As many of you are no doubt aware, after almost two years of paperwork, negotiating, and discussions with the IRS, LVL1 is now a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Organization!  This means LVL1 can now accept tax-deductible donations of money and physical items!

This has been an absolutely huge undertaking, from Joe P., filling out our first application, to Chris C. and Mark E. fighting for us every step and speed bump in the road, to Tim M. putting together a donation form and incorporating the responsibility of keeping 501(c)3 records into the office of the treasurer. Everyone in the LVL1 community owes these fine folks (and many more!) their due.

This goal comes with its fair share of responsibility, though.  Each and every one of us in the LVL1 community are responsible for maintaining the requirements of the 501(c)3 code.  We’ve put together a short page here with some rough guidelines: http://wiki.lvl1.org/501c3  As always, if you have any questions concerning our 501(c)3 status, please feel free to email directors@lvl1.org.  The long and short is this: follow the guidelines on the wiki, fill out the appropriate paperwork, mark items donated with a 501(c)3 receipt as 501(c)3 donations, and DO NOT remove 501(c)3 donated items from LVL1.  These items are now LVL1 property!

Again, HUGE thanks to everyone involved in making this happen over the years.  Let’s use this to our advantage, spacers! I’m looking at you, folks who have an employer match on 501(c)3 donations!

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

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:

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.