Category: Hackers

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Multithreaded Banjo Dinosaur Knitting Adventure 2D Extreme

Along with being highly neighborly, and slightly insane Travis Goodspeed is also great reverse engineer. He is consistently a bringer-of-weird things to conferences (and the parties that inevitably follow). Many of those cool & weird things are objects designs and/or builds himself.

So It’s not a huge surprise to see him hacking on an amazing collaborative project to make an interactive tapestry creating game. As far as I can tell, as people play the game the winners custom designed image is added to the end of the tapestry. The game appears to be an scroller/shooter game, which is controlled by waving around RFID tags. Geez. And here I was, thinking having #15 high score on Hive’s Spy Hunter machine was cool. One more amazing projects from an awesome Philly resident.

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Officers and Elections, and Board Member departure

Last night was elections at Hive76. It’s my pleasure as the previous Instigator to announce our new slate of Management, who were elected with 100% of all the members that voted. If you need to reach them with questions or feedback, they are available at Management@Hive76.org

Quartermaster – Brendan
Brendan has been around for quite a while, and us the longest standing member of Management. He’s been Quartermaster as long as we’ve had the position. He keeps the space clean and usable, and makes great amps and audio tools.

Book Keeper – Jack
Jack is one of Hive76’s Co-founders, and is the brain (and hands) behind USBTypewriter. He was previously our Events Coordinator, and is now going to be keeping our books.

Chief Technological Officer (CTO) – Adam K.
Adam is one of the powerhouses behind making Hive76 awesome. He’s done a great job as CTO setting up tools to make the organization run smoothly. Above and beyond his officership, he invests a lot of time keeping Hive active, and getting things done. He’s also our #1 print-ninja for our Makerbot.

Secretary – Chris T.
Chris is a designer, artist, and maker at large. He continues his post as Secretary (aka secretarat). He’s also an expert in cutting things into meat with lazzzors.

Instigator – Mike Hogan
Mike is an gentleman and a Maker of first degree. If you’ve taken a micro-controller class or electronics class at Hive, you’ve probably met Mike. He’s also our inside source for MSP430’s.

Events Coordinator – Sean M.
Sean is a developer, zombie-dummy maker, and now our Events Coordinator too. He has some great ideas for 2011, and some cool classes are already in the planning.

Congrats! *ding* to all our new officers, and thanks to all our old officers. If you want to reach them all at once, you can always drop them a line at they are available Management@Hive76.org.

On a sadder note, Adam Elkins has retired from the board of Hive76. He’s done some great projects (like the Free Spirit Stickers), and has constantly brings the coolest water-rockets to the Make:Philly picnic. We wish him the best of luck with whatever cool project he’s onto next.

We are now accepting nom-nom-nominations for a new board member for the open seat on the board. We are open to hearing nominee ideas from anyone. If you have a good idea for a nominee (even if you are not a member) feel free to drop a note on our discussion list with the name of the person, and why they would be a good board member. The members will consider the nominees, and vote to choose the best board member they can decide on.

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Open House and Elections!

Come to Hive 76 for our last open house for November, this Wednesday the 17th. As always, there’s a ton to see and a boat-load to do.

  • At 7:00PM, we’ll be updating our Scrum board with the latest status of our projects.
  • After the Scrum meeting, we’ll be holding elections for our management team.  If any members wish to cast a vote but are unable to attend the meeting, please check the Member’s group discussion for instructions.
  • At 8:00PM, we open the doors for our regularly scheduled Open House meeting. There will be free pizza and soda, and maybe even a few college drinks for sale in the ‘fridge as well.
  • Continuing our new tradition of Mini-Projects For Open Houses, we’ll have parts available for any visitors to make Bristle Bots. If you didn’t come out to make glow sticks last week, then you missed a ton of fun.
  • Adam will be showing off the MakerBot and training any interested parties in its basic operation,
  • and Sean will be bringing the skull of the Flaming Zombie Dummy to the Hive 76 “Trophy Case”.

As always, it will be pure, crystallized awesome. What else are you going to do on a Wednesday night, watch reruns of MythBusters?

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History of Hackerspaces

class icon Hackerspaces, Makelabs, whatever you call them, they are our beloved tinkering garages and workshops away from home. But just what is it that makes them so great?

In this short class/discussion group, we’ll be covering a bit of the flora and fauna of the hackerspace movement—for new and old members alike—and its growth in popularity throughout the world. We’ll look at some notable spaces and what they are known for, how different spaces organize themselves, the pros and cons of such arrangements, and how new members can get involved, have fun, and make new friends quickly and productively. Afterwards, established members are encouraged to introduce themselves, share their stories of Hive76, and talk a little bit about their projects.

Join us on Wednesday, September 22nd and/or Wednesday, October 6th, at 7pm. Come for the class and stay for the open house afterwards to experience the full buzz of a vibrant community of creators in action.

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Hive76 Intro to Microcontrollers — News From The Front

… Soon, I’m gonna have to switch places with some of the students in the class

…

It was weird to hit the Wednesday Hive Open House and see a handful of original MSP430 projects.  The video above is an LED chaser effect that Chris Thompson whipped up based on concepts from the first session of the MSP430 class.  As the old saying goes — teach a geek to fish and you’ll soon have LED encrusted fish.

Speaking of LEDs, here’s a Morse Code blinker project that Chris did.  Mostly a cut & paste job, but if nothing else, it makes the point that there are plenty of  MSP430 code samples out there and that it’s relatively easy to use them once you know the tools.

Audience

If you are an artist who wants to create small, cost effective interactive systems or a stone geek who wants to actually make a computer do something physical, this is a must-attend course.  We’ll have labs that will show you how to flash gobs of LEDs with just a few IO pins, run stepper motors, read switches, generate sounds, read analog signals and even have MCUs communicate.   You’ll leave with sample code and enough experience to apply this tech  immediately.
…
We’ll be running this class again, for sure.

…

Send any questions to: mikehogan62 AT gmail DOT com
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Next HOPE is Next Weekend

The Next HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) conference is next weekend in NYC. Along with Hive76 helping with the Hackerspace Village and the OpenAMD project, there are a bunch of Hive related folks at the conference giving talks or on panels. Below is the quick list of some people you might have run into around Hive or in Philly who are presenting at HOPE and how they are related to our space.

Stephanie Alarcon (board member), Mitch Altman (workshop), Maggie Avener (workshop), Scott Beibin (local vj), Matt Blaze (UPenn professor), cpfr (project), Travis Goodspeed (philly local), Joey Mariano (local musician), Far McKon (officer), Don Miller(local musican), Christina “fabulous” Pei (visitor) , Tiffany Rad(visitor) , Pete Tridish (frequent visitor). And more!

Come to HOPE! Help with the Hackerspace Village! Meet interesting people, and hear about their project! See the RFID awesomesauce. There are still some tickets left, and it’s a train ride + two block from 30th Street Philly to Hotel Penn in NYC.

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Happy Birthday Alan Turing

On this day in 1912 Alan Mathison Turing was born. Through feats of Math and Engineering he helped save the western world and help found the discipline of Computer Science. He defined Definable Real Numbers, and had several key insights into breaking the Enigma Cipher in World War II. After being convicted for indecency for being a homosexual, and likely because of it, he committed suicide in 1954. And of course the Turing Award is named after him.

Happy Birthday to the late Alan Turing ‘Founder of Computer Science’ (‘IEKYF ROMSI ADXUO KVKZC GUBJ’ in Enigma cypher).

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Top S33kert RFID Project

Hey,
A top s33kret RFID project is going on at Hive76, starting next week.
An RFID tag
What I can tell (in a google search-able place) is that It’s a RFID system based on Open Beacon for an event this summer. We could use some hardware hackers, UI/Web/Software folks, and a server wrangler or two. We are meeting next week (Tuesday Night) at an undisclosed location to do some planning for this, and get started. If you think you can spend some time working on this project, email FarMcKon@gmail.com to get the details and get involved.

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Grace Hopper

A day late for Womans History day, here is a post about another great female geek, Grace Hopper. With a PhD in mathematics from Yale, she became a Naval officer, pushed for Machine Independent programming languages, and became a Rear Admiral in the US Navy.

Wikipedia has a better entry on her than I could ever write, so I’d suggest reading that for a full Bio. Or better, watch her take on The Late Night Show and ham it up. I especially love the “I didn’t know [about computers] Since it was the first one.’ There is also a biography about her out on the shelves.

I first heard about her from her ‘nanosecond’ wire gifts she would give out. After she retired Rear Admiral Hopper became a speaker for DEC, and traveled around and spoke about the history of computers. She was known to give out 11.8 inch long sections of telephone cable, to give people a hands on fee for how far electricity traveled in a nanosecond.

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Ignite Philly 5!

Have a short attention span? Like to get excited about things? Like to know what awesomeness is taking place right under your feet while enjoying a tasty local beer? Well, you’re in luck, because…

It’s that time again!

Ignite Philly will be making it’s fifth come around next week on Tuesday, March 2nd. Tickets are available for purchase at the low, low cost of $5, and I suggest you pick some up because these events fill up fast! (proceeds benefit an Ignite Philly alum, TBD)

From the Ignite Philly website…

“Ignite Philly is part of a worldwide network that entertains and educates people in short 5 minute bursts. Ignite Philly is the local group, and is our way to highlight great ideas coming to life here in Philadelphia.

Each presenter is on stage for  a total of 5 minutes (20 slides, at 15 seconds each slide). These talks are a ’spark’ if you will, they are lightening fast and leave people with a new idea to mull over and talk about.”

So buy your tickets, and head on over to Johnny Brenda’s next Tuesday!

Doors open at 6PM and the speakers begin at 7.