On Monday, July 15th, at 7pm, LVL1 will be hosting a solder your own TV-B-Gone workshop!  The TV-B-Gone is a great way to introduce yourself to soldering, and hacker culture.  This device will turn off over 230 TVs, from over 100 feet away.  Great fun for the sports bar or electronics store.

Sign ups are here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/6748668449

Only 10 seats are available, so sign up now, reserve your spot, and come down to LVL1 on Monday, July 15th.  You need only bring yourself, everything needed is included in the workshop price of $25!

As many of you are no doubt aware, after almost two years of paperwork, negotiating, and discussions with the IRS, LVL1 is now a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Organization!  This means LVL1 can now accept tax-deductible donations of money and physical items!

This has been an absolutely huge undertaking, from Joe P., filling out our first application, to Chris C. and Mark E. fighting for us every step and speed bump in the road, to Tim M. putting together a donation form and incorporating the responsibility of keeping 501(c)3 records into the office of the treasurer. Everyone in the LVL1 community owes these fine folks (and many more!) their due.

This goal comes with its fair share of responsibility, though.  Each and every one of us in the LVL1 community are responsible for maintaining the requirements of the 501(c)3 code.  We’ve put together a short page here with some rough guidelines: http://wiki.lvl1.org/501c3  As always, if you have any questions concerning our 501(c)3 status, please feel free to email directors@lvl1.org.  The long and short is this: follow the guidelines on the wiki, fill out the appropriate paperwork, mark items donated with a 501(c)3 receipt as 501(c)3 donations, and DO NOT remove 501(c)3 donated items from LVL1.  These items are now LVL1 property!

Again, HUGE thanks to everyone involved in making this happen over the years.  Let’s use this to our advantage, spacers! I’m looking at you, folks who have an employer match on 501(c)3 donations!

So I fail horribly at scheduling, all the streets leading up to LVL1 are all blocked by the Pegasus Parade. I knew something was wrong when people started calling me to park at my place and walk to LVL1. Consequently the OpenSCAD workshop will need to be rescheduled. I will be here tonight (mostly to avoid going back through the crowd to leave) in case anyone was dead set on learning OpenSCAD tonight but the official workshop will be moved to a later date.

It’s probably no secret by now that I am easily amused, but I wasn’t the only one entertained by Ben Douglas’ dry ice set up at the meeting this past Tuesday. With dry ice, soap bubbles and hot water, he created a fun round of bubble popping for everyone. The bubbles squish into clouds of smoke – like magic!

I’ve made a video for my Youtube Channel in case you missed it. Seems like this would be great for science fair projects for young kids. Watch the Video Here.

The Vogt Awards in Louisville are accepting applications for their 2013 round! The organizers have been really inspired by LVL1′s emergence in Louisville. This year they’ve refocused the prize back to Henry Vogt Heuser’s original vision: hardware and manufacturing start-ups. LVL1 also has 2 members serving as mentors for the participants.

DEADLINE IS MAY 17th!!

Program

$20k in seed funding

Access to cutting edge prototyping and manufacturing tools

Mentorship in technology, engineering and business

10-week Course in Manufacturing and Lean Startup

Connections with investors, partners, suppliers, and customers

Demo Day with chance to win an additional $100k

More information and application form at http://www.vogtawards.com/

Henry Vogt Heuser, who died in 1999, was an exemplary corporate citizen and a gifted inventor and entrepreneur. He was a native of Louisville who spent his entire career working for Henry Vogt Machine Company, including 28 years as its president. Whenever Henry had an idea about how to make something better, quicker, or easier, all he had to do was walk out to the shop floor to assess its viability and commercial potential. The endowment he created to establish this award will allow engineers and entrepreneurs to access the same kinds of resources.

The Vogt Award is intended not only to memorialize Henry’s legacy, but also to inspire more inventors to pursue their goals right here in Louisville.

Other things of note:

Please pass this around to other hackers, makers, hackerspaces, and engineers!

LVL1 is lucky enough to play hosts to the folks at the Kentucky Open Source Society (http://kyoss.org/), and many of them have become hugely involved members of the larger LVL1 community.  Lately, some of the guys from KYOSS have been working on MOSSCon, the Midwest Open Source Conference.  We’re proud that LVL1 could play a small part in getting Louisville’s first open source conference off the ground.  If you’re someone who’s interested in Open Source Software, this is an event to attend.  It’s going to take place May 18th-19th, and early-bird registration is open now!

Here’s the full scoop on MOSSCon:

MOSSCon 2013

There will be another OpenSCAD workshop May 2nd at 8pm. This will be an intro class on how to use OpenSCAD to make functional drawings to print on the 3D printers. For those unfamiliar with OpenSCAD it is a 3D modeling program that uses scripts to define objects so you draw by writing code, not by using your mouse.

There are no signups or cost for this workshop, just show up with a laptop with OpenSCAD pre-installed and be ready to learn.

This weekend, we were lucky enough to have Sonny Mounicou come up from Memphis to teach a workshop on building a Prusa i2 3D printer.  10 people were in attendance, and everyone walked out with a working 3D printer!

The workshop was a grueling 24 hours, running from 8am to Midnight on day one, and 8am to 4pm the next day.  By the end of the workshop, though, everyone was slinging plastic!  Aaron was talented enough to be printing cubed gears after a mere 14 hours!

A big thanks to Jon from SeeMeCNC, who came in to help out with the workshop.  He also managed to sell a couple of printers while he was at the space! And an absolutely huge thanks to Gerrit, who kept us all fed throughout the event.  May no build-off ever go without catering.

Jon from SeeMeCNC (And his huge printer)

Gerrit, Keeping us all alive

Scroll past the break for more pictures of the event, but I’ll wrap it up here by saying that the build was a great event.  10 people in the LVL1 community got to build 3D printers, 2 more people bought 3D printers during the event, and our expertise for printers is growing.  This event even motivated some to start a Louisville-Area Thrug (3D Printer User Group).  If you’re interested in 3D printer, join the conversation here: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/kyin3dprinters

Until then, we’ll be hacking away at our printers.  For those who missed out, don’t despair: Sonny let us know that any time we can get 8-10 people together for a build, he’ll make the drive!

More pictures below the break.

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Over the weekend LVL 1 was host to the Code for America hackathon.  We had a great turnout, there were 18 teams in all.

Everyone was hard at work to produce a working model or prototype of their idea within the time frame.

“The task is to design or prototype an app that helps improve the quality of life in our city,” Mayor Greg Fischer said. “No idea is too strange or too bold. We want to see interesting ideas and innovation at work.”

18 teams offered up some great ideas, from geolocating features in our parks, to a program to manage our power grid by tracking smart phone power usage. The ideas were judged by a 4 person panel and ultimately yielded 3 winners of $5000, $3000 and $2000 for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place. The winning ideas and code will be used by the city to bring the ideas to life.

Congratulations to the winning teams:

First Place: Your Mapper

  Who created “Safety Check” an app for the smartphone.  This app allows the user to see the crimes reported in the area around them.  It also give a safety rating.  Other features of the included detail about certain crimes and a way to notify the nearest police station to report a crime.

Team members include Michael Schnuerle and Eric Roland

Second Place: Forest Giants

 Focusing on bike riding and cycling, this team created an app that would allow the user to easily find bike route around Louisville.  With this app the user could also record their time, speed and route. After each ride the user could then share with other riders to challenge or encourage.  Using GPS riders can find the closest bike loops, view details for each loop, and even allows you to take a picture and report loop hazards. The app could eventually help the city’s bike program determine what areas of town are most popular for rides which might determine where more infrastructure is needed for bike lanes and paths.

Team members include Dave Dveand, Chris Hawkins, Adam Richardson, Ryan Stemen and Ashleigh Chape

Third Place: Clean Up Team
Their app focused on cleaning up Louisville’s graffiti and trash by letting the user take a picture of an area they think needs to be cleaned up.  Their example: if you are walking down the street and see graffiti, you can snap a picture with the app, share it with others and using the power of Facebook, form a team and create an event to clean up and remove the graffiti.

Team members include Troy Harvey, Ashley Revlett, Charles Waddell and Steven Trentham

From reporting crime to cleaning the streets to getting out an seeing one or all of Louisville’s parks, one thing is for sure, Louisville has some bright citizens who want nothing but the best for their city and to be able to share it with all.

This is a cross post from my blog at makeawesomesh.it.  It is a little late but I hope it is still useful. All of the code used can be pulled from this github repo.

The Idea:
This project came out of the Hackathon LVL1 had in June 2012.  The rules were minimal but had a big impact on the end product. The competition ran from noon Saturday till noon Sunday, so 24 hours.  We had access to all of the tools at LVL1 plus we could bring our own tools, but we could not have any of the tools integrated as part of the final project.  Each team was given an Arduino and a bread board.  All other material has to come out of the LVL1 boneyard (this is the collection of stuff that has been donated for the purpose of hacking in any way we wish.)  The goal was to make anything you want.

We had the weeks leading up to the event to look around the boneyard and think about what we thought we could make.  We started with a list of things we wanted to make then limited that down to things we thought we had the parts to make.  We tentatively settled on a 3D scanner.  We knew we had all of the parts to make it but there was no guarantee that they would still be there the day of  the hackathon as the boneyard was still being used normally by the hackerspace.
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