A few of us will also be presenting at this event! We will have live 3D sugar glass printing, exhibitions of Brendan’s boom cases, Dan’s 8 mm RockBox, PJ’s electronics, Corrie’s textiles and artwork, Chris Terrell’s wood burning, and maybe a few more things.

We hope to see you there! Deets and directions below.

Deets:
Free Refreshments (wine, food, music) will be provided at the event!!
APS Requests your RSVP HERE: museum@amphilsoc.org
Thursday, June 6th, 2013
5:30-7:30 pm
APS Museum in Philosophical Hall
104 S. Fifth Street, Philadelphia, PA

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Making things to make music.

On Thursday April 25, our series of events for Philly Tech Week continues as we open our doors for DIY Music Night (5pm-???). If you’re into music, making music, or making things that make music, you won’t want to miss it! If you’ve been to the space before, you’ll know that we run on a steady diet of tunes. And on Thursday, we’ll have all our audio and music-centric projects out in what is sure to be the loudest night of PTW. Come by and see the space, make some amplified noise, hang out, or share your own projects.

We’ll have guitars, amps, synthesizers, sequencers, speakers, fuzzboxes, tremolo pedals, signal generators, oscillators, speakers, drum machines, pickups, karaoke machines and probably alot more – all made at Hive76.

Plus we’ll have a handful of contact microphones to give away! We’ll help you turn anything into an amplified electric instrument in 10 minutes flat.

On Wednesday, April 24, Hive76 will be transforming our typical Wednesday open house into a special Tech Week Open Hack!

Over the years, we’ve managed to accumulate a plethora of electronic detritus, as one might expect from a hackerspace. We’d love to invite you to come to our space and help us clean it put the junk to good use! We’ll have some microcontrollers on hand and several members around to help you along your way. The idea is to split attendees out into workgroups that will concentrate on designing and building objects from parts we have available for you at the space! Wanna throw together a bot that responds to table tapping? How about something that plays like a musical instrument? Dig making LEDs respond to external stimuli? Just wanna learn how some of these things might be possible? Slightly annoyed with how often I ask questions in my posts?

—Please bring a laptop along if you have one available. Some programming experience is a plus, but definitely not necessary.—

Wednesday 4/24 5pm – 10
Gratis and Libre (free)

RSVP by commenting below.

***ALSO: If you haven’t been to Hive76 and want to see what we’re about, stop by on Monday April 8th for our Monthly Monday Microcontroller Madness (7-10PM) or on any (other) Wednesday night for our weekly open houses (7-11PM)***

Our grand finale/blowout/party for Philly Tech Week will take place on Saturday, April 27. Everything from the previous week’s events will be on interactive display, and more. It’s an all-day exhibition of everything that goes on at Hive76 and everybody’s invited!

• 3D Printing/OpenSCAD interactive demo
• Fighting robots
• DIY musical instruments, effects, snyths, amps, circuit bending, everything
• Continuous open hack/project marathon: make whatever you want with whatever we’ve got
• Open soldering workstations
• Member’s signature projects on display
• Gaming, arcade and pinball machines
• Music
• Karaoke!
• Libations
• Free food

We are located in the Arts Building at 915 Spring Garden Street. Stop by at any time during the day/night and dial 0519 at the callbox. See you there!

Draw in Illustrator, extruded in OpenSCAD

I’m sure you know Illustrator. It’s the most successful vector drawing program <clarkson>in the world.</clarkson> OpenSCAD is less well known. It is best described as coding for objects. You make a solid with the function cube() and cut a cylinder() out of it with the difference() function, etc. But sometimes you want a more organic or complicated shape to start with. That’s where artist JK Keller stepped in and made a script that automates some of the process for you. What you need for this workshop:

• Laptop
• Adobe Illustrator
• OpenSCAD
• This script: https://github.com/jk-keller/Adobe-Scripts
• Some designs or ideas

There may not be time to print everyone’s design, but you should go home with something 3D printed.

Monday 4/22 5pm – 10
Gratis and Libre (free)

RSVP by commenting below.

Show up Tuesday and sign up for a spot to drive and fight, or just hang out and watch the destruction. Ask questions, check out our space and get your robot rocks off. This will also be a preview of an upcoming fighting robot class to be offered at Hive in which participants will build machines similar to those featured at Fighting Robot Night (TBA, check back soon!).

In the meantime, here’s some old Battlebots videos to get you excited.

• Monday: 3D Printer / OpenSCAD modeling class where we help people model ideas with OpenSCAD and Illustrator, and then allow them to print it on our 3D printer.
• Tuesday: Combat Robotics Demo: Duke it out with miniature R/C machines in tabletop matches – it’s Robot Wars on a hand-held scale. Choose one from a field of 1-lb robots designed and built by Hive76 to drive and fight in a display of electro-mechanical fisticuffs. Learn the basics of building and strategy, and get a taste of upcoming combat robot classes offered at Hive76.
• Wednesday: Open Hack Night, for anyone who wants to come and build, hack, or program. We’ll also have a Microcontoller session for individuals who want to become more familiar.
• Thursday: Music Night: Come talk to our best music hackers and learn how to build effect pedals, make anything into a speaker and learn about amplifiers.
• Saturday: Hive76 Ultimate Open House and Expo: Hive76 will have everything from the previous week available for display, and to play with.Also available will be Karaoke, Music, Movies, Food and Refreshments.

About 30 minutes into making our own greensand molds, we realized that this was going to be a difficult process, and immediately destroyed several hours of work trying to get a good crisp mold for our first pour.

A simple gear was too difficult

Several hours into our class, we managed to finally get a good solid mold of a 3D printed TARDIS. We hopped in line and got a pretty good looking cast. Andrew also attempted the TARDIS with some success. He also managed to get some good casts of a wooden puzzle, including one that blew out. However, due to our earlier troubles, we decided to hedge our bets and get one more good pour out of the class before we would start wrapping up. While waiting to pour ours, I was being shown how to work the furnace by Gus, and ended up melting down plenty of scrap and helping others make their pours which was a lot of fun to be working with. The furnace was operating at about 1300 Celsius, and moving around molten metal at that temperature can be quite a thrill. We plan on working with Gus and Darla at Philadelphia Sculpture Gym on some other types of casting techniques, especially as they apply to our 3D printing. We look forward to working with them in the future, and hope you all consider taking their next Greensand class in January.

I gave a talk too where I delved deeper into the science behind our work with RepRap for research in Regenerative Medicine and I made the case that open source is a philosophy, not a checkbox. Try not to get caught up in semantics of open vs. not-open (e.g. one could try to label Arduino as not an “open” platform since it has proprietary Atmel chips on the board). Instead, try to think of open projects as those in which you see people as collaborators (“open”), not customers (“closed”). We all have many things we can learn from each other, and who doesn’t want more collaborators to learn science together? Some interesting Q&A at the end too.

The gritty details: That’s a Baricuda extruder using air pressure to extrude molten sugar. Now I need to figure out how he can get it home to the UK in one piece.