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

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.

Check out what our summer Co-ops have been up to!

As a Co-op at LVL1, you can contribute to an ongoing project or even launch your own project. You must be a Speed School student seeking a Fall 2012 Co-op to apply for this program. The deadline is September 4, 2012.

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

Cross-posted from my personal blog: http://www.meatandnetworking.com/code/introducing-arduino-simple-task-scheduler/

Get the code here: https://github.com/Zuph/AVRQueue

Introducing the Arduino Simple Task Scheduler.  This is part of the balloon flight computer code I wrote for White Star, with some more polish. This library allows you to create a schedule queue of functions to be executed at specified times, on specified intervals.  For example, say you’re trying to log some sensor data and update a display in the same program. With the task scheduler, you can simply write a function to gather sensor data, write a function to update the display, add them to your queue, and let the library handle the rest.

This isn’t really useful for blinking LEDs, but it’s great for complex systems. For example, the balloon computer was gathering sensor data, sending short reports, sending long reports, monitoring vertical speed, monitoring GPS Status, monitoring flight state, managing ballast, and managing a backup high-frequency radio at the same time.  Halfway through development, it was obvious that we would need to integrate a watchdog timer to keep other systems from freezing the flight computer.  If all of these tasks had been occurring simultaneously, spread throughout spaghetti code, it would have been very difficult to add watchdog resets in all the right places.  With the task queue, I simply defined another function that reset the watchdog, and put it in the queue.  Two minutes, tops!

You can find extensive documentation and examples in the Github project.  To install, just copy the “Arduino” directory contents to the “Libraries” folder of your Arduino IDE install.  Restart your IDE, and it should pop right up.  Here’s a really simple example program:

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.

Our sewage lines have been reconnected and our bathroom facilities are now fully operational.

Contractor crews are still at work pouring cement in our basement to repair the floor. MSD will be continuing work in the alleyway this week, pouring concrete plugs and asphalt where they dug up the alleyway.

Everything is operational, just watch for wet cement.

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!

A big personal thanks to everyone who came out to the 2012 LVL1 Boneyard Hackathon.  We had 9 teams consisting of 54 hackers compete for 24 hours straight, putting to the test their technical capabilities, endurance, and creativity.  We had 9 great projects, and everyone had a lot of fun!  Our youngest competitors were only 11 years old! Everyone here already looks forward to the next event.

Thanks to Jon for recording a summary of the projects at the hackathon.  I’ll upload a full video of the project showcase soon!

Team Bloominglabs made an incredible 3 musical instruments, a mixer for them all, and a bunch of LED blinky stuff! They brought 9 hackers to bring this all together, and were a flurry of activity throughout the hackathon.

The Raging Narwhals, a team from the Triangle Fraternity at LVL1, made a floppy drive keyboard. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite working by the end, but it was an impressive effort, and they plan to come back to finish it up. They brought a huge team, and almost all of them stayed through the night!

The LVL1 Stonecutters managed to make a 3-D Scanner and Animated Gif Maker using the parts in the boneyard!

Team Rainbow Unicorn built a first place trophy, so even if they failed, they would win.

The Dirty Cheaters put together an incredibly impressive Rock ‘em, Sock ‘em robots kit, which included rack and pinion steering, and no microcontrollers.

Destined for Failure built a looping synthesizer controlled by a PS2 mouse. Very impressive, especially consdiering this was the group’s first foray into Arduino progrmaming!

Team Polar Bear build a laser pong game, complete with scorekeeping, 8 bit sound effects, and varying difficulty levels. Superb engineering, guys!

The Noobs were our youngest team, and they put together a custom computer using parts from the basement, including custom LED signs.

Finally, Bob the Bodybuilder built a very loud keypad controlled synthesizer. They even devised a means to convert sheet music to keypad tablature.

I owe a huge thanks to everyone involved. Thanks to FoodCalc Inc. (http://www.foodcalc.com) for supplying libation for the event. Thanks to Joe L. for helping out throughout the event. Thanks to Gary F. for being a trooper, staying way later than he meant to, and helping out almost every team here. Thanks to Jose C. for taking way more crap than he deserved. Thanks to Lauren, Jynn, and Steph for acting as team breakfast, and keeping us all from starving.

Plenty more photos on the flickr stream. Peruse through, and if this interest you, come to our space! Links above and to the right will help you find us.

The Louisville Digital Association, LVL1, GlowTouch Technologies and Insider Louisville are teaming up to help you rub elbows with the top tech influencers in the Derby City on June 22.

From the mayor’s office to maker garages, from venture capital firms to one-man bootstrap bands, from engineers to end-users to everyone in between — you’re all invited to the 1st Annual Louisville Digital Insiders Outing at Hogan’s Fountain in Cherokee Park from 6-8pm on Friday, June 22. Our organizations are putting on a full court press to get all 39 of the Insider‘s who’s who of Louisville tech present to cross-pollinate ideas and opinions; and we’re throwing in a free meal, too.

If you’re interested in any aspect of the Louisville tech scene — investment, employment, or intellectual curiosity — this is the one social occasion you don’t want to miss. There will be no pitches, no lectures and no strings attached. Just come meet your digital peers for a good, old-fashioned cookout in the heart of Louisville. The food will be excellent, and the conversation extraordinary — or your money back!

Admission is free, but seating is limited and RSVPs are required. Food and beverages will be provided by the Louisville Grind Gourmet Burger Truck. (Yes, there will be vegetarian options; just don’t be fooled by the awesome duckfat fries.) Reservations close at noon on June 20, so act now while supplies last.

It’s time to break down the walls between the various factions of the Louisville tech community. Nothing does that better than fresh air, fresh faces and freshly grilled burgers. See you at the Fountain.

Tickets are going fast – register here:

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/3692881508?ref=ebtnebregn