Greetings!
We recently received a demo board from Microchip with their new PIC-based Arduino-form-factor development board, the chipKit. While reading skimming through the technical specs, it turns out that it’s definately beyond me, hardware-wise.
Photos of the boxes we got here, https://secure.flickr.com/photos/quelabnm/tags/chipkit/show/
The chipKit has a similar form-factor to an Arduino, but it’s major difference is that it is PIC based (not AVR). Additionally, it runs at a different clock-speed and only understands the basic libraries from the Arduino suite. They do indicate that you can plug an Arduino Ethernet shield onto it and it will play ball, but some other boards might not.
But that’s really OK, because they shipped us two other boards to go with it. The chipKit proto-board (a perf-board with some headers) and the Input Board (which has some switches and a small OLED screen). It looks like the perfect brains for a new project.
Any ideas? Show off your grand plans in the comments and I can turn you folks loose on the board at Tuesday’s Hack Night! If you implement an awesome project, you can win the lab $5500 of tools and equipment! We’ve got a couple of months, but only the middle of January!
Greetings Makers and Hackers! I hope everyone enjoyed the Albuquerque Mini Maker Faire, and welcome to everyone who found out about us at the faire, we hope you enjoyed learning about the vibrant community of makers and doers here in the 505.
I would like to remind everyone about the Weekday Workshop we have planned for tomorrow. Our very own Spaceman Greg will be teaching a class on how to paint a stunning space scene. That’s right, Greg will be teaching you how to design your own worlds! If you don’t know what we’re talking about, check out the videos below the cut.
Wear your most rakish spray painting clothes and we’ll teach you how to spray paint your own space scene. If you want to pay at the door, let us know at events@quelab.net and we’ll hold you a slot in our rocketship*; otherwise, sign up at our Eventbrite
Here are some examples, and some process videos from an artist in the San Francisco Bay Area, Paco. Watch through the playlist to see the artist in action.
*Rocketship is metaphorical, unfortunately. It means we’ll keep a spot for you in the class
After note: Photos from the class can be seen here!
http://www.flickr.com/search/groups/?w=1645712%40N24&m=pool&q=spraypaint
Well Albuquerque’s first Maker Faire(Technically by registration, its called a “Mini Maker Faire”) was pretty amazing. I knew full well it was not going to be of the epic proportions that the Big Grandaddy Maker Faires are, but as a start this one was very good!
Quelab was very busy throughout most of it, We ran areas where we helped huge numbers of people learn to solder(from the pretty young to the not so young!). And showed off the Zork Teletype, helped troubleshoot the squishy circuits. Showed off 3d printing, and let folks play our restored Asteroids classic video game. Not to mention, members also setup live action angry birds, (with the cutest hand made birds and pigs), button making, and much more!
A nearly full list of what all was there can be found here!
And we Were just a part of it, There was a whole tent of Robotics, another for tent full of Creative ventures, Another full of Hands on Fiber arts and earrings and hand made stuff. and yet another full of Screen printing and textile arts! There were 2 stages!(one for makers presenting, and one for music and entertainment, A Cardboard Village. Alternative power vehicles, Food trucks, and the very exciting Trebuchet (flinging waterjugs 300yards or so)… and More
Flickr Group of Collected photos from the Maker Faire, If you use flickr please join the group and add yours! We will add some more from the Quelab Project DSLR tonight or tomorrow!
For anyone who met us and thinks they would love to become a part of what we are! Come on down to a Hacknight (pretty much they are just openhouse nights). If you didn’t get to learn to solder, we can help. If you have ideas or projects that too is what we are about enabling! And if you are already sold on the idea, please consider becoming a member! your memberships help us operate and grow!
And a huge Thank You to the Organizers, Other Volunteers, Makers, and attendees, you all helped make this great! And lets start making things for AmMF2013!
Coming soon! For your education and edification! More workshops, weekday AND weekend!
26 September – Build A BEAM-bot
3 October – Painting Space Scenes
10 October – Make Robot Art
17 October – Make an OpenWRT Router
20 October – How To: Screen Printing
7 November – All About Locks, locksmithing
14 November – Flavor Hacking (18+)
1 December – Homebrew Basics (18+)
And watch for more classes, as we’re adding more every month! Sign up for one or all at quelab.eventbrite.com.
So come and learn something. And if you want to teach a class (because you all know SOMETHING cool), we encourage that too. Just let us know
This Sunday, 23 Sept, is the first annual Albuquerque Mini-Maker Faire, and we want YOU! Quelab will be featured prominately up front in the Quelab Tent so we need to represent. We’re looking for volunteers to help set up our area on Saturday afternoon, and then run the tent for 2-hour shifts on Sunday (BTW, if you sign up for more than 1 shift you can get a free ticket to the Faire). Please contact Greg Moran (gregmoran at gmail.com) to get added to the list.
In addition to general volunteers, we are also asking for folks who can help with a “Learn to Solder” station. All materials and equipment will be provided, so we just need your expertise as “adult supervision.” Let Greg know if you are interested in contributing to that as well. Thanks, and see you there!
Do you have prints that don’t print?A pronterface that looks wrongterface? Well, you might have a bad mesh.
I ran into this when attempting to slice a whistle from Thingiverse: Slic3r would give me the ominous “Non-Manifold mesh” message and the printer would spaz out.
In order to undertand what’s going on, there should be a little information on how tools like slic3r work. Slic3r and other G-code generators tend to work on the values of face “normals” — the direction the face, well, “faces.” Let’s take our whistle for example: As downloaded from Thingiverse, it looks like this:
Bad STL file from Thingiverse
The tool I use is ModuleWorks STLView (also for android!) which allows us to show the face normals (green lines) and faces which face the wrong way (gold surfaces). Slic3r will produce some very, very strange GCode for this model:
Ugly GCode as a result of bad mesh
The tool here is the RepRap GCode Simlulator from opencode.eu.The source is included, and depends on openGL. This lets us see what the actual path for each layer of the model looks like.
So what do we do? First: don’t panic. Most of the horrible problems with ugly looking meshes can be fixed — all it takes is some time with the NetFabb cloud service. NetFabb produces a commercial 3D printer, but also runs a cloud service at http://cloud.netfabb.com/ which allows you to upload STL meshes and download the fixed version.
Here’s what the model and resulting GCode look like afterwards:
Fixed, good model with all its normals pointing out
Good GCode as a result of a clean mesh
Wednesday September 12th, Im going to be teaching a small informal workshop on lone exposure experimental photography via pinhole cameras. we will be going back to the very roots of photography.
As a long time photographer its easy to get caught up with the latest and the greatest in technology. But a lot can be learned by going way back to the start of it all. I wanted to get into some pinhole Solargraphs(photos of the sun streaking across the sky) but i didnt have a good darkroom handy.
So I developed a technique for using every day metal food tins to make small pinhole cameras, and then loaded them with blueprint paper. (blue print paper is nice because it does not need precise timing to develop, and can be developed with simple and fairly safe household chemicals, and you don’t have to work with negatives!
Here are some examples.
more examples and some of my cameras can be seen here,
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/killbox/sets/72157626481399715/
This Class we will talk a little bit of theory about How long do these long exposures need to be.
Camera making, (select your tins, and pierce your pinhole)
About the paper, and its handling.
Developing the film
Everyone signed up will go home with atleast one camera, and several sheets of paper (10 or more photos possible per sheet).
Date:Wednesday September 12th.
Time:7-9pm
Location: 1112 2nd street NW
Cost: $15 (you can choose to pay with cash if you rsvp look for the “Show other payment options” which will save you a little bit of service fees!)
RSVP now! http://pinholecamera.eventbrite.com/
24/7 Dedicated MINECRAFT Server!
So I just got a minecraft server up and working, and hopefully it will stay that way, so if you’re a proud member of quelab who also plays minecraft, this is for you!
The current IP for the server is 75.161.0.10 however, it does have a history of changing, so if it doesn’t let you connect then please tell me, and I will update it.
It should be reachable via quelab.dyndns-free.com
On a closing note, if the server doesn’t go kablooy in a matter of weeks like it did in the past, then I will be keeping it up to date with the most recent version of minecraft which sadly means that you do have to update to play on it.
Oh, and just for the record, no, its not going to be creative.
If you follow the Hack-A-Day stream, you’ve probably seen the STM32F0Discovery board come up on occasion. I have two of these boards and I like them — they have what I need for basic stuff, but I wanted some more horse-power (and USB Host.) Quickly, to the STM32F4Discovery!
The target here is people who’ve outgrown the world of AVR and need something running faster; you should be capable and comfortable with diving into your PATH, mucking with environment variables and reading some pretty deep C.
STM32F4 Discovery (From ST)
I was given one of these for xmas a little while back (read: 8 months ago) and played with it, getting demo code to run on it. ST did something very painful and/or clever in that they produced this board, for hobbyists, but conveniently forgot to point to a clean, unadulterated compiler.
