Microcontroller Mondays – Tonight – 7pm till 11pm
Heads up that tonight is the 3rd edition of the weekly Micro-controller Mondays at 757 Labs.
7PM until 11PM.
Bring your project, idea or come to learn!
AVR, Arduino, TI MSP, HC11, PIC, Xilinx, Altera, whatever!
Hack the Whole Weekend
Friday, Oct. 21: Open Hack Night
Saturday, Oct. 22: LAN party
Sunday, Oct. 23: Comic & Cartoon Creators
Monday, Oct. 24: Microcontroller Monday
Ready to get your geek on for a whole weekend? Come out to the lab and join in an event! Or join all the events!
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- Up front Matt & Kitty setup the night before the LAN party while Harold plays…music?
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- August 20, 2011 LAN party was a full house
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- At the LAN party, Kyle and others play something that is not TF2
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- Chillin’ on the couches during Open Hack Night on July 15, 2011
We begin Friday with our monthly open house, or "Open Hack Night". This is a great opportunity to see the lab for the first time and take a tour. It's a very casual atmosphere where you can shoulder-surf members actively working on projects or just chill and discuss ideas. Sometimes there is a loosely-coordinated dinner/drinks outing to somewhere along nearby Granby Street. A few people might even start setting up for the next day's gaming event, which is...
Saturday is the LAN party, which usually begins around 1 PM, but may have even began the night before. BYOC (bring your own computer) and try to do all your downloading and patching at home before joining in on the festivities. Team Fortress 2 is the most popular game, especially since it's free, though other games are certainly welcome -- Diablo, Minecraft, Quake, you name it.
Feeling creative? 3 PM Sunday is the 757 Comic and Cartoon Creators meeting. Bring something to draw with.
And just when you think the weekend is over, it's Microcontroller Monday! Beginning at 7 PM, discussions will focus on everything microcontroller-related; from hardware to software. Beginners and advanced users are both welcome.
Ignite HR – Five minutes, 20 slides. Oct 11 2011
Hello everyone! 757 Labs this year is a proud sponsor of the exciting Ignite Hampton Roads talks! This is the second Ignite Hampton Roads and it is being held in conjunction with the MODSIM World Conference and Expo at the oceanfront.
"Each presentation has 20 slides that automatically advance after 15 seconds. It is a worldwide movement. Ignite events were originally conceived as technology variety shows, but they have grown into much more than that. Ignite is about ideas. Ideas can change the world. And it takes less than five minutes to spread one"
Event time is 7PM. It's free, but ticket registration is required.
Website for more information and to get Free tickets:
http://www.ignite-hr.org/
See you all there!
Solar Boiler Update
I've gone through quite a few iterations of the solar boiler. The current version uses a 47" Fresnel lens to focus sunlight down to about 1 square inch. The sunlight will focus on an evacuated tube that will transfer the heat into water. The aim is to boil the water and turn a steam engine, ultimately turning a motor and feeding clean energy into the grid. The solar boiler can now pivot in two dimensions allowing it the ability to track the sun as it moves from east to west from the morning until the evening and from north to south as the sun moves between winter and summer. The next step is to build in the tracking system which will consist of two stepper motors that will turn screws pivoting each of the two dimensions to follow the sun. We'll then tie in an MCU attached to some photocells to track the movement of the sun. After the tracker is built the boiler section is next. Honestly, I'm a little nervous about pressurizing steam. That episode of the mythbusters where they blew up the water heater has me a little on edge.
Open Hack Night – Tonight (Friday) – 7PM until 11PM
Just a heads up that tonight there is an open hack night from 7pm until 11pm at 757 Labs!
“It’s not all about hardware!”
Some comments have been heard recently suggesting that the lab is only interested in building physical things or working on electronics and hardware. This simply isn't the case. We would love to see more software development projects at the lab. There are already a few smaller projects taking place. It only takes groups of like minded individuals to get together and work on things. There is already an Android development group that meets at least once a month which needs some love. Python and Ruby groups meet at the lab once a month as well. We are also open to doing something like SuperHappyDevHouse or a Dev Day! There is a consistent flow of people who develop software and are interested in branching out to new things popping up at the lab randomly.
How do you get things started? It's simple! Post on the public mailing list! It's the best way to find people interested in working on similar things. If you aren't on the mailing list, take a look at the sign up page!
A Long Cray Supercomputer Weekend
Some more progress was made on getting the Cray J932SE supercomputer running at the lab. Using information from the logs of the friendly people at Cray-Cyber and doing some hacking on our own, we made it through part of the install process that hasn't been reached before. That is the good news. The bad news is there is a program or two missing from the Sun Workstation that appears to be required to actually install the UNICOS operating system on the computer. Feelers are out on the Internet and hopefully we will figure it out soon! Stay tuned.
HP DesignJet Plotter
Thanks to a kind donation, the lab received a dead HP DesignJet plotter. It's beautiful. Thanks to some advice from Ken M., we were able to troubleshoot a power supply issue, which seems to have been the primary cause of failure. It appears to be running fine with the exception of a crash or two while paging through the menu-driven interface. Now that it is working, it looks like the plotter will be added to the list of available resources for the lab. The cost of supplies is a bit higher than standard laser printing, so we will work out a per-page change jar for the future to help cover the cost of replacement heads and ink (which can run $500+!). Even with a high maintenance cost, the plotter is worth it: A laser printer can't print full color on E-size (36" wide) CAD paper!
Much thanks to L.B. for the donation! Additionally, thanks to Beau for transport assistance and Leeroy for troubleshooting assistance!
Finalizing the Laser Engraver
VaShadow jumped in and pushed the laser engraver project ahead and now it's near completion. When we left off, Vex had completed the embedded controller that handles the pulse width modulation of the CO2 laser. Thanks to VaShadow, the engraver is now nearly encased in a box setup to keep the work area clear and push any bad smells out of the lab. TJ cut the metal that lines the inside of the box around the laser bounce area. The box is adapted from the original Meistergram layout and includes some needed adjustments.
Chances are it will be running again today, only this time with a nice safe enclosure! Many thanks to VaShadow for helping on this!
CNC Router Progress
Someone recently asked in a comment what the progress is on the CNC router project. The good news is the Bosch T-nut parts *finally* arrived from L&H. Combined with some M5 screws from the local American Maintenance Supply, I was able to mount the NSK linear slides to the Bosch extrusions. I also picked up some bolts to mount four corner parts to the underside of the frame to elevate it, making room for the center drive down the middle for the long axis.
The next step is to cut and drill out the aluminum plate that will form the sides of the gantry. I also need to get the proper saw blade to cut the aluminum extrusions so I can mount the 45mm x 90mm extrusion across the gantry. Cutting out the hole for the stepper motor seems like it is going to be difficult.
Progress is happening, just a bit slowly. The good news is the next post that is going to contain information about the laser engraver project. :-) It's rapidly progressed.
Location
@757Labs
- Our site is back to normal. Let's hope congress sees fit to let it stay that way.
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