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LVL1 Move, Wall Logo

It's been a busy month around LVL1! As we announce in April,we're moving to a new building at The Pointe in Butchertown! The new digs feature 8800 square feet of concrete floors, with three phase power, plenty of electricity run throughout, a dedicate wood/metal shop area (including the ability to weld indoors!), and better climate control. We've been working hard to get the new place ready to inhabit. We raised $9,001 through the Community Foundation's Give Local Louisville campaign (thanks to you, our community!), which we've been using to customize our space for hacking. In true DIY fashion, we've been working on this almost entirely on our own.

Plenty of space upgrades some along with the sweet new hackerspace, including new member shelves (care of the Community Foundation capacity building grant), a Shapeoko mill (care of Inventables), upgrade networking equipment, brand new kitchen appliances (care of GE), new projectors and smart-board technology (care of Power Creative), and more!

We've spent the past two months clearing out the new space, moving the old space, pulling building permits, and building walls. Currently, the walls stand roughed-in, waiting for inspection. After we receive our rough inspection, we'll add drywall and insulation. Following that, we can receive our final inspection and occupancy certificate. As soon as we receive our occupancy certificate, all operations move to the new space!

Until further notice, operations are still at the 814 E Broadway location! When operations move to 1205 E Washington, we'll let folks know via this blog, facebook, twitter, meetup.com, our public mailing list, our member's only mailing list, and possible smoke signals from the roof. Our grand-opening celebration is tentatively scheduled for August 9th, so save the date!

More pictures and details of our move after the break:

...continue reading "Pardon our dust — LVL1 is Still Moving!"

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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!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1maAoSg6Fdo]

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.

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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!

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

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

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

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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!

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

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

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

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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.

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Yuri's Night

This Tuesday is shaping up to be a Super Tuesday!  Tuesdays at 8:00pm are our regular meeting times, but this Tuesday, 4/12/11, we're throwing in a Sumo-bot throw-down, and a Yuri's Night  Celebration.

What: LVL1 Tuesday Meeting, Yuri's Night Celebration, and Sumo-bot throw-down!

When: Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

Where: The LVL1 Hackerspace, 814 East Broadway, Entrance on the rear alley

For visitors, our regular meetings usually consist of 30 minutes of talking about LVL1 business, events, and miscellany, followed by building, hacking, making and general mayhem, extending well into the night.  This Tuesday, however, we'll be celebrating Yuri's Night, a world-wide party commemorating the 50th anniversary of mankind first slipping the surly bonds of earth, and extending our reach into space.

LVL1 will be hosting members of the Louisville Astronomical Society for some urban star gazing, and we'll be trying to listen for the ARRISat, an amateur radio satellite currently attached to the International Space Station, transmitting just for Yuri's Night, before it becomes fully armed and operational later this year.

In addition, almost a dozen members of the LVL1 community have been working on Sumo-bots for the upcoming tournament at Hive13, Cincinnati's hackerspace.  We've got enough bots running around here for our own tournament, so we'll be doing exposition matches all evening, building, testing and tweaking our sumos!

Come one, come all to LVL1 this Tuesday at 8:00pm.  Anyone and everyone is always welcome.

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I meant to put a post about our QR inventory system several months ago when we implemented it... But I got, you know, busy! After sharing some of the details with hackerspacers on yammer, Pumping Station: One implemented our solution. It thrills me that they found it useful! But my lax blogging also means they scooped us! Oh well, better late than never. The important thing is that the implementation info is out there and other spaces can make use of it!

From my yammer post:

I thought I'd share this LVL1 approach to equipment and inventory management. Of course once we opened our doors last July, the contents of our members garages vomited forth their contents into our space. It was very difficult to keep track of what equipment we had, where it was, who wanted to retain 'ownership rights', whether it worked, how to make work, etc.

An idea bubbled up to inventory everything. A daunting task to be sure. I decided it'd be easiest to create a wiki page for each item. We crowd-sourced the effort and had the membership show up one Saturday to log everything and eat pizza. It worked well.

But wait there's more! With a little bit of MediaWiki templating, I was able to generate QR codes on each wiki page (and therefore each piece of equipment). We printed out these QR codes on sticky mailing labels and applied them to oscilloscopes, saws, makerbot, the bathroom, Ben (frequent canine visitor), and everything in between. So now anyone with a smartphone barcode scanner app can scan the QR code on a piece of equipment in the space and get ALL OF THE INFO. Each piece of equipment has a readily accessible/editable wiki page of metadata goodness.

Members can leave operation notes, known problems, safety instructions, links to manuals, passive aggressive notes, humorous taunts on the wiki page of each item in a very accessible way.

It's working pretty well for us! YMMV

Then the follow-up:

View source on this template entry to see how it's defined:

http://wiki.lvl1.org/Template:Equipment

And then view source on this wiki entry to see it's usage:

http://wiki.lvl1.org/Veruca_Gloop

...continue reading "LVL1 QR codes and inventory"