Category: Other

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Summer Project Day (Hackaton) on June 12

Everyone has cool projects they’ve not finished, or ones they’ve not made time to start yet. A Project Day (aka Hackaton) is a day to get together with friends, and finally get some of that stuff done. Have art to finish? A kit you want to build? Some software you need help on? Hive76 will be open 10AM to 10PM, so come by and get some quite, some help, and some comradeship as you work on whatever project you’ve wanted to finish. Little known facts about Hackatons:

  • People being too loud or just socializing will be politely asked to go hang out in the lobby.
  • Desk-sized whiteboards and some markers will be available to help in brainstorming.
  • We will have ‘quite please’ signs. Feel free to take one if you don’t want to be interrupted while you work.
  • If you just want to drop in and help, Hive76 will find something that fits your talents that can help the community.
  • A white board will be reserved for anyone to write what they are stuck on, to help people find tutors or helpers.
  • Lunch will be outside, at about 1PM, for about an hour. Get some sun!
  • People working on open source projects get free lunch!

(Photo CC and by Opacity of PS:One)

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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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Trenton Ave Arts Festival

2009 Kensington Kinetic Sculpture Derby (51)
With all of the excitement and planning taking place in preparation for the Trenton Ave Arts Festival, we forgot to post about it…

Our bad!

So, without further delay, I’d like to announce that Hive76 is going to be representin’ at our first all-day event, this Saturday, May 22nd!

“But what can I expect to see at booth #73?”

For starters, we’ll be teaching folks a little bit about electronic circuits and how to solder, so they can walk away with their very own, custom made in Philly, bike odometer/safety light!

“Seriously? Can it get any better?”

We’re Hive76. Of course it can! If the bike odometer isn’t your thing, how about a not-so-plain safety light? We’ll have an assortment of LED colors on hand to choose from to make a light that blinks at a rate related to how fast your riding!

“Cool! But I don’t like soldering irons, or batteries. What can I do?”

We’re going to have the amazing, vinyl-cutting Craft Robo! Custom cut vinyl stickers to make your sweet ride even sweeter?? Sweet! You’ll even have an assortment of colors to choose from!

“You all must really like bikes. Are you going to buy a 6 person bike with all our loot?”

We do like bikes! So much so, that all of the proceeds from this event are going to fund tech-centric bike classes for kids! This June, Hive76 and Neighborhood Bike Works are going to team up to offer cheap or free classes to kids where they will be making their own bike lights.

“Oh yeah? What else is going on?”

Well, there is a little something called the Kensington Kinetic Sculpture Derby that will be right around the corner…

So be sure to come and check out the Hive76 booth this Saturday, May 22nd, at the Trenton Ave Arts Festival! Do it for the kids!

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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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Hive76 Management Elections – 2010

Here ye. Here ye.
Let it be known the results of the Hive76 Management Election [so far.]
These positions have incumbents and they will roll on through for 6 more months:
Instigator: Far McKon
CTO: Adam K.
Events Coordinator: Jack Zylkin (This is a kind of a new position.)

But there has been a change in the Secretary where “lame duck” Adam E. has decided not to run again. The candidates were Dan and Chris and Chris was chosen. [and so I get to blog more I guess]

Also, Philip will be taking over for Brian as Bookkeeper and ran unopposed.

Lastly, the voting was a tie for Quartermaster between PJ and Brendan, so we will be re-voting.

Thanks for the hard work past management peeps, and here’s to a good future new management!

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Symmetry Design for 3D printing

Printed half-object. Print its mirror image (see instructions above), then glue together.

If you are designing objects for printing on MakerBot, the convention is to not try to print anything with overhangs. Well, what if you really want to? Simple… just cut your object in half, digitally. If you design with symmetry in mind, you can save yourself a whole lot of time and effort. Design and model half of your object. Print it out. Then invert your x or y axis, and print again. Bang, you get the exact mirror image of the first half-object. You won’t have to do any more modeling, processing, skeining, or converting to .s3g. bonus is that a single .s3g file on your SD card will be able to print both the left and right half-object. you will need to glue them together at the end, but this trick is most useful if your object has a lot of overhangs when trying to print it in one-shot. Just glue or epoxy them together to get a complete object.

This works really well for sphere-like (not quite spherical) objects, such as heads. See here: Symmetry Design — Blender Monkey Suzanne

Symmetric Monkey Head Print

Best of all, editing your hardware settings to flip either the X or Y axis means you can print the same .s3g file twice, once for each “half-face” of the object. Because the gcode is identical, this will always necessarily produce an exact mirror image.

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Guitar Effects Workshop – DIY PCB Etching – Monday, May 3rd @ 7:30pm

PCB Toner Transfer

This coming Monday at our monthly Guitar Effects Study Group we will be hosting a workshop on fabricating your own printed circuit boards at home. We will discuss a few of the different ways to transfer a PCB layout to a bare copper-clad board, including the toner transfer method, and show you how to make your own etchant out of chemicals you can find at your local hardware store. We will be providing a few small designs and a blank PCB so you can etch a board to take home with you. If you have a specific board that you would like to make during the workshop, just send us the layout files before the class so we can evaluate the feasibility of etching them with this process. There are a ton of circuit board layouts available for free online, so if you have a specific project in mind, let us know and we can help you find a design that might work for you.

Since we will be working with chemicals, you probably don’t want to wear your best clothes, and try to bring rubber gloves and safety goggles. We normally order pizza about halfway through the night. We would appreciate a $5 donation for materials we are providing for this class, but if you can’t afford that, don’t let that keep you from coming out. There’s plenty of material for everyone. If you have any questions before the class, feel free to email us. See you Monday!

For music-specific circuits, check out the following links:
http://www.generalguitargadgets.com/
http://runoffgroove.com/
http://geofex.com/

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Pictures, or it didn’t happen!

With the recent formation of Hive76’s Flickr pool, I thought I would take the opportunity to post some of the great pictures we’ve been capturing during our Teh Art of Electronics (sic,TM) sessions!

Originally designed to be a book study group, our introductory offering on the subject has morphed into quite the full-fledged intro course! Thanks to our resident gurus, the curious world of electronics has begun to unfold for some of Philadelphia’s creative minds. As a starting point, our students have learned about the relationships between charge, voltage, current, and power. We’ve since moved on to more complex topics and hope to finish out with learning about creating sensors!

So, if you’ve got some pictures of the space, or the the folks here at Hive76, and would like to share them with us, take a minute to hop on Flickr and join the group!

Hope to see you at our next [ open_house || class || event ] !

Disclaimer: These particular photos were taken with my phone, so please excuse the graininess for now. I’ll be sure to improve their quality with a better camera in the coming sessions.

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Herbie Hancock on Sesame Street

The worlds funkiest electrical engineering major  shows the Sesame Street kids the joys of technology and music! Check it out!

Also, check out him and Q talking shop about rad 80s synth technology here.

Though I’m personally more of a fan of his 70’s work with analog and electro-acoustic instruments: here and here

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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.