A message from PJ …
DIY BOOMcase
Today Brendan and I bodged together a powered audio suitcase, aka a BOOMcase. It’s not quite the same as one by Mr. Simo, but it does rock pretty well. I cut the holes and Brendan did all the hard stuff like soldering and wiring.
Brendan asked to get more credit then me because he provided the big speaker and the amplifier. Go Brendan!
Details: The amplifier is from old computer speaker system. The suitcase is an American Tourister. I got 8Ohm speakers form a cheap stereo system. A 10″ guitar speaker acts as a passive radiator. The BOOMcase is plugin now, but a battery is in the works.
Video of it being awesome.
Pics:
Jack and Martha have a moment (!)
Help Hive76 buy a laser cutter
Hive76, like all hackerspaces, is in need of a laser cutter. The simple engraver I own is not nearly awesome enough. We have been talking about this for a while but I have finally launched a Pledgie to collect funds for a serious-bizness laser cutter.
There is some guidance on what to expect and purchase on Adafruit’s wiki about owning a laser cutter and there are a few members with direct experience.
This process will include some sort of awesome laser fundraising party. If you have any other ideas, leave a comment.
Oh yeah one last thing: DONATE HERE!
Light Graffiti with The Hacktory tonight!
Our favorite chums at The Hacktory have a cool laser graffiti event tonight, featuring art projections and a chance for the audience to play with light graffiti. It sounds awesome:
Tonight’s our big night as part of DesignPhiladelphia’s Kick-Off. Join us in the Design Lot on South Broad Street across from the Kimmel Center to explore space and time, video and graffiti, technology and art, and play with laser graffiti. More details can be found in city paper’s article.
ICM7228 Libraries in Development
Here’s a video of a preliminary version of PJ’s ICM7228 library for Arduino. The 7228 is an LED driver chip that is particularly suited to driving 8×8 LED matrices. We have a lot of these chips at the Hive, and plenty of 8×8 displays as well, so we’ll see what gets created as a byproduct of the library.