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Party in our new Space on Dec. 5th

Hackerspace Party Madness
Hackerspace Party Madness

Party in the New Space!
Dec 5th. Doors open at 9PM
Hive76 Headquarters
Food and Drink available all night
$10 suggested donation at the door
RSVP required!


We just moved to a new Headquarters (3x the size of the old one), and we want to celebrate. So we’re throwing a party December 5th with the doors opening at 9PM. We’ll have a couple of VJ, a DJ, and food and drinks all night. This is open event, so if you’ve wanted to come check out our new space, or meet the crew, come on out. If you want to drop in, we’re going to ask for $10 donation at the door, because we’ve mostly wiped our our saving to expand. If you’re broke, well, come anyway. (If you want to know what a hackerspace party looks like, here’s a peek).

Here are some numbers for you math-heads. 6 months now. 4 classes, 10 workshops, 24 open houses, and 1 (minor) electrical fire. From 4 to 12 members. 42 awesome personal projects, 33 pointless arguments, and a 1-billion ‘dude, that is such a bad idea’s’. OK, those last 3 are made up. But we are living the life, and doing what we promised. We are making things awesome, and making awesome things.

We are a little limited on space, so be sure to RSVP for it, so we can plan.

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Hackers In An Organ

Hive76 member and quartermaster Brendan Schrader got his fellow Hive members an awesome field trip last Saturday. A journey into the inside of the Wanamaker Grand Court Organ, the worlds largest working pipe organ. Many thanks to Brendan and Andrew, the Curator’s Assistant for giving us this once in a lifetime experience. It really was amazing.

The Wanamaker Grand Court Organ, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is the largest operational pipe organ in the world, located within a spacious 7-story court at Macys Center City (formerly Wanamaker’s department store). The largest organ is the Boardwalk Hall Auditorium Organ (which is barely functional). The Wanamaker organ is played twice a day, Monday through Saturday, and more frequently during the Christmas season. The organ is also featured at several special concerts held throughout the year, including events featuring the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ Festival Chorus and Brass Ensemble.

We also got a sneak peak behind the scenes of the Macy’s Light Show, which Brendan helped build.

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Philadelphia Robotics Group Meetup Tonight!

Well it’s time again for the monthly Philadelphia Robotics Meetup Group tonight at Hive76. Stop by for some robotics and electronics chat. We’ll be talking about our Quadrotor project, a flying robot. The event starts at 7:30 PM. Hope to see you there!

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AVR Micro Controller Class Dec. 12th

On hiveavrDecember 12th FUBAR Labs member Keith Chester will be giving an AVR Mico Controller class. You will receive all the tools and training you need to work directly with micro controllers. No matter the project – from interactive art to physical computing to robotics – the use of micro controllers can vastly expand the power and interactivity of your project.
By mastering the basics of the popular AVR micro controller (which is used in popular platforms such as the open source Arduino platform) you can put a lot of power into your project for less than a few dollars!

The class comes with all the hardware you need to begin developing your own micro controller projects and several sensors, allowing you to make real-world interactive projects immediately after the course is done!

The class will last three hours.

Included in the kit:

  • Atmega88
  • USBtinyISP (Assembled)
  • Power Supply
  • Breadboard
  • Temperature Sensor
  • Piezo
  • IR Range Finder
  • Tiltball Switch
  • LED’s

So, you’ll be going home with roughly $60 in parts.. all yours for the hacking.

Prior knowledge of C programming is encouraged – some programming background required. If you know Java or Wiring (Arduino programming language) then the transition to C should not be too difficult.
A laptop is required to take the course.
(Linux, Windows, and Mac can all be used)

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BarCamp Philly is this weekend

barcampphilly2Bar Camp Philly is Nov 14th (This Saturday already). It’s Philly’s version of the Bar Camp un-conference scene, and is going to be jammed with webby and invent-y people talking about what is going on in Philly.

Or if you just want to party on, you can just rock out at the Geekadelphia party. I think tickets are sold out, or close to it, so get your tickets (or not). I myself will be working the sign in table on Saturday, so if you are coming, say hi to the guy in the weird hat signing you in.

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heated build stage success!

our custom made heated build stage for our MakerBot CupCake CNC is working extremely well. here you can see 4 pulleys being printed at the same time. there’s no raft (saves time, plastic, and headache), and ZERO warping. excellent! the etched acrylic may stick a bit too well. we’ll have to try regular, unetched acrylic next (which will be less expensive anyway).

say hello to mass manufacturing.

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Hive76 gets a Larger Space!

We are proud to announce that we have acquired a new space to be awesome in. It’s just down the hall from where we are were, and 2.5 times the size. We’ve been around for less than a year, and this is a big step forward. Keep an eye out for more details on an Open House event.

Interested in becoming a member? Check out our wiki entry for more details.

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MakerBot recommended Extrusion Temperatures for different materials

NopHead is a lead designer of the RepRap 3D printer, and designed the Skyhook that we’re using all the time while printing at Hive. He’s worked out some good temperatures for extruding different materials in this RepRap guide for Newbies, which i’m reprinting here for posterity:

HDPE.raft_temp = 200
HDPE.first_layer_temp = 240
HDPE.layer_temp = 220

PCL.raft_temp = 0 // no raft
PCL.first_layer_temp = 130
PCL.layer_temp = 120

ABS.raft_temp = 200
ABS.first_layer_temp = 215
ABS.layer_temp = 230

PLA.raft_temp = 0
PLA.first_layer_temp = 180
PLA.layer_temp = 160