With RAMBo bypassing the stock motherboard we can drive the ShopBot to scary speeds (10x faster in XY and 100x faster in Z.). Precision should also be ~10x better than belt-driven motion, but needs more fine tuning.

and did i mention it was freaking awesome?

My ShopBot RAMBo Marlin firmware branch is available via GitHub (of course). Follow along in the GitHub log to understand our process.

Thanks to ShopBot and Ultimachine for all your help and schematics!!

So…I put Sean’s Harrow through it’s paces, and here are some of my newest desktop backgrounds.

First you get the basic render down. I use 32-bit color with OpenEXR file format, saving z-buffer info too, just, you know, in case you need it later. You should get something like this… kind of flat when viewed on a crappy computer screen, but i assure you there is a ton of color info there for fine tuning later.

With all that extra color depth, you can easily fine tune the contrast, like so.

Then you need to come up with the shadow version… Andrew Price from BlenderGuru does this in a new Scene. I like the stark contrast… when you look carefully the sharp edges tell you that you are looking at a perspective view.

Put it all together, and you get a softly-back-lit Logo. WIN!

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.

Last year, I purchased a 1970 Telecaster copy for $120 from Elderly Instruments. The frets were no good and much of the hardware was corroded, so it seemed like a good instrument to hone my repair skills on.

The first thing I did was take it to Hive and bounced ideas around with some folks. One thing I really love is that no matter what kind of project or idea you’ve got, there’s at least one or two people at an open house who have some expertise to share.

My cigar box slide guitar would’ve been cooler with frets.

So I decided to give all the hardware a good cleaning and replace the bridge saddles – they were pretty sharp and very uncomfortable to rest my right hand on while playing.  I also chose, somewhat foolishly, to refret the guitar when in fact a fret dress job was all that was needed. But if this was to be a learning project, I thought I should learn what I could. It also seemed like a big step towards building more of my own stringed instruments, which up until now have not had frets (such as my cigar box slide guitar).

I purchased some new saddles from the nice folks down the street at Bluebond Guitars and installed them right away.  After doing some research on the refretting process, I learned that just about every luthier has their own method. I assembled my own procedure by printing out this guide and annotating it with notes from this series of videos and this forum post. Along the way I found that the general consensus on refret jobs is that it’s past the “DIY” border and well into the realm of  “just get a professional to do it”. But whatever.

Hammering in new frets.

I ordered some fretwire, end nibbers and sanding supplies from StewMac, and used a piece of aluminum channel left over from Such and Such as my levelling tool. I tried to get really econo and skimp on a fretwire bending tool ($90), opting instead for this technique ($0). It took a few attempts to start producing nicely curved fretwire. Unfortunately, this resulted in a pretty wide range of fret quality.

As I worked, the fretboard acquired all sorts of scrapes, marks, burns and excess glue which really ought to help produce those vintage tones. The uneven curvature I was initially producing in the fretwire caused many of the upper frets to sit higher than those at the end of the neck. Sanding and levelling couldn’t quite alleviate this, so I’m now relying on a slight forward neck bow under string tension as a remedy. Real professional stuff.

With a fresh set of heavy strings, there is still some fret buzz. But not enough to drive me completely insane. While I might’ve been better off sending it to a professional guitar tech, it’s still quite a playable instrument – possibly even more so than before. And as intended, this job was a great learning experience.

It’s more comfortable than it looks.

Another guitar project from the past month – this time a one-nighter -  was adding a tremolo arm to the old Sears guitar that’s been floating around the space. It was already equipped with a tremolo bridge, it just required an arm to get those bends and squeals so key to our late-night, burned-out-on-my-project jam sessions.

An old piece of aluminum tubing cut to length, pressed flat at one end and drilled out to accommodate a 1/4″ bolt and fender washer did the trick nicely. I wish I’d come up with something a little more inventive, but this’ll do for now.

Come by the space on Thursday April 25 for our DIY Music Night as part of Philly Tech Week. You’ll be able to see and play with all of the music gadgets built at Hive, including guitars, synthesizers, amps, pedals, speakers, noise makers, plus a really cool karaoke machine.

kthxbye

Well everyone, so long, and thanks for all the fission reactors. I’ve moved to Alexandria, VA, to be with m’lady, plan our wedding, start a doggy dating website with some folks, and maybe spread the joy of hackerspaces a little further south. Step 1) figure out the joy of hackerspaces.

It’s a bittersweet change, as I am really going to miss Hive76 and her amazing people. You all taught me a lot and I will forever hold it all in my heart with great appreciation.

I’m not disappearing completely. You will still receive the occasional displeasure of reading some new, overly-verbose, trying-too-hard rambling from me on the listserv and in this blog. I plan on visiting on occasion as well. But regardless, here are a few of those things that I learned thanks to Hive76:

• Everything is permitted. There is an avenue for doing just about anything. Don’t let the fact that you’ve never done something before prevent you from doing it now. Don’t ask permission to do it, either. People ask permission to do things in a lot of different ways. They stall the doing by looking for a job in what they want to do, waiting for an employer to give them permission. They research the “best” way to do something, asking questions of everyone around them, never actually just giving it a try. Someone will show up in your life with a need for help and you can help them by just saying, “I bet I can do that”, without knowing for sure if it is so. You win some, you lose some, hence it is a bet, but you always learn something, and that’s almost as good as winning.
• Anything is possible. If you put your mind to it you’re capable of just about anything. Things you could never imagine will happen if you just try. Like having a piece of art put into a museum. Or meeting a legend of technology. Or just plain making the block clean for a change. “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”. A place like Hive can help you always be prepared for the opportunities that inevitably come our way.
• It’s okay to do stupid things. Actually, it’s even preferable. We are too serious on most occasions. Having a habit of doing things just to see them done–things that have no inherent value of their own, beyond any spectacle they may bring–is pretty much the only way new discoveries are made; certainly the important ones. Without time for play, there is no art. Without art, there is no culture. Without culture, there is no language, no nation, no city, no people.
• Don’t ever let anyone tell you what is right. Not a boss. Not a friend. Not your parents. Not a single person. You have to decide, and you have to get good at deciding, because half of the people out there are wrong and it’s on you to figure which half. Depending on what it is, more than half of everyone is wrong. There aren’t many places where less than half of everyone is wrong. So get good at deciding what is wrong and then trying new things to try not to be wrong. But absolutely, most importantly, respect everyone else’s path to figuring out how not to be wrong, because if you try to tell them you’re right, you’re probably wrong.

I’m stopping at 4 because it’s not wrong to stop at 4 and I’m also tired of typing for the day. Don’t forget to check out Hive76′s Open Houses on Wednesdays at 7pm. I understand they have an opening for memberships now.

• 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.