What the heck is a Bug Jam?

README

Ok, so now what?

From Friday March 2nd to Sunday March 4th in IRC at #ubuntu-us-pa on
freenode we will be working as a group to help with this event.

On Sunday March 4th from 10am to 6pm at
Hive76 we will have a Bug Event.

If you can get out and join us, please do! No experience necessary.

Heck, even if you want to just hangout, stop on by.

Event info and Registration

Hive76′s Art Hackathon

March 10th and 11th, 3pm to 7pm

For the second weekend in March, Hive76 is hosting a day of smashing, cutting, gluing, taping, painting, and general making and frivolity. We’re calling it “Art Hackathon”. Inspired by the Bravo TV Series Work of Art, and following closely in the footsteps of Art Hack Day, the event will focus on the rapid creation of meaningful works of art out of a provided supply of recycled materials.

Hive76 will provide massive piles of cardboard, tubs of glue, masking tape, tubs of spackle, box cutter blades, and a few cans of various colors of spray paint, to let every participating individual or team create a work of their choosing. The works will be based on a single theme, to be announced at the beginning of the event.

The event is split across two, four-hour days. While participants are free to use the time as they wish, the time is designed to provide time for planning on and a moderate amount of building on the first day, with some drying and curing time overnight before finishing up the next day.

A fee of $25 per person will be charged at the door, to cover the cost of materials and food that will be provided during the event for both days. Please RSVP for the event before March 6th by emailing smcbeth@hive76.org.

I began by searching on DuckDuckGo for familiar imagery for the concepts of art and hacking. For art, the image of the paintbrush and pallet was very common. For hacking, the skull and crossbones shows up. Well, for hacking, photos of people sitting around tables, staring at computer screens, completely oblivious of any photographers in the room, was also quite common, but that’s rather difficult to capture in a logo.

I did a few sketches on paper of the idea of a Skull and CrossBrushes, but it was too simple and too cartoony. I need something that is stonger, with a lot more color. At this point, I got an idea. The event will feature construction of 3D elements, so maybe the logo could be constructed in 3D as well. I began a crawl through Thingiverse, looking for the perfect skull model. I knew that a skull should still be the basis of the piece, but I had a few ideas other than just “crossed brushes” to bring it back to “art”.

And then wonky hotel WiFi stymied me for about an hour, but that was okay, I had some laundry to do.

When the WiFi came back, I went back to looking for the skull. This is what I found.

Elvis, a printable skull

That looked like a pretty good skull, and I knew that starting with a model that was good for printing probably meant that the geometry was solid enough to do a 3D rendering. I then goofed around in Blender until I got something that would serve as a good start for some more work in Photoshop.

Le Skull

To make the cross, I searched for some more images through DuckDuckGo, and found a suitable brush and screw driver. Over in Photoshop, with a few applications of the Posterize command, some Hue rotation, some Outlines and Drop Shadows, a little text, it was pretty much complete!

March 10th and 11th

Back-lit view of paper and foil micro-controller board

After visiting The Hacktory’s “Soft Circuit” event, PJ and I were inspired to take a stab at making some micro-controller circuits using alternative, “high/low tech” approaches.  PJ made an MCU circuit using conductive paint (has potential, but needs some tweaks).  I opted to try a circuit board using metal leaf.  That happened to work on the first shot — although careful scrutiny of the picture on the left suggests there was some luck involved (there are holes in the circuit that come dangerously close to wrecking it).

Looks good from this angle and all the connections check -- you'd never guess it was hanging by a thread ...

I had considered using scored foil as a way to make free-hand, one-off circuit boards for quite some time — but until recently, I never had the mix of free time and raw nerve to actually try it.  It turns out that my reservations were probably well-founded, but it also happens that the technique is workable, and the results are actually aesthetically interesting.

We decided to make the board in a hexagonal shape (Hive76 — hexagon — get it?). First, we prepped circuit board material by spraying adhesive on card-stock and then sticking the faux gold-leaf on the prepared surface (this sounds simple, but the foil is maddening stuff, so the process involved profanity and a certain amount of despair).  Then we cut the foiled card-stock into hexagons. After that, we cut out a rectangle where the IC was going to go, so that there were no conductive paths under the chip.  Once the board was roughly prepped, we made a “squashed bug” of the IC , splayed its pins out, and soldered it to the gilded surface.  Using the gaps between the pins as a guide for an exacto knife, we cut free-hand traces that routed the pins of the chip to large zones on the edge of the hexagon (I was a little surprised that the cuts were free of bridges). Finally, we soldered a capacitor between the MCU’s Vcc and ground and soldered a 47k resistor between Vcc and the MCU’s reset line.  At that point, we had a working circuit that was in-system programmable — at least in theory.

Unfortunately, I had no idea how we might program the MCU or hook it up to external circuitry without damaging the fragile structure.  PJ came up with the idea that made it all workable … magnets.  All really good magic is done with magnets.  The idea here was to place the paper computer on a steel surface, which allowed us to stick magnets wherever we wanted to make a connection.  With steel under the circuit, the down-force of the magnets gave us firm-but-gentle electrical contact with the delicate foil. Once the magnets were in place, we only needed to touch alligator clips to them — since the clips were steel, they stuck happily. With the clips secured to selected points on the MCU, we were free to connect the opposite ends of the clips to the various external items needed for the circuit.  Note the ingenious use of paper-clips.  PJ again — see a pattern here?

Our first connection was power (two magnet connections, one for +3.6 volts, the other for ground).  Then we hooked up the Spy-bi-wire programming interface (two wires, two more magnets).  After that, we wrote the obligatory “blink LED” program and loaded it into the paper computer.  Naturally, we wanted to see the results — two more connections for the LED terminals and — Voila!  Here’s the movie …

Stop by and check out our 3D printer, our plethora of games, or come just to hang out, and/or work on your own project ideas.

Apostrophe Now! — based out of Philadelphia and developed by P’unk Ave — is “a content management system designed for maximum flexibility with a minimal learning curve. The interface is ergonomic, all content-editing is performed in-context.”

Do you have or are you building a website, but you are looking for alternatives to WordPress, Django and other CMS engines? Apostrophe may be right for you!

Come meet Geoff DiMasi and Tom Boutell, two of the lead developers, and find out all the nitty gritty about Apostrophe. They’ll give an overview of the system, design goals, and features, and they’ll also dive into the code to show us how it’s all put together. Geoff and Tom will also talk about other things Philadelphia (the founding of P’unk Ave, the founding of Indy Hall, and the founding of Ignite Philly).

You won’t find this info on Youtube or Vimeo. Come on down to your favorite hackerspace to learn all about Apostrophe and an awesome Philadelphia success story.

Hive76
Wednesday, February 22nd, 7:30 pm
915 Spring Garden, Suite 519

Designed with Illustrator, Rhino, Slic3r.

They only take .obj files at the moment (which you can export to from Blender). It’d be much much more useful if they automatically imported STL files, and all of Thingiverse, among other sites. I’ve logged a bug report and feature request along these lines.

Here’s a yoda head converted to .obj and imported and hosted by P3D in their demo iframe. pretty cool. (NOTE: I guess it needs a while to load in the browser, apparently. So if it’s not showing up yet in your browser, give it a minute).

CONTROLS:
Left click and drag – rotate
middle click and drag – zoom
Right click and drag – translate

NASA: The Blue Marble, 2012. Click the image for full resolution.

NASA: The Blue Marble, 1972. Click the image for full resolution.

NASA today released a crazy high-res reconstructed photograph of the world, 61 megapixels (8,000 x 8,000)… we can finally replace the one from Apollo 17 from 1972.

Here are the deets.

A ‘Blue Marble’ image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA’s most recently launched Earth-observing satellite – Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface taken on January 4, 2012. The NPP satellite was renamed ‘Suomi NPP’ on January 24, 2012 to honor the late Verner E. Suomi of the University of Wisconsin.

Suomi NPP is NASA’s next Earth-observing research satellite. It is the first of a new generation of satellites that will observe many facets of our changing Earth.

Suomi NPP is carrying five instruments on board. The biggest and most important instrument is The Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite or VIIRS.

Image Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

New Printer, right next to sawdustgenerator

Here at Hive76, my desk sits right next to the wood working station. Normally, this isn’t an issue because my computer uses passive heat management, so there is no risk of getting dust clogged up in the fans. But I recently bought a new printer and want to keep it nice and clean. I initially thought of buying a dust cover, but serendipitously completely forgot to even look for them before I left the store. So, necessity being the mother of invention that it is, I was stuck in the space, not wanting to hop back in the car for a silly little dust cover, when I realized that I had a useless cardboard box that I was about to discard that was almost the exact dimensions of the printer itself. Duh! The box it came in! I cut one side off of the box, taped the corners down, left the hole from the missing flap for the wires coming out of the back of the printer, and voila! A free dust cover. I suppose if the color ever bothers me I can just spray paint it a solid color. This solution is actually better than a real cover because now I can stack papers and other lite objects on top when the printer isn’t in use and not have to worry about them sliding or rolling off because of the somewhat round top of the printer.

A few simple cuts

How convenient