Just thought I’d take some time to catch us all up on several recent developments beyond Interlock, but somewhat local, that are relevant to our interests.
Last month, I read in the local paper of the formation of the Rochester Brainery, opening early next month in the Village Gate, across the Goodman Street railyard from us here at Interlock and our neighbors at the Hungerford.
We’ll always owe a debt to Dave at Coworking Rochester for helping us get started by offering space and moral support during some of our bigger early organizational meetings, before we settled on a space of our own to rent. Still, it’s interesting to see people coming together in another coworking space in town, Smokestack Coworking, High Falls area.
Here’s hoping they both thrive and complement each other.
Last month we received a visitor from Ithaca, José, who traveled up with a couple of friends maybe to join what he thought at the time was the closest hackerspace to him. I had a great time talking with him, so it was a little bittersweet to tell him Ithaca Generator has recently gotten off to what looks like a good start and might just meet his needs without the long drive.
I wasn’t able to make it to their open house back in December. But, I
did visit with some family over the holidays who were able to go and got to see the party favors they made at the open house. Fun. Look like good things are in store for the hands-on, DIY hacker and maker community in Ithaca.
We’ve also been having a friend, Joe, make the trip from Niagara Falls every so often to visit, which has had us asking how things are going at Buffalo Lab. Figured we’ve give them a shout out while we’re at it.
[placehold for eventual Rochester Makerspace logo]
Last, but hopefully not least, the most recent big news is a much-anticipated step for the group calling themselves Rochester Makerspace. They’ve rented a space a little north of downtown, on St. Paul Street. Just Tuesday they had a get-together with pizza at the new location.
Though the planning for this new space has been careful and deliberate, ongoing since at least this last summer, they now are moving towards ambitious goals to grow fast. I continue eagerly to await the opening of another maker-friendly space in Rochester, expected some time in March.
from deejoe on February 9th, 2013
1 Comment
About a year ago, Interlock members were offered to go in on two group purchases, coordinated through the mailing list. The first was for Freeduino kits, with the boards pre-populated with the USB controller chip and mini-B socket. The second was for strands of individually-addressable RGB LEDs which can be controlled with an Arduino using this
Adafruit WS2801 library.
I indulged in each, getting one Freeduino kit as a soldering-skills confidence-building project and to give me a second Arduino-compatible device in case I wanted to start do something possibly destructive of my “store-bought” name-brand Arduino. I also got a single 50-light strand of the LEDs.
Well, as it turns out, I didn’t solder together the Freeduino until a couple of months ago. But I started playing with the LEDs almost right away, demonstrating them at our open house in the spring. I haven’t done a whole lot with them, other than play around with the color space a little bit by having them display cyan, magenta, and yellow (eg, the combinations of the other two colors leaving out, respectively, red, green, and blue).
The main problem I had starting out was that I wasn’t quite ready yet to start messing with external DC power supplies capable of delivering more than the half-amp or so that a USB port can supply. Reportedly, each LED can draw up to 60 milliamps, so there was no way I could use the out-of-the-box example code from the library, which lights up all the lights in the strand.
I could have had it just light up a half-dozen or so of the lights, I suppose, but I wanted to try all the lights, just not at once. I soldered onto the end of each of the four wires a bit of lead clipped from through-hole parts for other soldering projects to give me something I could shove down into a breadboard connector or into the Arduino connectors. Red is 5V, blue is ground. White is data and green is clock (I think, but see the code).
So, here’s my modest modification of the example code, in which I modify the ColorWipe function to first turn off any previously-lit lights before lighting up a new light with the given color. It’s a bit lazy, having a fencepost error on each end of the strand, trying to turn off (eg, set to black) the light number -1 and failing to turn off the last light in the strand. I’ve come to think of that as the “last color used indicator” feature.
--- libraries/WS2801/examples/strandtest/strandtest.pde 2011-12-13 00:43:49.000000000 -0500
+++ strandshort.ino 2012-11-24 17:29:53.829648206 -0500
@@ -16,7 +16,7 @@
// Set the first variable to the NUMBER of pixels. 25 = 25 pixels in a row
-WS2801 strip = WS2801(25, dataPin, clockPin);
+WS2801 strip = WS2801(50, dataPin, clockPin);
// Optional: leave off pin numbers to use hardware SPI
// (pinout is then specific to each board and can’t be changed)
@@ -37,8 +37,9 @@
colorWipe(Color(255, 0, 0), 50);
colorWipe(Color(0, 255, 0), 50);
colorWipe(Color(0, 0, 255), 50);
- rainbow(20);
+/* rainbow(20);
rainbowCycle(20);
+*/
}
void rainbow(uint8_t wait) {
@@ -75,8 +76,13 @@
// good for testing purposes
void colorWipe(uint32_t c, uint8_t wait) {
int i;
+ int j;
+ uint32_t black;
+ black = Color(0,0,0);
for (i=0; i < strip.numPixels(); i++) {
+ j=i-1;
+ strip.setPixelColor(j,black);
strip.setPixelColor(i, c);
strip.show();
delay(wait);
from deejoe on November 26th, 20120 Comments
We’ve held the second of our monthly 3D printing meetings recently, with a fifth person getting trained up on how to use our current printer, and are on the cusp of another advancement in our previously-mentioned 3D printing capabilities, now that 3 people have decided which printer design they’re going to build next.
In the meantime, we continue to torture Beardicus’s poor little Huxley RepRapPro making other little tschotskes that speak to our interests. This doesn’t get us closer to the glorious future of 3D printers for everyone, but I like to think of it as our answer to Wall Street’s “profit taking”: Every once in a while it’s nice to just cash out a little bit and enjoy what you’ve already got.
My turn at that most recently was this little model of monomeric insulin, based on the crystal structure reported by Gursky et. al.
The trick is how to take a computer model of something like this:
and print it on the 3D printer so that it goes from being an on-the-screen abstraction to something you can hold.
Read the rest of this entry »
from deejoe on June 5th, 20120 Comments
I don’t have tons of statistics or great pictures or anything–I suppose those that have them might post them later–but in the meantime I figured I’d give a quick recap of my experience at our open house Friday, before it fades too much further from active memory into the realm of myth and legend.
It was, in short, a great time. We had a fairly good variety of folks wander through, from pre-teens on up. I spent a while fishing out from a small water-filled crockpot slow cooker fun little blobs of warm polycaprolactone These I then shoved into the hands of anyone who would take them as they wandered through our conference/presentation/meeting room. It was great seeing folks’ reaction to its warm, pliable nature and to listen to them comment about how tough and rigid it is once cooled. It’s a very minimalistic but (at least I’d like to think) very representative demonstration of the interactive, collaborative, exploratory, hand’s-on environment we try to provide at Interlock to members and guests alike.
I took a bit of a break from running my mouth and from noodling around in the hot water and gooey PCL to watch a short but sweet TOOOL-designed lockpicking slideshow, followed by a lockpicking workshop. Antitree had done the pied-piper trick, drawing a bunch of kids-in-fact and kids-at-heart into the conference room for a short statement of the lock picking rules, a little bit of lock construction and mechanism theory and picking how-to. Then everyone took turns with the several sets of lock picking tools and real locksets for some hand’s-on experience. Folks really seemed to have a good time with trying it out.
Elsewhere in the space, all the folks originally promised to appear were around. I can only guess at how awesome their presentations were, but there seemed to be people everywhere. Early on, I was worried no one would make it into the not-a-kitchen for snacks, but that turned out to be not-a-problem.
Not sure how much of the traffic was driven by word-of-mouth versus posted fliers, but I know at least some folks had seen our lead-off part in a feature in the independent weekly tabloid Rochester City Newspaper.
The lead-up to the open house rekindled a fire under some of our 3D printing aspirations. I don’t want to give too much away there, but that’s been bubbling along these last few weeks. And, in addition to folks who made it on Friday, we’ve also been having new folks continue to come in for our weekly Open Night. This week, we met John, who brought us some fun new-to-us toys (again, perhaps more on that later, but in the meantime, thanks, John!). Also, we got to meet and talk to (a different, distinct) Joe and Andrew. And so it goes.
If you came to visit us Friday, we hope you liked what you saw and will come back. If you missed it, not to worry: Please keep an eye on our calendar for other events (at least two every week). Or, if you can’t make it then, drop us a line and maybe we can work out an appointment for some other time.
from deejoe on March 21st, 20120 Comments
We were delighted to receive embassy from FamiLAB during our weekly Open Night on Tuesday in the person of John S, who stopped by on his way through town. We had a great time talking about his awesome business making good use of high voltages, and about all the cool things Familab does, and showing him around Interlock’s new location.
Roboalex is all fired up to lead us into doing soldering classes with the MintyBoost kits, following FamiLAB’s example. We’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, it’s great to learn that FamiLAB has recently expanded and seems to be going from strength to strength, including their plans to host the Orlando Mini Maker Faire coming up May 26.
from deejoe on March 8th, 20120 Comments
