When I posted the “Bre Builds a Bike” piece here last night, I neglected to include a link to the PDF that originally accompanied the Weekend Project. It’s a sweet little comic book that recaps the salient features of the video and includes this nice display of rudimentary bike tools. You can access the PDF on the link below:
Calling all hackers! Come out to the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, CA on April 17 for an inPulse hackathon. If you’ve already got an inPulse watch, that’s awesome – bring it along! If not, we’ll be supplying some watches to hack on. The hackathon will start at 11a and go until 9p. We’ll be providing a mid-afternoon BBQ, wifi and watches. At the end of the evening, we’ll organize a little demo session where you can show off your creations.
HeatSync Hackbus
Jordan Ranous of Chandler, AZ’s HeatSync Labs is hoping to build a hack bus for a road trip to Maker Faire.
So I want to make a mobile hacker space on an old school bus. Everything that HSL is in a mobile platform, plus a green living example in a trailer behind it. This will provide a place for drivers to sleep on road trips and also promote renewable ways of living. I have gathered adequate funding and selected a bus, I'm providing a trailer for living space, and am working on a possible local solar company to sponsor for the power system and I'm working on a bio-diesel sponsorship for free veg-oil bio-diesel fuel.
We’d like to give you a chance to become a cofounder. By paying for a full year of membership now, you’ll be guaranteed to have 24/7 access to an amazing community, voting rights, a neat certificate, access to a free parts wall and the honor of being an “OHM Space Founding Member”.
Yuri’s Night at Louisville, KY, Hackerspace LVL1
This Tuesday we'll be celebrating Yuri's Night, a world-wide party commemorating the 50th anniversary of mankind first slipping the surly bonds of earth, and extending our reach into space.
LVL1 will be hosting members of the Louisville Astronomical Society for some urban star gazing, and we'll be trying to listen for the ARRISat, an amateur radio satellite currently attached to the International Space Station, transmitting just for Yuri's Night, before it becomes fully armed and operational later this year.
Pumping Station: One Turns Two, Adds Space
This week Pumping Station: One turns two years old! Not only are we older and wiser, but we're getting bigger too! We've recently doubled our footprint in our building, adding on another classroom and a dedicated workshop. To celebrate and show off our new space, this Friday, April 15th, we'll be throwing a birthday party and grand re-opening (not that we actually closed). We'll have making-related activities like electronics and desktop trebuchet kits early on, as well as a DJ and liquid refreshments. The festivities start at 6 PM. Donations of $5-10 at the door requested.
Hackathon This Weekend at Winnipeg’s SkullSpace
April 16 will be the fifth SkullSpace Hack-a-thon! Everybody is invited to come hang out, work on projects, see some talks, or just wander around and meet new people! Saturday will feature a few talks/projects that you can participate in, if you choose. The point is to get together, meet new people, and have some fun!
New Loft at Unallocated Space
Unallocated Space just installed a loft in their space. You can watch a time-lapse of the build on YouTube.
Maltego Hackathon at RevSpace
Netherlands organization RevSpace is holding a hackathon this Friday:
Maltego is an intelligence and forensics application. It allows for the mining and gathering of information as well as the representation of this information in a meaningful way.
Coupled with its graphing libraries Maltego allows us to identify previously unknown relationships between information, persons and information about persons. As such, it is a useful tool in the IT security field to map an organization’s people and relationships. A valuable aid in exploring the social-engineering attack vector in pen-testing investigations.
The purpose of this hackathon is to create local transforms. Maltego defines various entity types (such as persons, domain names, phone numbers, etc..). Transforms are applications that when called will produce output which results in new entities that are somehow linked to the originating entity within your graph. They can be coded in practically anything as long as they stick to the specification (ie. they output the right kind of XML). These transforms will be open source and released to the community, and can be run locally without the need to contact a server.
Are you a hackerspace member with an event you’d like to publicize? Send it to johnb@makezine.com or tweet me at @johnbaichtal and I’ll post it. Also feel free to subscribe to my hackerspaces Twitter list. Hackerspace Happenings will run weekly Tuesdays, and the next one will come out April 19th.
Part of the charming special section opener illustration, by Juan Leguizamon, for MAKE Volume 26
As you likely know, the next issue of MAKE, now wending its way to subscribers (hitting newsstands by April 26) , is themed “Karts and Wheels.” While working on it, and its numerous projects and features (covering go-karts, scooters, skateboards, motorized bikes, and the like), it was hard for us not to look wistfully out of the window and go off on some fond tale of the crazy contraptions we fashioned ourselves as kids. Everybody has a go-kart (or other youthful rec vehicle) story. What’s yours? Please tell us about it in the comments below. Maybe this will help whet your whistle for taking on a project or two from the coming issue. There are some great ones, such as the drill-powered go-kart on the cover, that you can build in a weekend.
From the Pages of MAKE MAKE Volume 26: Karts and Wheels Garage go-kart building is a time-honored tradition for DIYers, In this issue of MAKE, we’ll show you how to build wheeled wonders that'll have you and the kids racing around the neighborhood in epic DIY style. Build a longboard skateboard by bending plywood and build a crazy go-kart driven by a pair of battery-powered drills. Put a mini gasoline engine on a bicycle. And construct an amazing wind-powered cart that can outrun a tailwind. Plus you'll learn how to build the winning vehicle from our online Karts and Wheels contest! In addition to karts, you'll find plenty of other projects that only MAKE can offer! Subscribe here.
Back in 2009 Cisco bought Pure Digital Technology’s Flip. Gadget fans and makers were puzzled by this, phones were just about good enough to start beating the Flip. Odd purchase for Cisco. Some details from the WSJ…
Cisco two years ago made a big splash by buying the maker of the Flip, the perfect-for-the-YouTube-age video camera that was then a tech geek accessory of choice. Now, Cisco is killing off the Flip.
Today, the company announced it will “exit aspects of its consumer businesses,” including shutting down Flip.
Just a week ago, Cisco CEO John Chambers issued a mea culpa admitting to problems with slow decision making and lack of “discipline” at the networking company. Chambers signaled that change was coming, and apparently Flip was steamrolled to make way for change.
In 2009, Cisco agreed to acquire Flip maker Pure Digital Technology in a stock deal valued at around $590 million at the time. The deal was one of Cisco’s biggest forays into the fickle, low margin world of consumer electronics. At the time (and since), analysts questioned whether Cisco was making a mistake by getting into the fiercely competitive business with established giants such as Sony.
Cisco is giving up on its barely two-year-old $590 million purchase of Pure Digital Technologies, announcing today that it is closing its Flip business unit and cutting 550 employees as part of a larger restructuring. The move comes after clear signs that the outsized deal was not paying off for the technology giant, which is in the midst of refocusing its business on its core networking business.
Cisco said it will close the Flip business, but will continue to support current Flipshare customers who upload and share media to the web. Cisco said it will also refocus its Home Networking business to make it more profitable and connected to the company’s networking infrastructure. It will also move Umi, its consumer Telepresence, into the business Telepresence line and sell it through an enterprise and service provider go-to-market model.
The Flip and cameras like it are cheap and attracted lots of hacks. From underwater ROVs to my favorite, mounting them on model rockets. Rocket-Launched Camcorder, MAKE 07.
But now it’s all gone? What a waste, Cisco, will you at least consider open sourcing the camera design(s) so you can put some value back in before you shelve the camera IP? You’re never going to do anything with it, just have someone post the firmware on GitHub and all the CAD stuff on Thingiverse. The rest, just publish anywhere, a BOM, etc. Allow your engineers to write about making these cameras – don’t let it all away like so many other tech acquisitions and destructions. Think of all the science, art, robotics and educational applications we could all gain by this – Cisco, you could be the first to release an open source camera for the world. Cisco, this would the best news in the world of making, it would show leadership and an investment in the future for anyone who used, hacked and improved this “open source camera” from Cisco. You don’t have time for this you can just send us the files, we’ll do it for you.
I created this inexpensive radiation dosimeter for the people of Japan. Strange that when I sent this to Japanese newspapers it was not printed or commented on.
We were all amazed at the sensitivity of an inexpensive digital camera ccd to beta radiation eqvalent to 100 bananas (+- 1.0 mrem).
I have run the experiment Pyrex dishware with 14 bananas as a source using 10 exposures resulting in 4.7 sigma events. A single photo yielded only a 1.5 sigma not signifacant to write about. I still have a few more experiments to do.
Created at Romania’s Sapientia University. The YouTube channel is AlgoRythmics. Although some naysayers have expressed doubt about the choreographic expression of a quicksort, per the AlgoRythmics Facebook page, videos of both quick- and merge-sort dances will be uploaded in a few days. Stay tuned! [Thanks, Stefan!]
Here’s a weekly look into what some robot building nerds are doing for fun. In a special edition this week, we are happy to host with Mr. Ignoblegnome as a guest in Frits Lyneborg’s workshop.
What’s a Netduino? Glad you asked! Netduino is an open source electronics platform using the .NET Micro Framework. The board features a 32-bit microcontroller and a rich development environment, making it a perfect solution for engineers and hobbyists alike. If you are picking up a Netduino, be sure to check out our exclusive MakerShield. It’s a perfect match for the Netduino, and any other ‘duino flavored micro!
This caterpillar track is the first step towards designing and building a printable mobile robot. My finished robot will have four of these modules, but many other designs are possible. A single caterpillar can function on its own as a simple robot that can move forwards and backwards; two modules can be joined together to form a tank-like machine, etc.
OK, so, I’m still just a bit fuzzy on how Oklahama City resident Mike Koehler’s delightfully hare-brained scheme is “for America,” but I’m prepared to get behind pretty much any initiative to build a “fully functional, full-scale” model of the original Imperial Walker. The initiative could be called “AT-AT for Azerbaijan,” and the only really important question, to me, would remain: “We’re going to build a life-size working AT-AT, right?” Also: “Does fully functional include the head-mounted laser blasters?” From Mike’s manifesto:
NERDS OF AMERICA:
We were once a country that made things: giantmetal cars, Hoover Dams, non-AutoTuned popular music.
But now we are stuck in an economy in limbo, surrounded by our Internets, our hipsters and our arguing politicians.
Nerds, I have a great idea to make America great again. We can show our brain power, our manufacturing prowess, our organizational skills and our geek-fueled eye for detail.
That idea: an AT-AT for America.
Now I have an idea, but no money and a total lack of mechanical aptitude.
That's why I am hoping this project spreads like wildfire, inspiring the nerds, makers, geeks, motorheads, sportos, dudes, steampunks, Jedis, halfwits, greasers and geniuses to band together for one goal.
Excelsior to you, Mike Koehler. Excelsior and Godspeed. [Thanks, Rachel!]
Part of the charming special section opener illustration, by Juan Leguizamon, for MAKE Volume 26
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