We at the Lab had a Segate DockStar kicking around, taking up space. I had been looking for a tiny NAS to run some home storage things, so a donation to the kitty later and away I go. However, I couldn’t put my 2.5″ PATA adapter onto it stock, so it needed a new home. That home happens to be sandwiched between some slabs of Inventables plexiglass. I’m kicking myself for not taking more pictures, but the overall design is pretty simple: Two sheets of plexiglass.
First, a short primer on Poly(methyl methacrylate), AKA “Plexiglas”. Technically, there are many names for the (usually) transparent, shatter-proof material, including lexan, perspex, lucite, and oroglas. the material itself is a lightweight, usually thin layer of a synthetic polymer intended to be both heat resistant and shock resistant. One of its first uses was in World War II, on the front of bombers which needed to have impact-resistant noses (so you could see out of them. More useful if you’re the guy in the bubble below the plane.)
Anyway, my design process essentially boiled down to:
- Mock the whole thing up in cardboard (this is an important step)
- Replicate the design overall onto a hunk of Plexiglas
- Drill holes for the bolts
- Drill holes for the zip-ties holding the ripped-out beating heart of the DockStar
- Zip tie the Dockstar in place
- Add hard drive/adapter
- Cable it up
- Admire work
The last part is the hard part.
On the slightly different side, I have ArchLinux ARM running on it. The device itself is supported quite well and has most, if not all, the Arch base packages available to it. Cool stuff. Installation wise, its a matter of following the instructions. I’ll summarize:
- Disconnect it from your PogoPlug account
- SSH into the device
- Pull down the alternative U-boot script installer
- Partition the disk. There needs to be at least one partition with at least 5..6GB of space available for ArchLinux. I personally gave Arch 10GB of space on a 250GB hdd. More data for meeee!
- Make sure the first partition is formatted ext2, has the ArchLinux arm5te root tarball extracted.
- Reboot!
Nothing can beat the official documentation on the ArchLinux ARM website.
One of the things I have is a real biggie for statistics. I like statistics. I happen to also like pretty graphs. Combine them and you get the results of tinkering around with the kernel diskstats file:
I put the script on Gist. Go hack on it.
Everyone you know is knitting like a boss and you want to get in on the action, but aren’t sure where to start. Or, no one you know can knit and you want to be the trailblazer. Or, there was that one time you tried to learn to knit, failed horribly and swore that you would conquer knitting someday. Well, that day is here, my friend.
January 30 come get your knit on at Quelab. We’ll teach you how to cast on, knit a rocking pot holder and bind off. All in two hours. Yes, that’s right. You’re going to finish a knitting project in two hours. We’ll provide needles, yarn and know how. You come with your swank self and get your knit on.
My, how time flies.
The time has come to start working on the agenda for the February General Meeting, currently scheduled for 3 February 2013 at 16:30.
The main items which are on our agenda every month are our Financial Report, our Task Force reports (currently 3D-Printing and New Location), and our 3-month Calendar Review. If there is anything you would like to bring up to the leadership of the group, please let us know via email, or by posting it in a comment here.
Wiki Link: http://quelab.net/wiki/index.php?n=Main.02-03-2013-General
As always, there will be pizza for a $5 donation, and the meeting will be followed by our regularly scheduled hack-night.
A Few weeks ago we were visited by one of their writers, and he did a very nice Nearly full page article about his visit. Please go to your nearest Alibi stand and go pick it up We are on page 12!
If you live far away or are getting to this late, here is the link http://alibi.com/feature/43885/Hack-the-High-Desert.html
If you live nearby, please consider tearing out this sheet and making sure it gets put up somewhere that interested people might see it! And Continue reading the whole edition is quite good!
Among the hacker-sphere this past week, there has been an uproar concerning the suicide of one of the Progenitors of the Internet, Aaron Swartz. This brilliant entrepreneur who was responsible for RSS 1.0 and is considered as a co-founder of Reddit, committed suicide on 11 January 2013 amid an ongoing investigation surrounding a theft of data from JSTOR (an online repository of academic journals).
Many other people have written more, priviliged, detailed, and informed commentary about the case, the surroundings, the impact, and the man that was Aaron Swartz. I encourage you to read the remembrances on the memorial blog and read more on both the case and the circumstances which led to his death in general.
I had a very hard time figuring out how to use Pin-Change Interrupts. I found AVR documentation hard to follow, and Arduino libraries overly complicated and obfuscating. Here is an example of how to use pin-change interrupts for Arduino (mega). It may help.
Pin-Change Interrupt forum post
Bottom line:
PCICR |= 1; // enable PCI0 pin group interrupt
PCMSK0 |= 0b1100; // enable PC interrupts on arduino pins 50,51, which are in group PCI0
...
/// Pin-Change interrupt, for group PCI0 (arduino mega pins 13..10, and 50..53)
ISR(PCINT0_vect) {
// do what you need to do when one of the pins in this group changes.
// usually... check to see which pin changed here... then do something.
}
Got in the mail yesterday a small christmas gift. A free Copy of Instructables Book, “Extrordinary Projects for Ordinary People”
About page 301, you will find the Instructable I wrote and won Quelab 2 prizes with(even with the typos!), I’ve only skimmed the rest of the book, but its a nice tomb of neat projects to inspire!
The above link is a Quelab affiliate code, so if you buy the book through there we get a few pennies! what better thing can you think of to spend your amazon.com gift cards on!
btw another holiday pro tip is, there are places you can exchange your unwanted un-usable (in my case one year i got gift card for a theater chain we don’t have), for cash or an amazon gift card. (you can also buy other cards if you like to do such things) http://www.giftcardrescue.com/ is one of them. Then buy the book! I know, you are probably thinking. Well since these are all on instructables, why should i pay for them? Well I have to say while i do find cool projects on Instructables, this atleast has it curated down a bit, and even after months of hanging out in the new article rss feed, I keep seeing new things in this book i never did see online.
And we are LIVE! Quelab’s 3D Printer Project is up on Indiegogo and we have 28 days left now!
Share the below link and don’t forget to donate!
http://www.indiegogo.com/quelabprinter
Even if we hit our goal, we have plans to buy extra filament, or build multiple extruders, or add a netbook to the system for ease of use/portability. So please give what you can! And share the link!
UPDATE 1:
As of 1 January (with 22 days left) we hit our first official stretch goal: $1100, meaning our printer will have ten different colors available!
UPDATE 2:
As of 8 January (with 15 days left) we are still working towards getting enough to build a second printer for experimentation purposes. After re-evaluating our current printer expertise, we haven’t built a two-head printer before, so rather than mess up the public-use printer, we’ll use the extra funds to build an experimental printer to do the testing with the dual-head before upgrading the public printer with this awesome feature.
Friends, Makers, Quelab Supporters!
Come celebrate the new year and our impending new space! We will be holding the first general meeting of the new year on 6th of January at 4:30pm. Please take a look at the agenda of the items we will be discussing, and if you have any suggestions for the agenda, please leave a comment here, or speak with a board member.
Howdy Quelabites,
First, your work on the strategic planning activities was AWESOME! ¡Gracias grande! (A big thank you) to everyone who participated. I just wanted to let everyone know that I’ve finished updating the minutes from the last Quelab planning meeting. Additionally, if you think of anything else that was forgotten during the meeting, or that you’d just like to add, it’s not too late. In January we will be working with this list again, and we can add more items at that time. Make sure to write them down so you don’t forget between now and then, or just email them to: board{at}quelab_dot_net.
Please keep in mind that we’re only halfway through the “Strategic Planning” for 2013. In January we will review this “ALL the Things!?” list and organize it into categories that make sense. Then we’ll figure out which items are the highest priority to Quelab membership (Yes, that’s you!). We can’t do it without your help, so we’ll see everyone after the holidays (6 Jan 2013 at 4:30pm) to kick off the new year.
Again, thank you for all your input, and for your help at the upcoming January planning meeting. I can’t wait for everyone to get these ideas rolling in 2013!
Respect,
-greg
Quelab prez
