LVL1′s New Year’s Resolution is to “make more makers!” We are offering not one, but TWO new Makerships to start off 2012! Through private donations from LVL1 membership, we have raised funds to award $100 of project financing and 3 months of LVL1 membership to TWO worthy makers!

The Makership recipient gets $100 for project materials like arduinos, sensors, electronic components, laser cutter materials, conductive fabric, EL wire, software, books, 3D printer filament, tools, bits, odds, ends or whatever else you might need.

The LVL1 membership gives you access to our 40W laser cutter, Makerbot 3D printer, woodworking tools, electronics tools, metal mill, computers, electronic surplus and much more.

DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS IS JANUARY 31, 2012

A Makership is a $100 project stipend and 3 months worth of LVL1 membership dues awarded to an individual in the Louisville area. We recognize that potential makers with limited financial resources often are unable to afford any membership rates- no matter what the discount might be. Similarly, the cost of materials to develop a cool project can be just out of reach to those strapped for cash. Our makership program seeks to eliminate these financial hurdles and get makers making!

We award our makerships to applicants who can put together the best pitch for (1) what they want to make and (2) how they plan to do it. Your project could be anything from an electronic gadget, to an open source software project, to a citizen science project, to a fire-breathing robotic pony, or (hopefully) a project we haven’t imagined. We want LVL1 to be the place where these things are made! LVL1 makerships are open to anyone whom could benefit from our community and resources to make something great.

For more information on applying for a LVL1 Makership click here.

Do you want to see this Makership program succeed? You can help LVL1 provide more Makerships with a small donation of $5/mo. We will announce a new Makership as soon as the donation funds make a new one available! Click the Paypal donate button below to contribute to a Makership:

LVL1 community member Tim G. and his wife created this great ghostbusters costume for their son Harper.

I have attached the schematic for the proton pack lights.  I used a 6V lantern battery as part of the pack so I didn’t need a voltage regulator.  The flashlight has a separate 9V battery located in the gun and 6 white LEDs.

I used these plans for the pack:  http://www.gbfans.com/equipment/plans/norm-gagnon/ although many parts had to be swapped out for similar items that were half the size.

The main structure of the pack is made from black coroplast since I had some on hand.  In fact I made the whole pack aside from the straps using items I had lying around.  For sounds I mounted a small mp3 player on the gun and used the 6V battery to power a set of USB powered PC speakers.

PROTON.SCH.1

UPDATE: Attendance registration is now full.

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2001740259

LVL1, KSTC, the Louisville Metro Inventors Council and Enterprise Corp are joining forces like a techno-entrepreneurial Justice League to teach makers how to make money, and maybe make Louisville more awesome in the process. From Tinkering to Commercialization – A “How To” Guide is a workshop set up for hardware hackers and inventors that teaches the ins and outs of bootstrapping and commercializing your designs for fun and profit.

Attendees will be introduced to the basics of how to take one’s projects from the garage to commercialization. Speakers will include Tendai Charasika of GLI’s EnterpriseCorp, Alex Frommeyer of Louisville Metro Inventors Council, and Ben Jennings of the Kentucky Science & Technology Corporation (KSTC). This will be a presentation and Q&A, with an emphasis on prototype manufacturing.

This past weekend LVL1 traveled north en masse to The Henry Ford for 2011′s Maker Faire: Detroit. LVL1 would like to extend a heartfelt thanks to all the staff and organizers who made this event possible. Great work!

We’d like to thank OmniCorp Detroit and i3 Detroit for their hospitality. Your members put in a lot of work to welcome spacers from all over the Midwest. A thousand thanks and in case you are wondering, we burned those pants.

Thank you to all the other spaces that we met and hung out with. Our spacer community is strong and is overflowing with goodwill. We love you all. If you find yourself in Louisville, our door is open and we’ll keep a soldering iron warmed up for you.

This was our first time there as a hackerspace (we’re only a year old), but we were well represented. LVL1 managed to spread ourselves out to 4 different exhibition areas!  There was the LVL1 table with ongoing hackerspace projects. White Star Balloon, our Pow-Pow-Powerwheels car “Steve” and Butterscotch: the fire-breathing robotic pony.

LVL1 was honored with the Maker Faire Editors Choice Awards for 3 entries.

White Star Balloon: It’s the little robotic balloon taking flight for a record-setting voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Talk with this team for 5 minutes and your jaw will drop in awe when you hear how ambitious this project is. These intrepid hackers have worked tirelessly to overcome the challenges of an unmanned flight through the upper reaches of the jet stream. Automated ballast systems, cryogenic chambers, weather simulations, satellite communications, Mission Control, FAA comms and the list goes on and on. The team gets special props for designing a new dry ballast system from scratch, with only a week’s notice! Good hustle people! White Star Balloon is a triumph of citizen science, dogged engineering and flow charts. Congratulations, and we’ll see you on the other side of the Atlantic. Edit: WSB won 2 Editor’s Choice Awards.

Plasma Arc Speaker: It’s a speaker with a spark gap tweeter and it’s name is Thor. There’s nothing quite like the fidelity of a 6000V arc of plasma. Paul performed a tremendous week-long rush to get a new speaker housing built with upgraded contacts and high-voltage transformer. It was more trigonometry than he signed up for, but he pushed it through. Many visitors to the LVL1 table came by to rock out, see how it works and burn paper in the plasma arc. They had no idea how much danger they were in.

Butterscotch:  20% macabre skinned robotic pony child’s toy, 10% Wii nunchuck I2C debugging, 10% flame-thrower, and 60% safety afterthoughts. Your video was posted on BoingBoing with a representative sample of LVL1 membership. It deserves a Venn diagram of utilikilts, mohawks, and pink attire. Overlord Butterscotch is a fire-breathing pony who captured the hearts of thousands of makers, but only singed a few. Better luck next year! Edit: Butterscotch also received 2 Editor’s Choice Awards.

Again, thank you to everyone that made Detroit Maker Faire possible. See you in 2012!

Come join us for a LVL1 Open Haus on Saturday, July 2nd, to help celebrate all the great things we’ve made this past year. Expect food, libations and lots of things to geek out about! Starts at 7pm. All are welcome!

Margaritas!
Sumobot competition!
Soldering areas with TV-B-Gone and Mintiboost kits!
…and more developing with some surprises to boot!

Flyer PDF
Flyer Inkscape SVG File

More updates will be posted soon; including photos and schematics.

Intro to OpenSCAD

This Wednesday at 7pm we’ll be hosting a Intro to OpenSCAD workshop. If you’ve been wanting to make stuff on the MakerBot but didn’t know where to start, this is the class to attend! OpenSCAD is a free open source 3D modeling program that uses scripting instead of your typical graphical elements. While editing text files to do anything graphical is counter intuitive at first it can be very quick and effective once you learn the basics. (It also works a lot better on small notebook screens)

This class will focus on creating simple 3D models with only a few key dimensions. When prototyping a part only a handful of dimensions actually matter and the rest are derived somehow from those key dimensions. For example, when making a coupling to fit two pipes together the outer diameter of the coupler doesn’t matter, only the inner diameter and wall thickness of the coupler do. Instead of manually setting the outer diameter OpenSCAD allows dimensions to be derived from formulas (in this case, inner_diameter+2*wall) so that when one of the key dimensions is updated the rest of the part updates automatically.

I will also cover importing and using drawings from Thingiverse (why reinvent the wheel when you can copy someone elses?) and the basics of using the MakerBot for those who wish to print their drawings/test their patience.

Requirements:
Computer with OpenSCAD (we have a few people can use, but not too many)
Basic Algebra
Trig is optional but very helpful
$5 Attendance fee (will go towards LVL1)

Here are some anaglyph photos of LVL1′s White Star Balloon Team recent launch attempt of Speedball-1. You see LVL1 transformed into White Star Mission Control, balloon construction areas, unpacking Speedball-1 at the Spaceport Indiana launch site. ALL IN 3D! Courtesy of Gary!

This is a velocity sensitive MIDI isomorphic keyboard. 192 total keys. The project came out of Louisville Soundbuilders, a fortnightly meeting of circuitbenders, synth engineers and experimental musicians. After seeing a couple of my failed variations of a single-bus isomorphic keyboard, Tim was intrigued enough to design one even better. He designed multiple PCBs that sandwich together with multiple switch types for velocity sensitive keypresses.

More development on the way! We’re working on molds/methods for making hexagonal keycaps. And I’m working on an Arduino-based controller as an alternative to the midibox controller Tim has working already.

Watch the progress at http://soundbuilders.lvl1.org