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DIY Music Night at Hive76

Making things to make music.
Making things to make music.

On Thursday April 25, our series of events for Philly Tech Week continues as we open our doors for DIY Music Night (5pm-???). If you’re into music, making music, or making things that make music, you won’t want to miss it! If you’ve been to the space before, you’ll know that we run on a steady diet of tunes. And on Thursday, we’ll have all our audio and music-centric projects out in what is sure to be the loudest night of PTW. Come by and see the space, make some amplified noise, hang out, or share your own projects.

We’ll have guitars, amps, synthesizers, sequencers, speakers, fuzzboxes, tremolo pedals, signal generators, oscillators, speakers, drum machines, pickups, karaoke machines and probably alot more – all made at Hive76.

Plus we’ll have a handful of contact microphones to give away! We’ll help you turn anything into an amplified electric instrument in 10 minutes flat.

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PTW Open Hack Event 4/24

Arduino SynthCome one, come fifteen or so!

On Wednesday, April 24, Hive76 will be transforming our typical Wednesday open house into a special Tech Week Open Hack!

Over the years, we’ve managed to accumulate a plethora of electronic detritus, as one might expect from a hackerspace. We’d love to invite you to come to our space and help us clean it put the junk to good use! We’ll have some microcontrollers on hand and several members around to help you along your way. The idea is to split attendees out into workgroups that will concentrate on designing and building objects from parts we have available for you at the space! Wanna throw together a bot that responds to table tapping? How about something that plays like a musical instrument? Dig making LEDs respond to external stimuli? Just wanna learn how some of these things might be possible? Slightly annoyed with how often I ask questions in my posts? 😉

—Please bring a laptop along if you have one available. Some programming experience is a plus, but definitely not necessary.—

Wednesday 4/24 5pm – 10
Gratis and Libre (free)

Hive76, suite 519 915
Spring Garden St
Philadelphia PA 19123

RSVP by commenting below.

***ALSO: If you haven’t been to Hive76 and want to see what we’re about, stop by on Monday April 8th for our Monthly Monday Microcontroller Madness (7-10PM) or on any (other) Wednesday night for our weekly open houses (7-11PM)***

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Illustrator to OpenSCAD to 3D printing

For Philly Tech Week, I will be showing visitors how to take a shape from Adobe Illustrator into the popular open source CAD program OpenSCAD and make a 3D model suitable for 3D printing.

Draw in Illustrator, extruded in OpenSCAD
Draw in Illustrator, extruded in OpenSCAD

I’m sure you know Illustrator. It’s the most successful vector drawing program <clarkson>in the world.</clarkson> OpenSCAD is less well known. It is best described as coding for objects. You make a solid with the function cube() and cut a cylinder() out of it with the difference() function, etc. But sometimes you want a more organic or complicated shape to start with. That’s where artist JK Keller stepped in and made a script that automates some of the process for you. What you need for this workshop:

There may not be time to print everyone’s design, but you should go home with something 3D printed.

Monday 4/22 5pm – 10
Gratis and Libre (free)

Hive76, suite 519
915 Spring Garden St
Philadelphia PA 19123

RSVP by commenting below.

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Fighting Robot Night at Hive76!

On Tuesday April 23, Hive76 will be hosting Fighting Robot Night as part of our week-long celebration of Philly Tech Week. We will have four miniature remote-controlled robots designed to battle one another in a table-top arena. All are welcome and all are invited!

Show up Tuesday and sign up for a spot to drive and fight, or just hang out and watch the destruction. Ask questions, check out our space and get your robot rocks off. This will also be a preview of an upcoming fighting robot class to be offered at Hive in which participants will build machines similar to those featured at Fighting Robot Night (TBA, check back soon!).

In the meantime, here’s some old Battlebots videos to get you excited.