:
Left click and drag – rotate
middle click and drag – zoom
Right click and drag – translate

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NASA: The Blue Marble, 2012 Edition

NASA: The Blue Marble, 2012. Click the image for full resolution.
NASA: The Blue Marble, 1972. Click the image for full resolution.

NASA today released a crazy high-res reconstructed photograph of the world, 61 megapixels (8,000 x 8,000)… we can finally replace the one from Apollo 17 from 1972.

Here are the deets.

A ‘Blue Marble’ image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA’s most recently launched Earth-observing satellite – Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface taken on January 4, 2012. The NPP satellite was renamed ‘Suomi NPP’ on January 24, 2012 to honor the late Verner E. Suomi of the University of Wisconsin.

Suomi NPP is NASA’s next Earth-observing research satellite. It is the first of a new generation of satellites that will observe many facets of our changing Earth.

Suomi NPP is carrying five instruments on board. The biggest and most important instrument is The Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite or VIIRS.

Image Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

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Art Hack Day in Brooklyn

The MAKE blog recently posted a notice of an event being held this weekend–Art Hack Day–that I find very intriguing. I’ve been bandying about an similar idea, in part inspired by the Bravo Channel’s reality TV series Work of Art. The show has the typical “Top XYZ” format of elimination challenges. What strikes me about the show is that their work space looks very much like a hackerspace, and once the artists settle in to the work format, they start producing some extremely intriguing pieces.

In a lot of ways, the artist’s studio and hackerspaces are very similar; indeed, we here at Hive76 have made a former artist’s studio as our fire-retardant-home-away-from-home here at 915 Studios. So with that in mind, we are putting together a similar event to the Art Hack Day. We would like to make it an open build session with recycled materials. Stay tuned for the full details in an upcoming blog post (honestly, I will write it, really, I will).

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Open call for help from ESR

The GPSd Project

Eric S. Raymond has recently asked for some help from Philadelphia’s DIY and engineering community with an exciting project. Amongst many other interesting projects, ESR is the lead developer on GPSd, a “service daemon that monitors one or more GPSes…”. He needs help building a cheap GPS repeater to forward the RF data from his roof antenna to his test rack in his office. For any student or hobbiest electrical engineers looking to make a name for themselves, this could be an excellent opportunity.

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The JayOscillator

The JayOscillator is the stupid name that I came up with for my HTML 5 synthesizer that I’ve been working on over the last month or so.  I spent a good part of today making it look pretty, though now It works in Chrome and Safari right now. It technically works in FireFox, but the displays for the variables don’t seem to want to open their eyes. Take a look:

The JayOscillator

I named it the “JayOscillator” after the Korg KAOSCILLATOR, as my thing is a similar sort of notion, written in JavaScript.

You can try it out here for now, though no promises that the URL won’t change in the future.

Unfortunately, I think I have to give up on iPad support. Apple nerfed the ability to auto-start HTML 5 audio tags from JavaScript. Without that ability, their is no way I can keep a continuous tone going.

I’m considering rewriting this as a native app, though. Most of the effort here has been in figuring out the math necessary to get this going. Since that work is done, porting to different languages and platforms is more of a chore in API calls.