RobotFest 2012 Pictures
by superfro on Apr.19, 2012, under Happenings, Soup
Well another RobotFest has come and gone. If you missed it, well… there’s always next year. Here’s some pics you missed.
Thanks again to our member Mike for taking a bunch of pictures, and to everyone who contributed to RobotFest this year.
Meet 401k
by superfro on Mar.15, 2012, under Projects, Soup
Mark has been working on this full sized biped robot made of mostly spare parts for over 2 years. These are the first movements after adding the Axon II controller and getting all the servos wired up. The goal is to start teaching it to walk over the next couple months.
More videos are on Mark’s YouTube channel
“Kickin’ It Old School” Pays Off for Local Junk Collectors
by bsom on Mar.15, 2012, under Contest, Soup
NEWSFLASH – Dateline:BALTIMORE -STOP- Harford Hackerspace wins Sparkfun Free Day Text Browser contest -STOP- Snail-mails photos of member Miles using LSI ADM-3A terminal to load Sparkfun Free Day website -STOP- Chosen as winner from over *13* entries -STOP- $100 prize forthcoming -STOP- Photographs available via private courier -STOP- (This telegram is fee on delivery: you owe us 35c for reading it.)
3rd Annual Techno-Swap-Fest – SATURDAY!
by bsom on Feb.20, 2012, under Happenings, Soup
Got junk? Need more? Come see us at the 3rd Annual Techno-Swap-Fest! The HaHas have reserved 4 tables which will be chocked full of recent acquisitions including bulk wire spools, test equipment, electronics part grab bags (only $2!), connectors, military and government surplus, heat shrink tubing, wire wrap equipment, and other indescribable stuff you simply must have.
This event is like a geek paradise. The HaHas acquired some awesome stuff in the prior two years and this year’s looks to be shaping up to be awesome as well.
BE THERE *AND* BE SQUARE!
National Electronics Museum
Saturday, February 25, 2012
9am – 2pm; $5 entry fee; 15 years of age and younger FREE (proceeds from entry benefit NEM)
Event website
I Won, I Won! Free Swag from Panavise!
by bsom on Feb.10, 2012, under Contest, Soup, Unboxing, Videos
I entered the Panavise Facebook contest in December and won! Weee! I posted a time-lapse video of me assembling a Drone Lab kit from Casper Electronics using my Panavise Model 315 on Panavise’s Facebook page and was informed a few weeks later that my video was selected as the December winner. And, boy, did Panavise come through with the swag. Their prize package contained NINE individual products, as you can see in the quickie video below. (Sorry about the video quality, I loaned my really good camcorder to a friend so I had to use my iPhone 4S…) Here is a link to the January 2012 GRIPnews Panavise newsletter where my win was announced.
Voiding a warranty on an external hard drive
by superfro on Feb.05, 2012, under How-Tos, Soup, Tutorials
After a recent hard drive failure, I realized I need to start doing some proper backups (Duh, right?) Anyway, while shopping for hard drives to build a backup NAS (for which I need some internal drives, not external USB drives) I discovered a trend where a lot of external hard drives are cheaper than internal drives at the same capacity. How does this make sense?
I ended up purchasing these 3TB hard drives for about $140 each at Office Depot. It’s a crap shoot on which hard drive will be inside, but it will normally be made by the same manufacturer, and be of that capacity. (You would be surprised to find out this isn’t _always_ the case).
Being a 3TB Seagate, a quick search over at Newegg shows this drive which sells for $229. That’s a $90 dollar difference. WOW! So doing this instead of buying internal drives is a bargain so far.
Coffee Maker Mod
by Squintz on Jan.23, 2012, under Projects
Sure… anyone can go to the local store and buy a coffee maker with a timer. That was not good enough for our new member Ryan Merl. Keeping in the hacking spirit, Ryan decided to make his own internet controlled coffee maker. He installed a relay between the wall cord and the power switch on the coffee pot. The relay is controlled by his arduino. He used this tutorial as a guide. An ethernet shield is used to connect the arduino to the network.
You can find the source code for this project here: https://github.com/theanti9/HTTPCoffeePot. Be sure to checkout the Readme.doc for more details.
Special Features
- 15 minute automatic shutoff
- Controlled via HTTP Requests
- Status, start, and stop requests
- Returns JSON meant for AJAX interfaces
- Ready and running LEDs
HTTPCoffeePot can be connected to your arduino with an ethernet shield and attached to the network. It will listen on port 80, like a normal web server, and take several different request URLs to control it. The URLs return JSON with the intention that an AJAX interface will be built over it:
- /status/ – This will return some information about the current status of the coffee pot
- /start/ – This will start the coffee pot assuming that it is currently ready to be started and not started already
- /stop/ – This will turn off the coffee pot
Currently the process will work like this:
- Put in coffee grounds/filter/water
- Press ready button to enter coffee pot into ready state
- When coffee is desired, send /start/ request
- Wait for coffee to finish
- Send manual /stop/ request OR wait for timed automatic shut off to take place after 15 minutes
I have a very simple coffee maker which is really only a switch. The modifications I made to the pot were to cut the power inside of it between the wall and the switch on the pot and place a relay in between. The relay is then activated by the Arduino board when sent the /start/ request.
Hacking is not a crime
by Squintz on Jan.11, 2012, under Friends, Soup
We want to send a big THANK YOU! to Mars Brown from New Orleans for sending us these awesome vinyl stickers.
Useful wireless solution comparison chart
by superfro on Jan.06, 2012, under Projects, Soup
Last week I was having a discussion with one of our members about solutions on how we can control his biped robot he is working on. I was trying to explain that we could go something like zigbee (which he has a zigbee servo controller already) but you’re going to trade off throughput, if you wanted to add streaming video to it, and we’ll need to construct something for the pc to talk to the zigbee network. We could go bluetooth, or even wifi, etc. And it became a discussion of push pull’s difficulty implementing it, writing code for, cost of parts, etc.
(Biped robot pictured below if you havent’ seen it, it’s really awesome!)
Anyway, I stumbled on this article on digikey’s web site that goes into further detail, but I wanted to share this nice little chart they have in the article. It really sums up cost vs range vs throughput vs robustness. I found it useful, thought someone else might also. Enjoy.
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We are currently operating out of Baltimore, MD (21206). Contact us: info@harfordhackerspace.org.
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