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We Boldly Went…

Last night’s gaming event was a huge success! We played 3 consecutive games of Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator, and the entire event lasted about 3 hours. Highlights were our tactical officer Adam E. blowing up every ship that we came in contact with, Captain Chris’ excellent leadership, and our engineer Brendan possibly getting us blown up while he was on his phone. Starfleet Security is looking into that last one. Everybody seemed to have a lot of fun and there was interest in playing the game again soon.

Artemis2

I’d like to thank Hive members Brendan, Adam K., Chris, and PJ for helping to set everything up and making sure everyone had enough computers to play. I’d also like to thank everyone else who rocked at their bridge stations and commanding roles.

Until the next adventure, Hive 76 out.

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Hive 76, the Final Frontier…

At this week’s open house Hive 76 is hosting it’s second LAN gaming event. We’ll be playing Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator. What is Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator you ask? Well, it’s a co-operative computer game that simulates a spaceship bridge, similar to the ones you’d see on Star Trek. Each player is given a key bridge position to help guide the ship on a successful mission. Click here to see an awesome, and quite hilarious example of the game in action.

Players need only to bring a PC laptop or netbook as the game software will be provided. So come join us, because at this open house we’ll be cranking it all the way up to warp 11!

The fun starts this Wednesday, January 19th at 9:00 PM.

Hope to see you there, Captain out!

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January Philadelphia Robotics Meetup Wrap-Up

Last night Hive 76 hosted the first Robotics Meetup Group of 2011. For those who are unaware, the group is organized and run by Roy Brewer and Hive 76 has been hosting a space for the group since September of 2009.

This month’s meeting featured an appearance by inventor & entrepreneur Michael Treat, who’s company Robotic Systems & Technologies, Inc. (RST) has been featured in sources such as the New York Times, ABC, TLC, and BusinessWeek. Mr. Treat stopped by to give a talk on his company’s newest project: a robot called Penelope CS, which is designed to automate work in a hospital’s sterile supply department. Sterile supply is the department where used surgical tools are cleaned, sorted & inspected, packed into containers, and finally sterilized to be ready for the next procedure. The talk concluded with Treat announcing that Penelope CS is ready for action, and RST is looking for partner hospitals in which to deploy the product.

After the talk we discussed ongoing projects within the group including 2 members who are building quadrotors, our uGPS project (an indoor GPS system), and other types of robots (delta bots, for instance).

We meet every second Thursday of every month, and our next meeting is February 10th at 7:30 PM. I’d like to encourage everyone with an interest in robots or electronics to join us. This is a fun and exciting group!

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Open House, Wednesday, January 12th

Technically, these are highballs

We have big plans for this week’s open house meeting. Brave the cold and come hang out with us tomorrow night for an evening of tomfoolery, shenanigans, and if you’re lucky, maybe even charcuterie.

  • 7pm starts our membership meeting, where we will discuss open projects and start brain-storming on a cocktail and gastro/mixology workshop. Tom Cruise will not be attending.
  • 8pm starts the open house, where will be working on plans for a semi-secret, semi-sweet-chocolate project (well actually, no chocolate) involving remote control systems, stereoscopic vision systems, and high-voltage effects.
  • 9pm starts ???
  • 10pm is pure profit

Don’t dilly-dally, look lively, step to it, and make something!

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Open Source Rendering with Blender, LuxRender, and SmallLuxGPU

There’s some outstanding new open-source add-ons for Blender, one of our favorite open-source 3D rendering/simulation/animation programs.

The first, LuxRender is a physically based Light Modeler. It’s currently limited to CPU-rendering only, but it creates enormously realistic lighting scenarios based on physical equations that describe the behavior of light. An amazing new feature here is that it stores the contribution of each light to each pixel during rendering, so you can modify the rendered image photorealistically and non-destructively without having to re-render the entire scene again.

The second, SmallLuxGPU is even more experimental but it is able to harness the full power of your GPU for unparalleled rendering speed of highly photorealistic visual scenes. Even better, with SLG you can interact with your scene in realtime to get just the view you want.

SmallLuxGPU v1.6 (OpenCL) from David Bucciarelli.

And here’s some examples of renders we’ve done in the past few days. Keep in mind, these are entirely synthetic images. Jump over to flickr to see at higher resolution.

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Hive76 Saves Christmas

Two days to go until Christmas, and after a full day of last minute shopping, I still hadn’t found a decent gift for my mom. Around 9:00, the bookstore closed up, and I was still S.O.L. Then, inspiration struck, and I raced over to Hive76, where I worked into the early morning handcrafting the perfect D.I.Y. present for my artist mom: a wooden paintbrush organizer! Luckily, there were some choice pieces of birch plywood at the space, and a really nice scrollsaw (which was actually a gift from my mom last Christmas, so I was putting it to good use). Amazingly, all the pieces fit together beautifully, and my mom was thrilled with her gift. Hive76 saved Christmas!

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Laser Pledgie update

We still want a laser, but now we have a bit more of a focus. Much like the open source hardware Makerbot is for printing, Lasersaur will be an open source laser cutter.

lasersaur
Lasersaur

Hive76 really wants to make one! So we have adjusted the pledgie where we are collecting donations to match the new goal: $2000. Here’s the cost breakdown:

  • $570 Lasersaur Alpha kit: optics, electronics, belts, fasteners
  • $500 Extruded aluminum rails
  • $700 Fume extractor for exhaust
  • Remaining funds for unseen costs
  • Free: Laser tube from Meatcards, Stepper motors from Meatcards or elsewhere, Paneling is nominal.

As before, your pledge will be rewarded with laser time at a dollar per minute. Also, any $10 pledge gets some not-yet-designed lasercut trinket!
Let’s make it happen!
Click here to lend your support to: Laser Cutter and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !

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We Won the Open Science Design Contest

We won!
We won!

Great news, The Citizen Science Quartely just picked the winner for the Open Science Design Contest, and:
WE WON!!!!!!!!1111!!111one

You can read more about the original entry HERE.

We’ll be using the Ponoko gift certificate to design a housing for the electronics and make it more kit-able. Bench Science FTW!

And definitely check out the Kickstarter for The Citizen Science Quarterly. It’s shaping up to be a really interesting mix of Bench Science in the DIY spirit. From the Kickstarter page:

“We’d like to create a magazine for the scientist in all of us.

It will have simple How-To’s, like extracting the DNA of a strawberry using kitchen materials. But on the next page could have a paper on the validity of using Bacillus Subtillus as a model organism. We’d feature extraordinary citizen scientists who are doing extraordinary things in abnormal labs (aka garages, closets, etc). We’d also give legal and safety tips to inform and protect citizen scientists from some of the dangers they could run into.”

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Making things Blink and Buzz!

Ever wanted to learn more about electronics but weren’t interested in taking a long, drawn out class on theory? Are you looking for a class that will pique your interest and spark your creative flow?

Then join us at Hive76 for “Making things Blink and Buzz” on January 29th. Join us for a day filled with blinking, buzzing and all out DIY geektopia. The class is open to anyone who is curious about electronics of all skill levels. The only requirement is a willingness to learn and a desire to have a lot of fun while doing it. Example projects will include a 555 timer and an Atari Punk Console (if you don’t know what these are then you definitely should come and find out). These projects are hands on, beginner friendly, and cool kit to take home and keep playing with, so grab a seat in the class before it sells out.

If you’re still unsure, Hive76 will be offering a free preview of this class during one of the weekly open houses in January. Far will be demonstrating how to build a “blinky bug.” Come meet the Hive76 crew, and find out how much fun DIY electronics can be!

Class: Making Things Blink and Buzz
Date: Saturday, January 29, 2010 from 10AM – 4PM (with an hour break for snacks)
Cost: $40 (Includes 4+ hours of class, as well as parts and materials).

We have only 15 seats, so get your Tickets soon.

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Open House and Studios recap

The building we rent space from, 915 Studios, hosted Open Studios this past weekend. While most of us don’t make art, we did want to show off our cool projects to any visitors. I set up my DIY time lapse intervalometer and took pictures every 9 seconds all Saturday. Here is the completed video.

Hive76 Open House from Chris Thompson on Vimeo. Also, buy that music. It’s amazing.

We also installed a new extruder in 3DPO, the Plastruder MK5. A lot of cool stuff was printed. Here’s a video of some successful printing:

Fynflood also got his Mendel up and running again. And printed a Hackaday skull:

Hackaday skull
Hackaday skull