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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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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.

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LVL1ers had an awesome time at Hive13 (Cincinatti's Hackerspace) this weekend. Hive13 did a great job hosting a Sumobot competition. The competition was staged in an actual boxing ring at the gym next door to Hive 13! A big thanks to the owners of the boxing gym. What a great venue. Many bots competed, but the LVL1 bots rose to the top. Jose won with "Lessor".

Here is the actual video of the rounds.

I would like to sincerely thank Hive13 for hosting this event. It is fantastic to get to know you all. It should also be noted that Hive13 made an excellent web app that organizes Sumobot competions - check it out http://sumobots.hive13.org/. LVL1 will be hosting our second Sumobot competition in the Fall of 2011, probably October. You have 6 months to build your next Bot! All competitors are welcome, especially other hackerspaces (Lexington, Dayton, Indy, Bloomington, Nashville...). Hope to see you there!

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This is a velocity sensitive MIDI isomorphic keyboard. 192 total keys. The project came out of Louisville Soundbuilders, a fortnightly meeting of circuitbenders, synth engineers and experimental musicians. After seeing a couple of my failed variations of a single-bus isomorphic keyboard, Tim was intrigued enough to design one even better. He designed multiple PCBs that sandwich together with multiple switch types for velocity sensitive keypresses.

More development on the way! We're working on molds/methods for making hexagonal keycaps. And I'm working on an Arduino-based controller as an alternative to the midibox controller Tim has working already.

Watch the progress at http://soundbuilders.lvl1.org