RedBull Creation Contest
RedBull visited the lab this week and dropped off some information and an invitation to join in on their hackerspace challenge. A few lab members are already thinking up great projects as an entry. If you are interested in participating contact Dave E. or Kyle K. The deadline is the 24th of April, and then the next round takes place in New York City. Note - it's best to keep communications on the members only mailing list when it comes to planning and development. We love our neighbors in Richmond and DC but in the spirit of competition..
Radio 757 Goes Public From 757 Labs
Lab members and visitors know about the strange Linux computer that has been sitting in the cubicle upstairs for a while playing the loop of music. Well, as of a day ago people are listening! The project to do a local internet radio station that focused on local music has been cooking for a while, but I finally got the motivation to get things finished the other night. AltDaily put on an event at the Chrysler Museum and I heard audience members ask questions of local hip hop stars about where they can get their music played at. The panel consisted of Dj Cornbread, DJ Bee, Malice and Chad Hugo and was a nice fun event. It hit me during this as to how much of a good resource this will be to local musicians. So I finished up some needed things and it's live, and new submissions to the station seem to come in every few hours. Being genre neutral is going to be interesting!
If anyone at the lab is interested in helping run things, drop Ethan a line. The station is for local music (Hampton Roads out to Raleigh, and Washington DC (but focus on the 7 cities)) so the station won't be for geek/tech specific stuff or commercial music. There is still a bunch of work to be done on it, but it has the potential to make a HUGE positive impact on the lack of community that exists here in Hampton Roads.
Listen in (or upload your own music) at www.radio757.com.
Special thanks to Sean Bergeron and Kevin McKinley for help with the system setup, and people on IRC for some assistance with web scripting issues.
The lonely automation system now has a worldwide audience.
Kyle (and TJ)’s LED Cube Adventures
First it was a 4x4x4 LED cube, then the massive 8x8x8 LED cube. Witnessed by lab members and visitors was a number of nights spent soldering massive amounts of LEDs and hand building the circuit boards for these mesmerizing works of art. Congrats to Kyle and TJ for a job well done in building one of these!
Cisco lab has started
Just a heads up that BK has started to get a bit serious about doing some Cisco familiarization. If anyone is interested in Cisco labs or cert study, drop him a line. The lab has some Cisco toys for play as does BK, and some other lab members are network guys by day for very large enterprises in the area. Seems like a good match!
Open hack night followup and Art|Everywhere
Open hack night on Friday was pretty dead in terms of visitors with the exception of 3 new people that stopped by for a bit. But while it was a quiet night in terms of visitors, it was an active night in terms of projects. Kyle recapped his Rampage World Tour monitor which went from non-working to looking great. The robot arm got some needed attention. Work has started on wiring it up properly. The gecko drives are being mounted with the bigger power supply and cooling. Mike's Silent Scope Hardware Error -11P failure has been corrected. We're working to engineer a repair kit for these machines and put it on the market. Don't think the lab is just about video games, it just happens that a few of them showed up as projects that need highly technical fixes. Others were working on other projects as well.
The lab has been selected as an entrant into Art|Everywhere. Very exciting! So work will begin soon on creating our masterpiece.
Art Everywhere submission
Art Everywhere is a yearly event in it's second year where artwork is made and placed into empty storefronts on Granby Street. Some of the lab members have come up with some ideas for Art Everywhere, so we are going to submit them and participate this year. It should be rewarding!
For more information on Art Everywhere, see arteverywhere.net.
AMX Automation System + LED lighting + IRC
The IRC bot that is running on the AMX controller can now pass commands from the IRC chat room (#hackerspace on irc.757.org) through to the LED lighting in the lab. The LED lights run on the DMX-512 protocol. The command to set the colors is "amxled #rrggbb" where rrggbb are hex values (0 to F). "amdled #FF0000" makes it red, "amxled#00FF00" makes it green, etc. This is identical to HTML color codes. The AMX DMX-512 controller fades in the new color over 1 second. Later I might spruce it up more with allow adjustment of the fade variable, but for now, it's rocking (as long as the bot is in IRC.) I plan to add speech synthesis to the AMX next. Enjoy!
InvisiFrogger on AVGN MAGfest Review
During this year's MAGfest the 757 Labs crew brought along InvisiFrogger, a modified Frogger game where the forg is invisible. During the con James of Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN) fame stopped by to take a look at the game, check out his coverage of at Cinemassacre.
New parts for the Cray Supercomputer
Thanks to the generosity of Cray Inc, we now have hard drives that will work in our system. This means we should be good to go ahead and finish up the UNICOS installation and bring the system online! This is a vintage system that is historical and not considered fast by modern standards, but has use in learning about vector computer systems. Much thanks to Cray Inc!
Underwater ROV project underway
Build out of the underwater ROV has started. The first step is to build what will be pretty much a standard ROV design. Initially it will have lighting, video, and propulsion controlled from the surface. We are going to build (and release) a new module to facilitate digital communications with the vehicle from the surface. After this part is complete we have some ideas for new sensors and driver boards that can be developed that should be useful to the ROV community at large.
If interested, there is a ROV specific mailing list in addition to the main 757 Labs mailing list.
Location
@757Labs
- RT @kmcurry: Getting my first guided tour of a makerbot from @757labs #startnorfolk #maker http://t.co/XsHo6NTi
Links
User Groups
- 757 CCC Comic & Cartoon Creators
- 757 Objective C Group Objective C and Cocoa programming group.
- 757 Python Users Group
- 757.rb Ruby Users Group
- HR Geeks Hampton Roads Geek Community