If you haven’t seen them, these are the new business cards for LVL1. They are located by the stickers. So grab a few and spread the word.

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

Ladies and Gentlemen, you are all cordially invited to LVL1′s 2nd Birthday! We’ve grown tremendously in two short years and we want to celebrate! There will be food, drinks and a jaw-dropping amount of technical wizardry on display. Party starts at 7pm. Come see what we’ve been making!

New to LVL1? Here’s how to find us.

LVL1 is now open again!

There are now 2 port-a-potties at the building. One for boys and one for girls.

MSD and contractor plumbing crews will be active at LVL1 for the next week, while they redo our sewer lines. They say one week, but let’s go ahead and assume 2 weeks.. Access will be through the garage door in the alley. The RFID reader has been moved to the garage door side, to allow RFID entry.

Please be patient with the MSD and plumbing crews while they are working. If they have any questions about access or procedure, direct them to contact our landlord. Don’t try to answer it yourself. The landlord is the point of contact for all the work crews.

Everyone can resume your pulse jets, flame colors, synthesizer building, 3D printering, lasering, space AI or whatever else you’re working on.

Thanks!

Due to some plumbing and drainage problems caused by a sinkhole, LVL1 is temporarily closed as of June 17th, 2012. We are working with MSD and Louisville Metro to resolve the problem and hope to be open to the community again ASAP. Check http://www.lvl1.org for updates and information as they become available. Questions can be directed to info@lvl1.org. We apologize for any inconvenience.

-Management

UPDATE 6/19:

The landlord’s team has has rerouted the roof drain to flow into the
alley itself, rather than continue washing out underneath the alley.

MSD has 4 trucks at our place as I type this. It is confirmed that
buildings in our alley are connected to a previously unmapped sewer
drain going out to Logan St. It is also confirmed that MSD filled this
up with sand, thus leading us to our current unfortunate situation.

MSD is going to be vacuuming out all the sand (from them) and debris
(from rainwater washout) from this newly discovered drainage line.
This is going to happen either today, or at the latest tomorrow. It
depends on how long it takes them to mark all the utility poles and
clear any other hiccups.

Tonight’s meeting is tentatively cancelled, unless work is performed
today and we have some time to perform any necessary clean-up. If this
changes, we will update everyone and the Tues meeting will be back on.

UPDATE 6/21

MSD work is still ongoing. Lines have all been marked, but a 6″ gas line was discovered while digging an entry point for vacuuming out the clogged drainage line. This has slowed work for safety concerns, but not too much. Stay tuned, spacers!

engunneer visited LVL1 last night and we gave him a quick video tour, hackerspace ‘Cribs’ style. Visit his blog to see other hackerspace tour videos he has collected.

This Tuesday is shaping up to be a Super Tuesday!  Tuesdays at 8:00pm are our regular meeting times, but this Tuesday, 4/12/11, we’re throwing in a Sumo-bot throw-down, and a Yuri’s Night  Celebration.

What: LVL1 Tuesday Meeting, Yuri’s Night Celebration, and Sumo-bot throw-down!

When: Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

Where: The LVL1 Hackerspace, 814 East Broadway, Entrance on the rear alley

For visitors, our regular meetings usually consist of 30 minutes of talking about LVL1 business, events, and miscellany, followed by building, hacking, making and general mayhem, extending well into the night.  This Tuesday, however, we’ll be celebrating Yuri’s Night, a world-wide party commemorating the 50th anniversary of mankind first slipping the surly bonds of earth, and extending our reach into space.

LVL1 will be hosting members of the Louisville Astronomical Society for some urban star gazing, and we’ll be trying to listen for the ARRISat, an amateur radio satellite currently attached to the International Space Station, transmitting just for Yuri’s Night, before it becomes fully armed and operational later this year.

In addition, almost a dozen members of the LVL1 community have been working on Sumo-bots for the upcoming tournament at Hive13, Cincinnati’s hackerspace.  We’ve got enough bots running around here for our own tournament, so we’ll be doing exposition matches all evening, building, testing and tweaking our sumos!

Come one, come all to LVL1 this Tuesday at 8:00pm.  Anyone and everyone is always welcome.

I meant to put a post about our QR inventory system several months ago when we implemented it… But I got, you know, busy! After sharing some of the details with hackerspacers on yammer, Pumping Station: One implemented our solution. It thrills me that they found it useful! But my lax blogging also means they scooped us! Oh well, better late than never. The important thing is that the implementation info is out there and other spaces can make use of it!

From my yammer post:

I thought I’d share this LVL1 approach to equipment and inventory management. Of course once we opened our doors last July, the contents of our members garages vomited forth their contents into our space. It was very difficult to keep track of what equipment we had, where it was, who wanted to retain ‘ownership rights’, whether it worked, how to make work, etc.

An idea bubbled up to inventory everything. A daunting task to be sure. I decided it’d be easiest to create a wiki page for each item. We crowd-sourced the effort and had the membership show up one Saturday to log everything and eat pizza. It worked well.

But wait there’s more! With a little bit of MediaWiki templating, I was able to generate QR codes on each wiki page (and therefore each piece of equipment). We printed out these QR codes on sticky mailing labels and applied them to oscilloscopes, saws, makerbot, the bathroom, Ben (frequent canine visitor), and everything in between. So now anyone with a smartphone barcode scanner app can scan the QR code on a piece of equipment in the space and get ALL OF THE INFO. Each piece of equipment has a readily accessible/editable wiki page of metadata goodness.

Members can leave operation notes, known problems, safety instructions, links to manuals, passive aggressive notes, humorous taunts on the wiki page of each item in a very accessible way.

It’s working pretty well for us! YMMV

Then the follow-up:

View source on this template entry to see how it’s defined:

http://wiki.lvl1.org/Template:Equipment

And then view source on this wiki entry to see it’s usage:

http://wiki.lvl1.org/Veruca_Gloop

Read the rest of this entry »

Almost every night of the week, LVL1’s 2,000-square-foot communal workshop is a hive of tinkering, socializing and building. Oscilloscopes, wave-form synthesizers and multi-meters, all donated by members, line the shelves and tables inside the hacker space. Puffs of smoke and tiny explosions erupt from the poised tips of soldering irons. Hand-built robots click and flash. Musical instruments are modified, purposefully mangled and built from scratch. Consumer electronics have their warranties voided by simply being opened up, cheap broken toys are cannibalized for parts, and, above all, information, free and plentiful, is shared.

At a Tuesday night meeting, Tim Miller, a quiet, dark-haired network technician in his mid-20s, draws a rough sketch of a tree on the dry-erase board at the front of the room, adding a squiggle at the end of a branch near the top and stepping back into the crowd of half a dozen that has wandered over and gathered behind him.

He crosses his arms as the group considers the problem: At the end of a test flight, the computer payload for a robotic helium balloon that members of LVL1 designed has gotten stuck 80 feet in the air, tangled in the upper regions of a giant tree on a Christian dude ranch in Vernon, Ind. Somehow, the payload — a 12-pound mother-brain of chips and sensors about the size of a microwave — has to be retrieved so the data it has collected can be analyzed. Ideally, the payload can be installed beneath another balloon that, in the coming weeks, will attempt a record-setting flight across the Atlantic.

http://leoweekly.com/news/hacktory

Laser

By using the donate button below you will be taken to Paypal to make a donation to the laser cutter fund. When you use this button the donation is earmarked for the laser cutter fund, not the general fund.

White Star Balloon

White Star Balloon Project – official site

Monthly Donation

Help LVL1 with a small monthly recurring donation of $13.37!

LVL1 Makership

We’re raising money for a Makership fund. A makership is similar to a scholarship, but the focus is on a creating something. We are using this fund to support an aspiring maker in financial need. The fund includes all LVL1 membership dues for 1 year, plus $400 to fund their proposed makership project.

For more information, see LVL1 Makership