This weekend is filled with awesome events LVL1 is a part of.
Friday is Actor’s Theatre of Louisville rooftop concert. We are labeled as AWESOMENESS on the flyer. Several members of LVL1 will be showing off projects at the event. There will be bands, art, music and a cash bar on the roof of the Actor’s Theatre parking garage.
Saturday afternoon between 1pm and 5pm we will be hosting Mitch Altman and Jimmie Rodgers for their traveling electronics workshop. Mitch and Jimmie are currently touring Midwest hackerspaces, teaching electronics and soldering to anyone interested *for free*. Mitch is the inventor of the TV-B-Gone, Trip Glasses, a founder of Noisebridge in San Francisco, widely regarded as a pioneer of Virtual Reality and all around cool guy. Jimmie Rodgers is a full time hacker, maker and circuit bender. He sells kits for Open Heart v2.0, Atari Punk Console and LoL shield. Instruction is free and they are selling kits for attendees to build *at cost of materials* in the $10-$30 range. LVL1 is excited to have them!
And this Sunday night at the Rudyard Kipling I will be performing my homemade synthesizers in my band Nzambi.
By request, this is the thank you email posted to the list:
Hello all,
Last night’s Open Haus was such an overwhelming success that I didn’t
have a chance to thank everyone properly.
Thank you to Kwau-La-Waul Properties and the Zink family for leasing
us such a fantastic space. Steve Jr. did a great job doing the build
out for us. They put in the new walls, plumbing, A/C, electric and
replacement doors windows.
Thank you to bluegrass.net for providing the internet connection and IPs gratis.
Thank you to Matt Frassica at the Courier-Journal for coming out to
check out what we’re doing.
Thank you to the Collexion members who came up to help us celebrate.
Thank you to everyone who brought projects to show off!
Most importantly, thank you to all the founding members who’ve
contributed their knowledge, time and finances to make LVL1 a reality.
The contributions are too many to mention, so I won’t even bother. It
takes a leap of faith to try and bootstrap a community like ours
without any guarantee of success. You are heroes, every last one of
you.
9 short months ago, Brian and Mark put out a post to see who else in
Louisville was interested in starting a hackerspace like the other
spaces popping up all over the US. People showed up. And they kept
showing up. We self-organized and came up with a plan to bootstrap
this thing. The plan worked! 9 short months from nothing but an idea
to an awesome real physical space.
The first question I always get when I talk about what LVL1 is
doing… What exactly is a hackerspace? It’s a surprisingly difficult
question to answer. I think it has something to do with computers and
electronics… These spaces are so conceptually new, that there isn’t
a lot of history to help define them. The best I can think of is to
offer analogies. Musicians need venues to perform at. Basketball
players need courts to play on. Painters need galleries to show off
their work. Skateboarders need skateparks to show off their tricks.
Poets need open mic nights to read their work. etc. etc. Tinkerers,
makers, hackers, programmers and engineers need hackerspaces to work,
learn, share and socialize. Computers and electronics alone touch
almost every facet of our modern lives, so the breadth of possible
projects is incredibly large. And a hackerspace can be much more than
just computers and electronics. I think that was demonstrated by the
wide variety of projects on display last night!
Now that we have our space, let’s move boldly forward. Our success as
a hackerspace should be measured by the good times we have, the
friends we make and the great projects we create. Remember all the
things that have helped us build a great community and keep doing
them. Go out of your way to be open and welcoming to new members.
Share what you know. If you want something to happen, take the lead to
make it happen. Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know. Figure
out where to start, be prepared to fail, readjust and try again. All
of the democracy and voting in the world is no substitute for a
healthy culture of learning and doing.
Thanks again. I looking foward to this time next year, when we can
look back and again be pleasantly surprised by what has been
accomplished.
I will now officially exercise the sole privilege of my office and
redesignate my LVL1 title from “Chief Tyrant of the Collective Will”
to “Micro Colonel”.
The dust is still settling and the space is still coming together, but please join us for our first open house meeting. Check out the space and see some of our member’s projects. Socialize with fellow tech-minded makers and hackers. Celebrate the end results of a 9 month sprint that took us from an idea to an actual space for Louisville to call it’s own!
Last thursday night, a tragic event occurred. My bandmate’s Nord Lead 2 synthesizer darted in front of a car and was run over. Crushed, mangled and inoperational.
Before:
He brought the wreckage over to my place Friday night. I worked a little synth triage and was able to get it banged out and functioning. Some hammering, superglue, resoldering to a busted power supply and it lives again!
After:
I’m calling it the Nord Bleed. It’s completely operational and playable. The high C key was pulverized beyond repair, so I left it off. I need to source some replacement potentiometers and knobs. The are all 100ohm pots, but have an uncommon 4mm D-shaft I haven’t found a replacement for yet. Once the bent and snapped pots are replaced it will be 100% tweakable again. I have much respect for the Swedes at Clavia and their roadworthy (literally) engineering.
This past weekend I experimented with dyeing some etched PCBs. I used Rit dye easily found in grocery stores. It was quick and dirty. I just boiled some water, mixed in a heavy concentration of black dye and let it sit for a couple of hours.
The dye worked well enough. Rather than just soaking in a cooling dye, I should have been applying a constant heat and agitating the solution in order to get a darker saturation. And when removing flux after soldering the board, dye came off as well. But in general this is a promising way to make nicer looking DIY PCB boards in the future.
We’ll be meeting tonight at Heine Bros in St. Matthews as usual. Lease details are being worked out for our new space on Broadway. We’ll be planning details for our move in to the space. We’ll also have a report from those who visited Maker Faire this past weekend.
As always; makers, hackers and curious bystanders are welcome to come check us out.
