757 Labs A Hackerspace in Hampton Roads, Virginia.

Open Lab, Fri Sept 3rd after 9:15pm

Just a heads up, lab will be open (assuming it doesn't flood too bad) Friday September 3rd after 9:15pm. This is after the 2600 meeting that takes place in Virginia Beach.

D-Link DES-1024D switch repair

We got hold of two D-Link DES-1024D 24 port unmanaged network switches that are totally dead. Out of warranty. No power, no lights, no life.

Fix was 1000uf 10v caps, 2 of them, on the power supply board. C6 and C5.

They are working and on the shelf if anyone in the lab needs one for a project. Not of the grade acceptable for the lab's infrastructure, but good for quick project and temporary expansion.

Dlink, D-Link, dead, no lights, hardware version A1.

CNC (Gonna make you sweat)

Some parts are on hand for building of the 60" x 35" x ?" CNC router!

Still need wood, and some couplers, and all the other parts that we will find out we need once it's halfway done.

Arduino + old LED sign = Newness

TJ continues to make progress in converting an older 12' long (7 pixels high) green LED signboard to run from an Ardunio (Atmel 328) instead of it's original controller. With the new controller the sign will act as a frame buffer off of a host computer, allowing it to act as a spectrum analyzer and other neat effects not possible with most LED signboards.

757 Labs featured on AltDaily

Just a heads up, 757 Labs was featured in an article written by Matt Labarge, published on AltDaily! Check it out here!.

Thanks to Alt Daily for the mention and Matt for the article!

The Road Ahead

Light rail is still a ways off, but the construction in front of the lab is moving along nicely. The tracks pass by us, and are finished off. No sign of power yet, but the street is open in all directions at our intersection.

Sure the prospect of car/train collision is high, but if we get a camera pointed at the most likely point of impact, perhaps we can offer the feed to HRT and VDOT for faster incident response?

Microcontroller night report (3/27/10)

The 2nd micro-controller night was a success! A long night for some folks, indeed. Activities started off with trying to decode the protocol used by the UFO LED under car "neon" kit with a bus pirate board. Harold's USB oscope shed light on it but we will have to return to this in the future. Travis got an arduino microcontroller driving an Oracle LED sign (made by Sunrise Microsystems.) Very cool! The original control electronics were archaic and control software never worked right. Still some hacking to go before the entire 12' sign is running but much progress was made.

There was also discussion of the hackerspaces in space high altitude balloon project. It's going to be quite a challenge to stay in budget, and track this thing. There are stilll a few solutions to narrow down, but we've got the basic idea in place. Jody has created a new mailing list for this specific project, if you wish to join email him (jfranklin) or me (telmnstr.)

Chad set a new record on Galaga for the lab. Travis helped mount the whiteboard to hold the new record. A few new folks made it to the lab (Chad, Matt.)

Overall, good times!