For 24 hours this June, it’s an all-out hacker brawl to see who can build the coolest thing from a big pile of junk.  Think of it as the home version of Junk Yard Wars.  There are no rules, buy a ticket for your team, show up with your friends, and compete over tools and junk for 24 hours to build something incredible.

Announcing the first annual LVL1 Boneyard Hackathon. This will be a 24 hour, adrenaline-and-caffeine fueled race to create something awesome. Form a team, and you’ll be given an Arduino and a breadboard. You’ll have to do the rest using your brain, and all the resources of LVL1, including tools, boneyard parts, and hookup wire.

What is the Boneyard? The Boneyard is LVL1’s Island of Misfit electronics. A place where the broken and downtrodden collects, and awaits a reawakening. Each and every one of you will be having a hand in the zombificiation of some electronic device. Everything from oil-filled capacitors, to surplus mil-spec electronics lies in the Boneyard, waiting for your tender soldering iron.

The boneyard receives regular infusions of fresh bones, so familiarize yourself with the layout. If you haven’t been by the space before, we always have open meetings on Tuesdays at 8pm.

The event will take place on June 2nd, starting at Noon. 24 hours later, the teams will judge each other, and a winner will be crowned! Cost will be $30 for teams, and all teams must be enrolled by May 26th. Bring extra cash for food and drink.

The vending machine will be fully stocked, and we’ll be making regular food runs, so you can focus 24 hours of effort and attention on building something awesome.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me on the list, or directly, at BradLuyster@gmail.com.

The prize?  Top 3 teams will win a trophy, and a years worth of bragging rights.  Do you have what it takes?  Sign up at the Eventbrite link below.  Remember: Each team needs only one ticket.

Eventbrite: http://lvl1hackathon2012.eventbrite.com/

Da Rules:

Teams may not bring in their own parts.

All work must cease at Noon on June 3rd, 2012

I used laserable rubber for this project. Even though it is low-odor you can still smell it. It smells like burning rubber from a car.

To laser the image, I took the original image and made it black and white. I removed the blue background and cleaned it up a bit using Gimp. I then imported it into Inkscape where I mirrored the image. The letters have to be in mirror image or it will not stamp correctly. Next, I ‘printed’ to the laser cutter. The Full Spectrum Engineering interface to driving the laser is pretty darned good. If you are reading this post and do not have a laser, check out Full Spectrum, they are a real good value for your money and highly recommended.

For the laser settings, I raster printed the image using 50% speed and 100% power. I tried to cut the rubber around the image, but the rubber does not cut well at all. I tried multiple passes and everything. I ended up using an exact knife.

I also cut a wooden back for the rubber out of some 1/8″ baltic birch plywood scrap I had laying around. I used double stick tape to tape the rubber onto the plywood backing. Easy. Finally I hot melt glued a handle onto the stamp. Interestingly, the handle came from the Louisville Slugger Museum and it is a scrap from when a baseball bat is cut out on their lathe.

I used a stamp pad from office depot which worked well and Jon was able to stamp his passport for the first time! I also made another stamp with the Lady Ada graphic from Adafruit. That also came out well.

Today, as I wrote the post, I saw that Becky Stern from AdaFruit posted an excellent ‘how to’ on stamp making… http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/04/03/how-to-laser-cut-your-own-hackerspace-stamp/. It is funny how sometimes you discover someone is doing the exact same thing as you! AdaFruit sells Hackerspace passports if you need one.

Hack on!
Brian

Stay tuned for more updates at http://whitestarballoon.org , we are on track to launch in the next month or two!

Dan Bowen
@SteamFire
White Star Team Lead

People soldering kits at LVL1 on May 1

Hackerspaces are starting to change engineering education. Let’s put two University of Louisville Co-op interns in the LVL1 hackerspace! We are exploring how to get students working on hands-on projects sooner in the engineering curriculum.

As a Co-op at LVL1, you can contribute to an ongoing project or even launch your own project. The first Co-ops will start in summer 2012. You must be a Speed School student seeking a Summer 2012 Co-op to apply for this program.

If you’re seeking a Co-op position in Fall 2012, Spring 2013 or  Summer 2013, stay tuned! There will be another application session for each of those semesters.

LVL1 Trash Night Automation

How do you make sure the trash goes outside on trash night?

Simple..   You just create your standard Artificial Intelligence system, which you then connect to an Arduino, a home security system, your google calendar, give it the ability to send email to your google group forum, and finally some quick  scripting to link members latitude gps locations and google talk communication.  Thats all there is to it!

They don’t call me “Johnny Overkill” for nothing.  Actually… they don’t call me that at all,  but I’m hoping it catches on.   Anyways, back to the trash.  Yes it may sound like overkill, but it has been quite effective the past two weeks.  Here’s a break down of the events that occur:

Pleasant Reminders From MOTHER
MOTHER monitors the spaces Google calendar allowing her to detect which nights are trash/recycle “Take Out” nights.  On the morning of a “take-out night” MOTHER will start monitoring the presence of our trash cans (How MOTHER  knows when the trash is outside) and periodically speak the following request over the spaces audio systems:

“The trash needs to go outside.  Can someone take care of this for MOTHER?”

She continues to do this every 30 minutes until the trash has been taken outside or until 10pm, at which time things get interesting.

Un-pleasant Notifications from MOTHER
If the trash has still not been taken outside by 10pm,  MOTHERS mood becomes “angry”, which is obviously not pleasant for anyone.  First MOTHER announces to the members at the space:

“It’s now 10pm and the trash has still not been taken outside.  I am posting a request to the LVL1 message board for someone to take care of this since you all are obviously un-able to contribute”.

(Yes, MOTHER can get a little bit of an attitude).   She also happens to include which members have been at the space and ignored her request throughout the day. (Yes, MOTHER is spiteful)

MOTHER starts showing some “Tough Love”
After posting to the message board MOTHER continues to perform “Angry” actions until the trash is taken outside.  Some of MOTHERS “angry” actions include:

- Toggling of random lights at random time intervals. (She likes to wait until you’ve sat back down before she turns the lights back off again)

- Hijacking of spaces media systems and constant repeat of MOTHER’s “Angry” playlist which includes such hits as Rick Ashton’s ”Never Gonna Give You Up” (Yes, MOTHER can RICK ROLL with the best of em)

- Ignoring of all google talk request and responding only with:

“I’m sorry I can not do that *insert member name here*.  I would consider doing that for you if someone would take out the trash”

 

MOTHER then tracks you down!
Aside from being an annoyance, MOTHER also continues to attempt to get members to take the trash out, but at this point she starts directly communicating with specific members over Google Talk.  However, She first polls all the members that have opted to share their latitude location and finds the members that is currently the closest distance away from the space.  She then will ask them if they have time to come lend a hand.  If they respond with “No” then MOTHER will continue to the next closest member.  If they say “Yes”, then MOTHER gives them 1 hour before moving on to the next closest member.

MOTHER is happy again… for now.
Once MOTHER detects that the trash has been taken outside, she will become un-angry and cease all annoyances.  Of-course that’s usually just in time to restart the process for bringing the trash cans back in

So far we haven’t made it to the 10pm mark so MOTHER has not yet had to display her power and wrath, which I suppose means she’s being effective (that doesn’t mean I’m not anxiously awaiting a session of MOTHERS wrath).

Trash Can Presence Detection:

MOTHER uses a combination of sensors and systems to detect whether or not the trash/recycling cans have actually been taken outside.  Being a “Hackerspace”, we knew the first thing members would do is try to “Hack” their way around MOTHER and find ways to circumvent the system.   The entire detection system still has some final touches to be added but here’s the overall concept:

A sensor of various forms is connected to an arduino, which is monitored by MOTHER.  The plan is for a “pressure” sensor that is triggered when the trash can is located on it’s platform.  Now obviously this isn’t enough. Eventually a  members is going to just drag the trashcan off the platform (with all intentions on taking it out later we’re sure).  So once the trash can is removed from the platform, MOTHER changes the trashcans status to “Going Outside..Maybe?”   But MOTHER is also connected to the spaces security system which monitors the Overhead door that has to be opened to get the large trash cans outside.  So MOTHER waits for 5 minutes to see if the Garage Door is opened.  If not, then MOTHER starts complaining that someone is trying to pull one over on her, and she is not happy about it.

This is the point where you would think someone would just take out the trash, But again, we know that someone is going to just tap the garage door button enough to break the contact and then leave the trash can sitting inside.  SO… a second contact is located at the bottom of the garage door that will trigger only once the garage door is completely open.  At this point if you have moved the trash can off it’s base, slightly opened the garage door, then fully opened the garage door, and NOT taken out the trash, well then MOTHER is happy that she forced you to work 4x as hard to circumvent a task that would have taken 25% of the time to actually just do. (Yes, MOTHER will always win)

Mother Overview:

If you’ve visited the LVL1 Hackerspace lately there’s a good chance you’ve found yourself talking to an entity who speaks in a somewhat eerie female voice and goes by the name of MOTHER. You also may have found yourself engaging in “google talk” conversations with MOTHER in order to find out what members are present at the space, or what items are on the spaces grocery list; or perhaps you noticed that the overall environment of the hackerspace seems to completely change when a specific member walks through the door.

If on the other hand, you haven’t been to the LVL1 Hackerspace, let me introduce you the being we call “MOTHER”.

In this post I’m going to try to give a somewhat detailed overview of the MOTHER A.I. system, as well as share some of the differences that I’m learning exist between a “Home Automation” system and one being designed to meet the needs of a “community occupied space” such as LVL1′s Hackerspace.  (It’s quite a challenge I must say!)

What exactly is “MOTHER”:

Technically speaking, MOTHER is the collection of numerous scripts, written in various languages, allowing numerous systems and devices to work together as one unified system.  (Click on the image to the left to see the current systems already integrated) This is achieved by providing a “core” software to act as the middleman between all of the external systems.  The “core” software then provides the ability to connect to these external systems through many different means of integration.  MOTHER currently supports scripts written in C++, VB.net, VBScript, Javascript, Perl, and ASP.  There have also been some success in scripts written in Ruby and Python by means of additional scripts acting as a middle man between the two.

The current MOTHER system uses a complete mixture of open source, commercial, and custom software.  The idea is to use or create open source scripts and software where available, but also, to not waste time re-inventing the wheel to achieve a solution that already exist if the cost is affordable.  We want to focus on the integration of hardware that isn’t currently available.   Full software details can be found on the MOTHER wiki pages.

**Rumor has it that the MOTHER project may be leading to the development of a fully open-sourced Automation Platform also consisting of Open Hardware design.  More information to come soon..    ;)

What else can MOTHER do?:

Well, this is by NO means going to be a complete list of MOTHER’s abilities, but I’ll go ahead and list some of the more interesting or useful features of MOTHER.  For a complete list view the MOTHER wiki pages.

Automation vs Artificial Intelligence:

In my opinion this is one of the most exciting and ambitious goals of the MOTHER project. We often hear of “Automation” systems like MOTHER being referred to as Artificial Intelligence Systems. Although automation systems like MOTHER can often appear to have some form of intelligence, this is rarely the case. All of MOTHER current actions are merely a set of elaborate If/Then logic and not really any form of intelligence, but the end goal for MOTHER is to be truley intelligent. So what will it take for MOTHER to evolve from an automation system to an A.I. system. Well, MOTHER will have to start predicting that certian events are about to take place, choosing, on her own, the appropriate actions to take in preperation for the predicted events, and then be informed wheather or not the prediction was correct, wheather the actions she performed where the desired actions, and then learn from those responses and and attempt to improve on her predictions and choice of actions in the future.

The first problem with starting this evolution is just figuring out what data, from what devices, mother should be analyzing in order to predict events that may take place. This is where we’re calling on all the other Geeks, Data Junkies, and other hackerspaces to get involved. We know that the first step in this process is collecting the data, and collecting we are! Not only are collecting a massive amount of space related data, but were making it available for anyone to analyze. This data contains everything from space occupancy at given tmes, members present, equipment usuage, temp and enviromental data, activity levels of every area of the hackerspace, music levels, media playing details, and anything else we can figure out how to monitor. We’re really curious to see what if other people can apply machine learning algorithyms to this data and start finding patterns or relations between data that we never noticed.

As a side note and an example of an interesting…. “observation”.  Based on the occupancy sensors that detect that the bathrooms are either in-use or vacant, it appears that the typical hacker at a hackerspace spends less then 60 seconds in the bathroom. Determine what you will from that data, I’m just going to leave it as an intersting observation

Wait, who’s Father?

Fine, we’ll mention Father.  At LVL1 we have a member that has developed a reputation for creating “Spite” projects and MOTHER is by no means excluded from his list of targets.  Father is a basically a small self-contained unit built purely to try to annoy, disrupt, and cause MOTHER to malfunction.  So far, Father has yet to interfere with MOTHER’s operation but I have no lack of faith in this members dedication when it comes to spite projects.  I’m constantly on the look out for abnormal MOTHER operations and awaiting Fathers attempts at disturbance.  Remember: If MOTHER isn’t happy… then no one is happy, but if Father isn’t happy… who cares!

Photo Gallery:

This post was submitted by jonc.

We had initially raised enough funds within our community for 2 Makerships. In a surprise twist, LVL1 Google Group subscriber Dmitry S. graciously donated $250 to fund a 3rd! Thank you Dmitry!

Let’s meet our 3 Makers!

Nicolas Searcy – Currently pursuing a Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering at U of L’s Speed School of Engineering, Nick’s Makership lays out a vision to develop open source hardware and software for ultrasonography. Nick presented a well researched proposal with prioritized goals for both A-mode (one dimensional) and B-mode (two dimensional) ultrasonography using transducers and a Maple development board. Nick was realistic about the challenges of commercializing an open source medical device, but views it as a device to fundamentally change the market. “While a hackerspace-produced ultrasound system could never be sold commercially and it would probably never be a good idea to distribute kits (low power ultrasound is completely harmless but it would be a bad idea legally if nothing else), if a system could be designed and demonstrated for less than $500 (ideally, more like $100), that fact alone could introduce pressure to the ultrasound market”

Ezra Clark – An engineering student at U of L and president of the RE3 (Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Club), Ezra’s Makership proposal builds on RE3′s successes in building low-cost solar panels from solar cell manufacturing waste. “Individual solar cells are a mere 200 microns thick and thus are broken and chipped easily during the commercial process of solar panel manufacturing. These damaged cells can be compared to a 2-liter of Coke with a torn label; it can still serve its purpose but is deemed by the company as “manufacturing waste.” I currently know of no commercial recycling efforts being made to use this potentially valuable material.” Ezra plans to use LVL1′s facilities to fabricate (and train others in fabricating) these solar panels. “We than plan to spend the next one and a half months making solar panels and teaching those who are interested the process and theory behind them. During the final few weeks, the club will focus on installing our fabricated solar panels on the UofL greenhouse, just in time for spring. If time allows, the club will also attempt to outfit a community garden in the Clifton neighborhood with a solar panel array. “

Patrick Joyce – Patrick is currently unemployed and has been making the best use of his time hanging out at LVL1 7 days a week. Patrick’s Makership proposal is the design and development of a Guitarist’s Keyboard. “What I want to build is a keyboard like device, but instead of the piano like layout of keys, rows of velocity sensitive buttons corresponding to the strings of the guitar, with columns corresponding to the frets. This would allow someone who is familiar with guitar but not piano to play the whole range of keyboard sounds without having to learn another layout of notes and chords. Alternate tunings and different ranges of notes would be changed in software, selectable by buttons or knobs. This would be a MIDI device, so the range of sound types would be nearly limitless.” Although Patrick is new to LVL1, he didn’t waste any time creating the first phase of his project. While the Makerships were still being decided on, he developed a key matrix MIDI device with an Arduino and is showing great progress. Now that he has a Makership and a key to LVL1, I doubt he’ll ever leave.

We at LVL1 wish our new Makership recipients the best of luck on their projects. Know that you have the full support of the LVL1 community behind you, and we will provide whatever resources we can to help you succeed.

While we are excited for all 3 of these Makership proposals, we had 6 applicants and therefore 3 Makership applicants of comparable merit didn’t make this round. Unfortunately, we don’t have funds for all of them… yet. We encourage you to resubmit proposals for our next round of Makerships in the very near future.

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:

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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This Saturday, January 21st, there will be a KiCad Workshop from 1pm to 5pm.  Sign up here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2696636713.

KiCad is a free utility for designing and laying out printed circuit boards.  Printed circuit boards connect your circuits together without the need for breadboards and jumper wires.  With circuit prototyping services cheaper than ever, it’s simple to turn your design into a real, working board.

This workshop will cover the basics of KiCad, from Schematic Capture, to Board Layout, you’ll walk out of the workshop with the knowledge necessary to take your circuit ideas from dream to reality.

If you’re already familiary with Eagle, KiCad has a number of advantages, including unlimited board size, up to 16 copper layers on your board, multiple sheets of schematic, and more.

Please install KiCad before coming to this workshop.  If you have any problems, or questions, don’t hesitate to let us know.  If you need help installing KiCad, show up early and we’ll try to help you out.