This weekend, we were lucky enough to have Sonny Mounicou come up from Memphis to teach a workshop on building a Prusa i2 3D printer.  10 people were in attendance, and everyone walked out with a working 3D printer!

The workshop was a grueling 24 hours, running from 8am to Midnight on day one, and 8am to 4pm the next day.  By the end of the workshop, though, everyone was slinging plastic!  Aaron was talented enough to be printing cubed gears after a mere 14 hours!

A big thanks to Jon from SeeMeCNC, who came in to help out with the workshop.  He also managed to sell a couple of printers while he was at the space! And an absolutely huge thanks to Gerrit, who kept us all fed throughout the event.  May no build-off ever go without catering.

Jon from SeeMeCNC (And his huge printer)

Gerrit, Keeping us all alive

Scroll past the break for more pictures of the event, but I’ll wrap it up here by saying that the build was a great event.  10 people in the LVL1 community got to build 3D printers, 2 more people bought 3D printers during the event, and our expertise for printers is growing.  This event even motivated some to start a Louisville-Area Thrug (3D Printer User Group).  If you’re interested in 3D printer, join the conversation here: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/kyin3dprinters

Until then, we’ll be hacking away at our printers.  For those who missed out, don’t despair: Sonny let us know that any time we can get 8-10 people together for a build, he’ll make the drive!

More pictures below the break.

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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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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

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.

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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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.

Admit it, you have always wanted to build a penny sized dinosaur

Well here is your chance! LVL1 is raising money to buy a laser cutter for the space. With a laser cutter you can do all sorts of neato things like this…

http://www.epiloglaser.com/sample_club.htm

Scroll thought the link and think about what you want to make. Then donate to the laser cutter fund. The sooner we make it to $2500, the sooner we can get a laser cutter for all to share. IT IS GONNA BE SO AWESOME!

Here is the Laser Cutter we are going to buy.

http://www.fullspectrumengineering.com/co2laserv2-40w.html

and a video of it in action…

As you can see, you want to give to this fund! Watch the progress bar on the right side of this blog to see how much further we have to go!

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.

DO IT FOR THE DINO!

Another day, another repost from another project I’m working on. This time, from White Star Balloons, the world’s lightest quad helix antenna.

After the scrub on the launch pad for flight attempt A, we went back to the books, to try and figure out what we could do to improve our odds the next time around. One of our biggest setbacks was the inability make an antenna suitable for our use: We needed an antenna tuned for 149 MHz, not needing a ground plane, weighing as little as possible.

After 4 tries, and some expensive test equipment, the end result was a Quadrifilar Helix antenna weighing only 80 grams!

Our ground test antenna was a 5/8ths wave whip antenna, which works well, but unfortunately needs a ground plane. Tests with both a quarter-wave dipole and a J-pole antenna were lackluster. Documentation from our satellite service provider implied that a quadrifilar helix antenna would provide the best coverage at all. While these antennas are pretty, their design and construction was voodoo magic at first.

Thanks to some design documentation here: http://jcoppens.com/ant/qfh/index.en.php and some help from the balloon community, we had some baselines for creating such an antenna. We still went through *quite* a few revisions.  We went through 3 revisions that didn’t work, and one which works pretty darn well!

Here are the antennas which didn’t work:

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Originally posted on my personal blog, Meat and Networking.

LVL1 is great.  A place for creative and motivated people to get together and goad each-other into doing more creative things.  It’s also a great gathering place for tools, as well as knowledge.  A few months ago, the spoiled electrical engineer that I am, I never would have considered making my own PCBs.  Any project worth taking off the breadboard was worth sending to China to get made “right.”

Of course, there isn’t always time and money to send something to China.  Today’s installment is the Sumo-bot board I’m trying to put together for the Hive13 sumobot competition.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like poor Snoopy bot will make it to the ring, but the board making process itself is worth talking about.

Laying out a PCB using software like Eagle is beyond the scope of this post.  If you can follow the appropriate Sparkfun Tutorial, it’s pretty easy to pick up.  Something to note:  for single sided home-made PCBs, put all traces and surface mount components on the BOTTOM layer.  Put any necessary jumpers on the top layer.  When you’re ready to print, just turn off all the layers you don’t want turned into copper.

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