Ruxcon 2010

[Kathryn Small]

Hey hackers,

I want to revive this list.  It would be astoundingly useful and interesting if we could get all the Aussie hackerspaces collaborating, sharing ideas and resources, showing off projects, organising meet-ups, etc.  

So, first off:  who's going to Ruxcon in Melbourne this November?

Ruxcon's a computer/security conference - like Defcon, but smaller.

At the Sydney hackerspace, we're sending a contingent of about ten people.  You know what it's like, being a hacker and trying to pack a suitcase: Dremel, lockpick set, soldering iron, MakerBot, mad scientist costume, etc, etc.

Plus, three of us are making Dalek dresses to wear ;)

Who else is going?

-- Kathryn

Robots & Dinosaurs, the Sydney Hackerspace

[Mitch Davis]

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 7:58 PM, Kathryn Small <kathry...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> So, first off:  who's going to Ruxcon in Melbourne this November?

Hi Kathryn!

Thanks for your email, I have forwarded it to our mailing list for
others in our group to look at.

As far as I know, no-one here has talked about Ruxcon. At the moment
we're all focused on LCA, which is up in Brisbane in January.

Just an update on where we are: We've been working the past few months
to become an incorporated association. This will let us take
donations and lease a space (not as lucky as some!). So we've just
had our voting on the rules and we now have committee members (I'm
secretary). We'll probably put in our application for association
this week. And we are _still_ trying to find some permanent full-time
premises.

We recently had a stand at Software Freedom Day, and we got to speak
to many interested members of the public about the pleasures of
hacking. Andy Gelme, our president, had organised to use the Makerbot
to construct some lego pieces, and this was driven by an RCX which had
been reprogrammed with LeJOS. A good time was had by all.

I'm currently involved in a project with a few others to make a doodad
which has a row of LEDs on it, and can be plugged into a USB port. In
fact we're calling it the USB Doodad. Such a device could be used for
a number of goofy purposes, such as a count of unread mail messages,
something to simulate media keys your keyboard may not have, as a
breathalyser, or as a waveable persistence-of-vision toy. But the
main point of the project is a way of giving people an introduction to
SMT soldering. I feel SMT doesn't have to be any harder than
through-hole soldering, and assembling this can give people good
experience.

I'd like to say that our CNC machine is up and running, but it's still
not completed. It's currently somewhat disassembled, but with some
loving reassembly, and some work on the software, it wouldn't be too
far off being a working asset. Unfortunately it seems that everyone
interested has been busy working on other things.

Since Spring is here, and it's neither too hot nor too cold, we're
about to embark on some organic hacking: Beer making. We will
probably do this in the space in the next month, with web-enabled
Arduino-powered monitoring for temperature and brew progress.

Well that's about it for our group. You are welcome to forward it to
your group, and I hope that we can use this group to keep in touch,
not just with Sydney but the other fine groups on this list. Hi guys!

Mitch.

[Daniel Harmsworth]

Hi All from the Perth Artifactory!

Curses be to day jobs preventing trips to cool conferences! But is shall forward this on to our list as well.

My sympathy goes out to you Mitch for we went through the joys of incorporation last year, I can only hope that the bureaucracy over in Victoria isn't as horrid as in WA.

We are preparing to move to a new space (Alas the council got wind of our existence and decreed that unless we could provide a rather large number of dedicated parking spaces we couldn't stay, though the potential spaces we are looking at in more commercial / industrial areas will open up a number of possibilities!

Our CNC Machine the Swarf-O-Mat is fully operational (albeit lacking in any safety mechanisms) and is happily chewing though large plates of aluminium to produce parts for several child machines that have started being built by members (i am building a 4-axis machine and another member is building a larger 3-axis)

We have produced the prototypes for our first electronics kit, which is a high performance coil driver intended to make musical Jacobs ladders, we have made a multi-voiced polyphonic synthesizer using these that we have tentatively named the Arcophone. There is info and video up on our website at http://artifactory.org.au/?p=342. If anyone would like some of the PCB's to play with let me know!

Brilliant to hear from the other hackerspaces around the country and look forward to another hackerspace meetup at LCA next year!

--
Daniel Harmsworth
Lecturer, Information Technology
Challenger TAFE eTech Centre