Samsung 226BW / GH22WS LCD monitor fix
Over the weekend George brought by a Samsung LCD monitor that was having issues. The screen backlight would flicker somewhat fast. It looked like the CCFL back light tubes were failing on the monitor, or something was up with the inverter. Upon further inspection it was common bad caps issue. So if you have one of these, you're going to want two 820uF 25V caps and a 330uF 25V cap. You can see the bulging ones inside. C110 and C112 are two of them, the other is in between. I seem to recall similar issues with a different model Samsung that was donated to the lab, perhaps the power supply boards are the same. Faulty components from the manufacturer led to this issue.
24-Hour Comics Day Time-Lapse
We decided to record a time-lapse video during the 24-Hour Comics Day event, here are the results.
Music Jam Session Saturday, October 16, 2010
757 Labs will be having another amateur music jam session. We will hold it on Saturday, October 16, 2010. Plan to setup your gear around 5:00 PM EST, and spend the next hour or so messing around with MIDI, pushing buttons, tweaking configurations, etc. Then around 7:00 PM EST, we will get down to business.
Feel free to add comments to this post, to let us know who will be attending, and what gear you will be bringing. Hopefully, we will have some webcams setup to stream live video, or at least record some audio samples. Anyone interested in electronic music and related musical gear is welcome to attend, regardless of skill level.
24 hour comics day this weekend
Heads up everyone, 757 Labs is the only site in Virginia hosting a 24 hour comics day! See www.24hourcomicsday.com for more info on the event. Participants write 24 pages of comics in 24 hours. It starts Saturday at noon and runs until Sunday. Big thanks to Mike B. for putting this together, and Local Heros for a sponsorship of it!
Open lab night, Saturday. 4PM till whenever.
Lab opens at 4pm till whenever. Open hack night. Project discussion, work being done, perhaps board games. More details on the mailing list. Will echo to Facebook.
Next round of projects
Now that the balloon launch is done and we were able to see some great results, it's time to start thinking about new projects. Matt C/Mark G and others have their simulator project going (and kudos to them for such great structure!) There has been a little talk among other members about starting some new projects.
UAV - Unmanned Ariel Vehicle. 757 Labs started developing an open source control program called OpenVulture. We could build a plane, run it on existing microcontroller platforms. We could fly OpenVulture with some work. We could work on building our own foam plane platforms.
ROV - Remote Operated Vehicles. Generally underwater exploration vehicles. We've also got some ideas on floating saucers that do underwater mapping, and some other neat ideas.
Interested? Have other ideas, or are interested in other things? Post on the mailing list!!
Fri Sept 10th, Open Lab Hack Night 8pm till
Another open lab night is happening Friday, starting at 8pm. Not sure which projects will be getting attention but it's fun as always (everyone is welcome to attend.) It should be open until midnight.
757.rb Learn to Program #1 a success!
On Sept 08th the 757.rb Ruby Meetup Group met at the lab for an introduction to Ruby programming. Attendance hit at least 23 people, and the presentation was good. Thanks to all for coming out, and thanks to Ken Collins for putting it together!
The next 757.rb meet up (in a month) will detail actually writing applications in Ruby.
Game development project underway
There is a new project at the lab around making an arcade game/simulator. There is an ambitious schedule on a whiteboard upstairs, and a development system where a few of the open source racing applications are being tested to see which is the best candidate as a starting point. It could be quite exciting! Matt Crainer has a background in modeling & simulation programming, and a number of others are assisting. Drop him a line if you are interested!



