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.

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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Brad and I created Mind over Melon. Ever since I was a boy, I’ve dreamed of exploding things with my mind. At LVL1, we now have the technology to make this dream come true. Using a hacked Star Wars Force Trainer, Arduinos, XBees and a solenoid valve, we’ve developed Mind over Melon. It’s a game where you focus your mind to an intense level of concentration; and explode a watermelon. It’s a combination of David Cronenberg’s classic sci-fi film “Scanners” and Gallagher.

We will be welcoming new players to try Mind over Melon this Saturday at Bernheim CONNECT. Please come out and pop some melons with your mind.

Here I am on WHAS Great Day Live playing Mind Over Melon. I suspect this mind-controlled watermelon explosion is a television first.

Team Sign ups here: http://lvl1makefoodnotwar2012.eventbrite.com/

It’s time for another 24 hour hackathon!

This October, from Saturday the 20th to Sunday the 21st, pit your building skills against 9 other teams attempting to assemble the finest food-flinging machines in the world!

Your challenge is to build a machine in 24 hours (or less) that can fling the tastiest foodstuff the longest distance with the most style.  Teams can bring in any supplies they want (up to $150 worth– We will be asking for receipts at the door!), but you can’t put anything together until the start of the competition.  From then on out, it’s a free-for-all to build your contraption using the supplies you’ve brought in alongside the supplies at the LVL1 hackerspace.

As with last time, buy only one ticket per team!  One ticket gets your entire team in the door! Try to think of a team name before you show up!

At the end of the competition, teams will judge eachother in the following categories:

• Taste: How delicious is it, after being flung?
• Distance: How far did you fling it?
• Ingenuity: How well-built was your flinger? How crazy?
• Appearance: Is your food recognizable on the other end?

The rules:

• $150 budget, not counting parts from the boneyard at LVL1
• Must be built in 24 hours (nothing preassembled!)
• Team size is unlimited (in either direction), but 3-6 is recommended

Sign up for the workshop HERE: http://lvl1arduinobeyond.eventbrite.com/

Workshop is BYOA (bring your own arduino).

Another Arduino workshop at LVL1!

On August 26th, from Noon to 4pm, we’re going to cover software on the Arduino.

This is different from other workshops we’ve done on Arduino.  We’ll cover the IDE, built-in Libraries, their uses and pitfalls.  We’ll go over the current Arduino sheild ecosystem, investigate embedded C best-practices, and more!

This workshop will be strictly BYOA (bring your own Arduino), and will run about 4 hours.  Feel free to stick around afterwards to ask any questions we didn’t cover.  Buy your Arduino from Radioshack, Sparkfun, or any number of other online vendors.  Bring your laptop and a USB cable, and we’ll make the Arduino sing.

Here’s a detailed list of topics covered:

• What is a Microcontroller?
• What training wheels does Arduino provide?
• What are sheilds?
• What are libraries?
• Getting into the IDE
• Blinkenlights
• Built-in Peripherals
• Pitfalls
• Basic embedded C techniques
• Going beyond Arduino

All the necessary equipment to make reliable solar panels is now set up at LVL1.  This includes a custom built oven with a vacuum sealing system capable of making panels up to 15×21 inches, but no worries for bigger projects individual panels can be wired together in series or parallel and with the right framing anything is possible.  A further break down of this oven and the panel making process is coming in the future.  Along with the oven a tile saw has been set up with a 0.015″ thick diamond blade.  This saw can be used to cut scrap or non-scrap of mono or poly crystalline solar cells into usable custom sizes to fit the needs of various projects.  The only other equipment needed to make a panel is a soldering iron, which LVL1 has plenty of.  Only some materials for making solar panels will be available the rest will need to be purchased.  For more info contact Sam Ellis at srelli02@louisville.edu.

The set up:

Example of a solar panel made using the equipment followed by a table of its performance characteristics:

Isc:   0.4485 A

Voc:   16.8 V

PowerMax:  5.1 W

Imax:  0.3845 A

Vmax:  13.28 V

Fill factor:  0.6697

% Efficiency:  12.36%

Introducing a useful SOPA- The Stop Online Productivity Avoidance box.

After having an extremely productive day on January 18th, I had a thought: What if every day were January 18th? Well, at the push of a button, now it can!

The button, switch, and display are wired to an Arduino.  The Arduino communicates with a python script running on the router, which controls a Squid3 proxy blacklist.  In SOPA mode, the whole of the internet is my oyster.  In NOPA mode, however, distracting websites like reddit, hacker news, and hackaday are blocked.  This isn’t very useful without a great deal of self control, however.  In weaker instances, nuclear mode must be employed.  Turn the key switch and press the button and all distracting sites are blocked for one hour.  The only recourse is to restart the router, but the router requires 15 minutes to restart, blocking the entirety of the web for the duration.  Overriding nuclear mode is not appealing.

All code is posted online at https://github.com/Zuph/SOPA-Box

A video demonstration and more pictures of construction lie below the break.

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Signup at EventBrite http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2562787366

After the popularity of Butterscotch I seem to have got a reputation for adding fire to things (even though it was FireTim that did the pyro half of Butterscotch).  So when the Mythbusters posted a link to a fire breathing pumpkin I was bombarded with questions about when I would be building one.  Not being the type to do what others expect me to do I rejected the idea of doing a pyro pumpkin outright.

Though I was set on not building a fire breathing pumpkin it did make me think about building other things inside of a pumpkin.   Then it hit me just two days before Halloween. I needed to build a pumpkin that would forcefully deliver candy to Trick-or-Treaters much in the same way they would deliver eggs to my house if I did not provide candy to them.  From that point on I had a mission. Throwing sleep and other responsibilities to the wind I went to the bowels of the LVL1 bone yard to hack together a candy launching pumpkin.

After design concessions due to time and help from fellow LVL1ers (thanks FireTim and Jon the Kilted) I was able to defend my house this year.  Although I never saw the pumpkin Mythbusters link and I am sure it is cool I considered this a spite project similar to JAC 101 Micro-Laser Cutter.  I just hope everyone enjoys it as much as I enjoyed making it.

I have posted an instructable for this project to help others defend themselves next All Hallows’ Eve… but really, why wait.  Go to that instructable and start defending yourself for Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, or Christmas.  There is nothing like a fruitcake chucking Santa to keep those damn carolers at bay.

IT’S TIME FOR A LVL1 MEGA-WORKSHOP!

Sign up now on EventBrite:http://lvl1summercamp2011.eventbrite.com

This summer only, at the LVL1 hackerspace in Louisville, KY, you can learn how to Design, Etch, Solder and Program your very own microcontroller project.

This series of four workshops will take place across every Saturday in June, from 1pm to 5pm.  The first Saturday, you’ll learn how to use EagleCAD to route PCBs for manufacture.  No more perfboard!

The second Saturday, you’ll learn how to use dangerous chemicals to turn a blank copper board into a functional AVR programmer!  With this clone of LadyAda’s USBTinyISP, you’ll be able to program almost ever AtTiny and AtMega chip ever manufactured, freeing you from the surly bonds of the Arduino develoment environment.

The third Saturday, you’ll learn extremely useful skills in prototyping with surface mount components, soldering tiny parts on to the boards you etched the week previous.  Surface Mount soldering is  an important skill, as projects and parts get smaller and more powerful.

Finally, on the fourth Saturday, you’ll learn how to program a CapsLocker, a nefarious device which masquerades as USB keyboard.  This device is capable of entering any key sequence at any interval, super useful for makinG SURE YOUR MARK ALWAYS TYPES LIKE THIIS.  Or p#erha#ps #ann#o#yin# him# in ##eve#n #mo#r#e interes#ting #ways.

If you want to enroll in all four workshops, purchase the four-pack and the four pack only!  If you’d like to participate in just the etching and building, purchase the “Etching It and Soldering It” ticket.  If you’d like to participate in any just the Eagle or Programming workshop, without the fun parts to take home, simply purchase those tickets separately.  If you’re confused, or would like any combination of the above workshops, contact us!

LVL1 members, you get a discount! Contact the appropriate authorities!

Sign up now on EventBrite:http://lvl1summercamp2011.eventbrite.com