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Category: space

Published on Leave a comment on LVL1 temporarily closed!

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!

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Published on 1 Comment on LVL1 Tuesday Super Meeting

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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Published on 3 Comments on LVL1 QR codes and inventory

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

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