Learn soldering and basic Arduino programming in this workshop. The cost of this workshop also covers the materials cost for a freeduino microcontroller kit. Your assembled Freeduino is yours to keep! Use the vast open resources of the Arduino community to come up with your own electronic applications. This workshop is intended to teach you necessary skills for further exploration in the world of Arduino.

Limited Seating!

More information and registration here!

I, Dan Bowen of the White Star Project, recently gave a presentation on the frontier of amateur science ballooning, a type of balloon called the ‘superpressure’.  At this I introduce a tool we’re working on to help amateurs solve the problems of these balloons.  The event was the United Kingdom High Altitude Society first annual Amateur Balloon Conference on October 15, 2011, in London, England. I was unable to travel there, so I combined Skype live video with a pre-recorded presentation.

Slides from presentation and Source Paper Citations in text format

Now, background info to get you up to speed on the state of amateur superpressure:

This type of balloon has the potential to stay in the air for extremely long times, much longer than the 3 days flight estimated for the White Star’s trans-atlantic ‘zero-pressure’ balloons. Read the rest of this entry »

Saturday, October 22, 2011 and  Sunday, October 23, 2011

2:00 PM - 6:00 PM (ET)

Don’t have a sumobot for this years competition and Halloween party? Want to be one of the cool kids? Do not be afraid the friendly folks at LVL1 are here to help.

Learn the basics of building a Sumobot! It’s a small autonomous 10cmX10cm robot that doesn’t like sharing the ring. More information about Sumobot competitions can be found here.

All parts, tools and equipment needed to build it will be provided. If you already have a FTDI cable for programming the microcontroller, you can save $15 with that ticket option. If you do not have this cable, purchase the full ticket including FTDI cable. A FTDI cable is common with Arduino variants and is very reusable.

http://wiki.lvl1.org/Sumobotsclass

10 total seats are available. Sign ups are open  http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2288210098

-Fire Tim

ANNOUNCING – LVL1′s 2nd annual Sumobot tournament will be on October
29th, 2011, 8PM at 814e Broadway (our home). There will be a Halloween
party following the fun – costumes are encouraged! All are welcome to
join in the festivities. You may even get to see the world famous fire
breathing pony, Buttercup! You now have a month to build your bot.

UPDATE: The ring we will use is made of MDF painted FLAT BLACK with a GLOSS
WHITE border ring.  The rubber surface of the last ring was just to
hard to source, build, maintain and paint.

UPDATE 2: Solarbotics just sent some awesome prizes for the sumo
winners! If you are looking for some sumo parts, please check out what
they can offer… http://www.solarbotics.com/

Here is the (new) poster: http://wiki.lvl1.org/images/4/46/Sumo2011.pdf
Please post at your favorite coffee shop!

Sign up: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dDFtRTlScWttTmswMU9xMkdJOEZBT2c6MA

I just finished programming my gearclock that I showed off last week.  I added a Chronodot real time clock so it keeps perfect time!  I also wrote up an instructable here:  http://www.instructables.com/id/Laser-cut-gear-clock-with-Chronodot/ so you can build your own.  I also have some stepper motors if you want to buy them from me (cheap!).  Put your Arduino to work!  Learn how to use the lasercutter!  Brian

Some more pics…

Come celebrate a “round number” birthday. Saturday, September 24 from 7 pm until???
At the LVL1 space. 
Food and beverages provided.
Bring a snack or a desert if you want.
(Binary numbers just look too old!)  

LVL1′s 2nd annual Sumobot tournament will be on October 29th, 2011, 8PM at 814e Broadway (our home). There will be a Halloween party following the fun. All are welcome to join in the festivities. You may even get to see the world famous fire breathing pony, Buttercup! You have a couple of months to build your bot. There will be prizes and eternal glory!  Here is the poster  Here is how to build your own Sumobot.

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!

Full spectrum 40watt CO2 laser