Category: Cool Projects

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Hive76 Celebrates the Birth of Our Third 3D Printer!

Adam K. works on getting axis movement on the RepRap Huxley

Back in 2009, we ordered our first 3D printer, the MakerBot Cupcake. Since then, we’ve become pros at fixing, modifying, and mostly breaking it. We’ve even created new, awesome products for it which have been adopted by a good portion of the 3D printing community, and even sold by MakerBot themselves.

Shortly after completing our Makerbot, once-member fynflood decided to start building the RepRap Mendel, which is the 2nd generation of the RepRap Project’s 3D printer. He started by printing all of the pieces on our MakerBot, which took over 20 hours to complete, and gathered all of the required hardware with help from many of our members. A printer was born out of Hive76, and life was good. A few months later, there was a post on the reprap aggregation pipe about a new iteration of the reprap, called the Mendel Mini (now the RepRap Huxley), which has a similar build volume to the MakerBot, but can be assembled for under half the cost. Fynflood set out to print the parts on his Mendel, while I gathered all the required hardware and electronics. After a few months break over the summer, and a few more months being busy with the Holidays, the Huxley is now complete! Our printer’s baby made a baby!

At this very moment, we have 2 MakerBots and the Huxley all going at the same time at the space! If any more printers show up, we’ll probably have to start giving away USB Typewriters just to make room! Really, it’s an exciting time to be printing at Hive76, so if you have any interest in learning how 3D printers work, or even building your own, come by for open house on Wednesdays and check out all the awesome things we’re making!

Hit the jump for a few videos and images from the first few prints!

Continue reading “Hive76 Celebrates the Birth of Our Third 3D Printer!”

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Weekend Itinerary

the Atari Punk Console

This is a busy weekend for Hive76, with classes and guest speakers and projects out the whazoo, so if you can manage to dig your way out of your snowy sarcophagus, come on down and see what’s happening.

  • Friday, Jan 28th – At 6pm tonight, we’re having a new member orientation meeting. This will be one of the first times we’ve had so many new people join at one time to warrant a specific “orientation”. This event is open to new members as well as any old ones who would like to get more involved at the space. Afterwards, we are going out to a nearby restaurant for dinner and drinks.
  • Saturday, Jan 29th – From 10am to 4pm we are running our “Making Things Blink and Buzz” class ($40, kit materials included) with Far McKon. This class is a hands-on workshop for building fun noisemakers without getting bogged down in drawn-out mathematics and electronics theory. A couple of seats still remain open and we do take last-minute entries if you are paying cash-at-the-door.
  • Sunday, Jan 30th – From 5PM to 8PM we are running a special open house for analog audio hacking. This is an open house for anyone of any skill level to mess with audio electronics. The event is free, you may bring your own materials, or beginner audio kits ($15 – $30) are available to get you started. A few very knowledgeable geeks—Jimmie P. Rogers, circuitbender and designer of a popular Atari Punk Console kit, and our very own Brendan Schrader, cohost of our Guitar Effects Class—are on hand to help out with more advanced projects.

This is just the start to our new year of classes and workshops. We have a few exciting events currently in planning stages, including a workshop on Rapid Prototyping and a series of workshops on Mixed Drinks and Molecular Gastronomy. Also, don’t forget our weekly open houses, every Wednesday at 8pm, where you can meet our current members, get to know everyone, and join our ranks yourself. Members get discounts on classes and kits!

(ed: snafu on list of attending “experts” fixed)

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Laser Pledgie update

We still want a laser, but now we have a bit more of a focus. Much like the open source hardware Makerbot is for printing, Lasersaur will be an open source laser cutter.

lasersaur
Lasersaur

Hive76 really wants to make one! So we have adjusted the pledgie where we are collecting donations to match the new goal: $2000. Here’s the cost breakdown:

  • $570 Lasersaur Alpha kit: optics, electronics, belts, fasteners
  • $500 Extruded aluminum rails
  • $700 Fume extractor for exhaust
  • Remaining funds for unseen costs
  • Free: Laser tube from Meatcards, Stepper motors from Meatcards or elsewhere, Paneling is nominal.

As before, your pledge will be rewarded with laser time at a dollar per minute. Also, any $10 pledge gets some not-yet-designed lasercut trinket!
Let’s make it happen!
Click here to lend your support to: Laser Cutter and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !

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We Won the Open Science Design Contest

We won!
We won!

Great news, The Citizen Science Quartely just picked the winner for the Open Science Design Contest, and:
WE WON!!!!!!!!1111!!111one

You can read more about the original entry HERE.

We’ll be using the Ponoko gift certificate to design a housing for the electronics and make it more kit-able. Bench Science FTW!

And definitely check out the Kickstarter for The Citizen Science Quarterly. It’s shaping up to be a really interesting mix of Bench Science in the DIY spirit. From the Kickstarter page:

“We’d like to create a magazine for the scientist in all of us.

It will have simple How-To’s, like extracting the DNA of a strawberry using kitchen materials. But on the next page could have a paper on the validity of using Bacillus Subtillus as a model organism. We’d feature extraordinary citizen scientists who are doing extraordinary things in abnormal labs (aka garages, closets, etc). We’d also give legal and safety tips to inform and protect citizen scientists from some of the dangers they could run into.”

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Open Source Orbital Shaker

Open Source Orbital Shaker
Open Source Orbital Shaker

Here is my entry for the Open Call for Open Science Equipment Contest.

I did this with help from Mike, Jack, Rob, Adam and others right here at Hive76. Thanks everyone!

Details and all source files for this project are available on Thingiverse.

The deadline for submission is December 15th, so if you have an idea for open source equipment you still have some time to submit your entry to the contest!

Open Source Orbital Shaker from jmil on Vimeo.

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Multithreaded Banjo Dinosaur Knitting Adventure 2D Extreme

Along with being highly neighborly, and slightly insane Travis Goodspeed is also great reverse engineer. He is consistently a bringer-of-weird things to conferences (and the parties that inevitably follow). Many of those cool & weird things are objects designs and/or builds himself.

So It’s not a huge surprise to see him hacking on an amazing collaborative project to make an interactive tapestry creating game. As far as I can tell, as people play the game the winners custom designed image is added to the end of the tapestry. The game appears to be an scroller/shooter game, which is controlled by waving around RFID tags. Geez. And here I was, thinking having #15 high score on Hive’s Spy Hunter machine was cool. One more amazing projects from an awesome Philly resident.

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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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OpenHatch at UPenn this weekend

If you aren’t already going to Maker Faire NYC, or setting up an antenna with Promethus Raido in Hudson, NY this weekend, there is also going to be a FOSS Hackathon in Philly this coming weekend.

If you use open source software and want to give back to the community, here is your chance. Or, if you have some UI, design, or human interface skill and want to work on a project used by thousands or millions, Open Source software *always* needs design, UI, and layout help. Always. I mean, have you even looked at GIMP?