What have you been making? May 2012 edition

[Joe Kerman]

Its that time again!  Tell us what you have been making around the space over the last few months! Make the people who havent had the time to be around the space in person jealous that they havent :)

I have been working on researching motors, controllers, batteries, chargers and other general EV technology in preparation for the power wheels build.  In the process have rebuilt a tiny pink scooter, and a tiny electric motorcycle with new controllers, and higher voltage.  I also wired up as many of the tiny vehicles as possible to a universal 36v charging port, for easy charging.  We have quite a fun collection of mini EV's now!

Spent the weekend working with the parallax propeller chip, through the awesome "propjam" event we held at the space. They have some very interesting advantages over arduinos. I can see this technology being very handy for motion control projects with more than a few servos, and for multimedia projects. the 8 core design is very hard to wrap my head around, coming from arduino land, but is very interesting nonetheless.

The computer in the lab connected to the 3d scanner and kinect has about 10 new awesome kinect demos on it.  (the "snowflakes" demo is a huge hit with kids visiting the space)

[Nathan Davis]

With Joe's and Chris's help, I've begun converting an old medical hole punching machine into a 3D printer with a wide range of motion (maybe 2 feet?) along the X and Y axes. We're not yet sure of the eventual range along the Z axis. It will live at S67 for general use.

Nate

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[Tanya Cunningham]

With a huge amount of help from Davi Post and Joe Kerman, I've been able to utilize a hack for my electronic knitting machine.  If you've been around Sector you've seen some of the stuff our joint efforts have produced.  It's just the start!

Most of last night (well, OK, ALL night, actually) I was working on an "internet meme" sweater in honor of Neil deGrasse Tyson's scheduled appearance/speech at the Memorial Union Terrace today.  Got front and back done.  Sleeves will be plain and therefore much simpler - hope to have it done by showtime - 3:00pm today!

Hoping Joe will wear this thing down there, maybe get a pic with Mr T himself!  Joe??

--Tanya

[Joe Kerman]

If you werent able to make the event, his talk was *Fantastic* and someone has posted a video with decent audio http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqJzHHkmJ-8

he said being a meme was "a bit creepy" but he seemed to get a kick out of the sweater, as did the crowd!

[Nick M. Daly]

On Mon, 7 May 2012 09:37:47 -0500, Joe Kerman wrote:
> Its that time again! Tell us what you have been making around the space
> over the last few months! Make the people who havent had the time to be
> around the space in person jealous that they havent :)

Two things:

1. I made a wiki page for the second FreedomBox Hackfest in NYC, in
July. It's the 3 days before HOPE 9, so if you're going to HOPE, you
should come by to join the hackfest too.

http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Hackfests/2

2. I've released the first developer preview of the
Santiago/FreedomBuddy system. It's a developer preview mostly
because the setup instructions are really annoying and long.

It's designed to let users negotiate services without interference
from third parties, preventing man-in-the-middle attacks by using
pre-shared keys, and without having to worry about exchanging IP
addresses.

First, a short history lesson in by way of explanation: A few years
ago, Comcast started blocking Lotus Notes for no apparent reason [2,
3]. Users were negotiating connections between their computers and
Comcast was censoring the messages. To simplify things terribly,
Alice would try to send Bob some new notes. Bob would tell Alice to
send them along but that acceptance would be censored: Alice never
received Bob's reply and notes were never exchanged.

Santiago avoids this issue by encrypting the messages that negotiate
connections: now, neither Comcast nor your nosy next-door neighbor
will know what services you're negotiating, keeping out the people
who have no business poking into your business. Securing the
connection process allows you to set up an encrypted connection to
your friend that other services can use, making it still harder for
third parties to interfere in your communication. If you use a Tor
hidden service as your Santiago service address, that can act as
static IP address, allowing you to negotiate with your friends even
as you both move around and change IP addresses.

Find it at: github.com/nickdaly/plinth

Thanks for your time,
Nick

[Colecago]

I assisted Ben Heck on making an Android remote controlled pot stirrer.  I made the Android app, its pretty neat though I'm not awesome at Android yet.  

Video available here:

http://revision3.com/tbhs/android-cooking-app 

Source Code and blog about experience here:

http://blog.colecago.com/?p=201