Category: Cool Projects

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Hive76 Intro to Microcontrollers — News From The Front

… Soon, I’m gonna have to switch places with some of the students in the class

…

It was weird to hit the Wednesday Hive Open House and see a handful of original MSP430 projects.  The video above is an LED chaser effect that Chris Thompson whipped up based on concepts from the first session of the MSP430 class.  As the old saying goes — teach a geek to fish and you’ll soon have LED encrusted fish.

Speaking of LEDs, here’s a Morse Code blinker project that Chris did.  Mostly a cut & paste job, but if nothing else, it makes the point that there are plenty of  MSP430 code samples out there and that it’s relatively easy to use them once you know the tools.

Audience

If you are an artist who wants to create small, cost effective interactive systems or a stone geek who wants to actually make a computer do something physical, this is a must-attend course.  We’ll have labs that will show you how to flash gobs of LEDs with just a few IO pins, run stepper motors, read switches, generate sounds, read analog signals and even have MCUs communicate.   You’ll leave with sample code and enough experience to apply this tech  immediately.
…
We’ll be running this class again, for sure.

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Send any questions to: mikehogan62 AT gmail DOT com
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Next HOPE is Next Weekend

The Next HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) conference is next weekend in NYC. Along with Hive76 helping with the Hackerspace Village and the OpenAMD project, there are a bunch of Hive related folks at the conference giving talks or on panels. Below is the quick list of some people you might have run into around Hive or in Philly who are presenting at HOPE and how they are related to our space.

Stephanie Alarcon (board member), Mitch Altman (workshop), Maggie Avener (workshop), Scott Beibin (local vj), Matt Blaze (UPenn professor), cpfr (project), Travis Goodspeed (philly local), Joey Mariano (local musician), Far McKon (officer), Don Miller(local musican), Christina “fabulous” Pei (visitor) , Tiffany Rad(visitor) , Pete Tridish (frequent visitor). And more!

Come to HOPE! Help with the Hackerspace Village! Meet interesting people, and hear about their project! See the RFID awesomesauce. There are still some tickets left, and it’s a train ride + two block from 30th Street Philly to Hotel Penn in NYC.

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The Open Organisation Of Lockpickers (TOOOL) visits Hive

The Open Organization Of Lockpickers (TOOOL) is a non-profit, public advocacy group that encourages people to learn about and play with locks. By understanding lockpicking, people can experience the thrill of an exciting and fun hobby and also be better consumers in the marketplace, basing purchasing decisions on hard fact as opposed to marketing promises.

This month’s meeting of the Mid-Atlantic chapter will take place at Hive76 on Tuesday the 22nd, 18:30. It’s open to all who wish to play and learn in an atmosphere of open disclosure and honest discourse.

Locks, picks, and other tools will be made available. Event open to all with a non-criminal interest in locks. Folks asking nefarious questions or hiding behind childish online nicknames will be asked to leave. 🙂

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Open Beacon or was that Open Bacon?

We have an Open Beacon install currently running at Hive for the next month or so. We are doing some testing and research on what the platform can offer just for the fun of it.

As part of this, we are trying to do some tracking. It turns out that our test setup is compatible with badges from The Last HOPE. If you are in the Philly area and want to play with OpenBeacon, or if you have a badge from The Last HOPE you can lend us, we’d appreciate the help!

(Photo is Creative Commons from Pedro Moura Pinheiro)

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Top S33kert RFID Project

Hey,
A top s33kret RFID project is going on at Hive76, starting next week.
An RFID tag
What I can tell (in a google search-able place) is that It’s a RFID system based on Open Beacon for an event this summer. We could use some hardware hackers, UI/Web/Software folks, and a server wrangler or two. We are meeting next week (Tuesday Night) at an undisclosed location to do some planning for this, and get started. If you think you can spend some time working on this project, email FarMcKon@gmail.com to get the details and get involved.

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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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Hive76 Store – Open For Business!

Good news, kids! We have a store! It’s on the internet!!! That means you can now pay for things like donations, classes, membership dues, and the somewhat delayed but still awesome 2010 Men of Hive76 Calender, all online! We’ve got some really awesome plans in the works for Hive76-designed products, so keep an eye out in the next few months. We also have this rad custom ticketing system, so if you pay for your event before it happens, you’ll get a genuine Hive76 event ticket. They have QR code, people! Worth it!

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Right now we’re accepting PayPal and oldschool cash/checks, but we might add Google Checkout if enough people want it. Feel free to poke around, buy some stuff, send us money, go wild! Most importantly, let us know if there’s something you would like to see or a way we could make the whole experience better. You can leave a comment here or send an email to [orders at hive76 dot org]. kbye!
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Ignite Philly 5!

Have a short attention span? Like to get excited about things? Like to know what awesomeness is taking place right under your feet while enjoying a tasty local beer? Well, you’re in luck, because…

It’s that time again!

Ignite Philly will be making it’s fifth come around next week on Tuesday, March 2nd. Tickets are available for purchase at the low, low cost of $5, and I suggest you pick some up because these events fill up fast! (proceeds benefit an Ignite Philly alum, TBD)

From the Ignite Philly website…

“Ignite Philly is part of a worldwide network that entertains and educates people in short 5 minute bursts. Ignite Philly is the local group, and is our way to highlight great ideas coming to life here in Philadelphia.

Each presenter is on stage for  a total of 5 minutes (20 slides, at 15 seconds each slide). These talks are a ’spark’ if you will, they are lightening fast and leave people with a new idea to mull over and talk about.”

So buy your tickets, and head on over to Johnny Brenda’s next Tuesday!

Doors open at 6PM and the speakers begin at 7.

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Two Carbohydrates, an Alcohol, and an Acid Walk Into a Bar…

Making Bioplastic was just Boinged. What’s going on? Steph requested a bar story explanation, so here goes:

Two carbohydrates, an alcohol, and an acid walk into a bar. The carbohydrates are holding hands, but the acid wants none of it. She breaks them up with hot water in their face and a punch in the gut, then scrams. The skinny alcohol, seeing her chance, gets right between them before they can reconnect.

and there you have it — you’ve just created starch glass!

Starch Molecule, Adapted from Wikipedia

The starch is very very long chains of carbohydrate which normally crystallize to opaqueness. These can be broken (hydrolyzed) by strong acid, in this case white vinegar whose active ingredient is acetic acid. The heat really helps to get the molecules moving and so makes the acid work much faster than it would at room temperature. The heat can actually help water molecules to similarly break up the starch. The glycerol prevents the shortened starch molecules from just recrystallizing again after all the water and acid are boiled off. The glycerol gets physically entrapped between the starch molecules (intercalation). The broken-up starch chains can no longer organize into an opaque solid; they can no longer crystallize. This new highly disorganized, solid arrangement of moderately long molecules becomes translucent and is called a glass.

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MakerBot Hotness Lives at Hive76

We love MakerBot, but we needed a better way to print larger objects (like parts for a Mendel). So I started experimenting in the lab at UPenn for how to get a heated platform up and working on 3D-PO.

The first design involved multiple layers of silicone fused together around a nichrome core. We told MakerBot about it, and they wanted more! Then Eberhard Rensch in Germany heard about it (go Internets!), and he went to town on a simplified software design. Awesome!

Of course the design is very simple, totally open (and transparent!). Hooray for Universities. So Mike and I bought a bunch of materials, refined the design a bit, and made a bunch more platforms. It was pretty risky but we trusted our gut and listened to all the awesome members right here at our favorite hackerspace. And we also made use of plenty of Hive resources to get the job done.

But we had gotten ahead of ourselves a bit… we don’t have the infrastructure to sell/invoice/ship/advertise this type of product. We could build that infrastructure, but we really love the core MakerBot community and don’t want to see market fragmentation. So we shipped them off to MakerBot to sell through their store. Check out this blog post and also the wiki page explaining how it works and how to use it.

It’s been an awesome experience: idea -> it works! -> invest in yourself -> Success!!

And about that Mendel… Fynflood’s assembling like gangbusters, check it out!!