It didn’t take me and Robert long to find an RGB LED pushbutton. I composed a short part number using the NKK data sheet and found a KP0215ASBKG03RGB-2SJB. I made a simple perf board shield with the proper resistors for my Arduino Mega 1280 and re-learned Arduino to light it up.
FOSSCON is right around the corner, and Hive76 is gearing up for another run. Our very own Jordan Miller is presenting the keynote talk on building Open Source Infrastructures for Science. We’ll be in our own room again this year showing off our latest gadgets and creations, our tools and our know-how.You can expect to see a 3D printer in action, Circuit Bending, Piezo madness, Battlebots and more. We’ll be there August 10th, 9AM-5:30PM.
Consider registering and getting a FOSSCON T-Shirt and helping us come back next year! As always, feel free to come and ask us questions via WordPress, Twitter, E-mail, or IRC.
Our friend John Abella (of the Maker Faire 3D Printer Village and Delaware Makerspace Barrel of Makers) is running a two-day RepRap build workshop in Wilmington Delaware, October 5th and 6th. Attendees will be building Prusa i3 printers with all top-shelf parts: milled frames from Josef Prusa, genuine J-head hotends from Hotends.com, stainless threaded rods and hardened chromed smooth rods.
The workshop is being held at the Wilmington DoubleTree Hotel, and will have catered food for attendees. Every person attending will leave with tools and basic supplies to maintain their printer and get started printing. The workshop fee – all inclusive – is $999.
I finally finished the hydroponic garden I’ve been building at Hive76 for the past few months. The plants have just started to sprout, so it will be at least another month before they can be harvested. But when they are ready, if you want to take some cuttings for yourself at open house you’re more than welcome to. Right now I am growing basil, thyme, oregano and morning glories.
Unfortunately, I’m spending the rest of the summer in Germany so I won’t be at open house to answer any questions in person, but I will be back in september. In the mean time I’ll start posting the blueprints of the hydrogarden, so anyone will be able to build one if they want. Hope to have more of the details next week!
Thanks, to Pete for agreeing to watch my plants while I’m gone, Rob for letting me steal his wood and carpentry techniques to build the frame, and Jordan for helping to design the caster flat bed and general support!
“Hey let’s take the boat out.”
“Hold on, I wanna build a hydrophone first.”
All three major construction methods represented: tape, glue, zip ties.
And so, using the parts left over from the day’s Piezo Transducer Class, some wire, a spraypaint cap, red solo cup, and two sticks, the Hive76 Aquaphone was born. With a battery powered amplifer and some groovy headphones, we had ourselves a mobile underwater listening apparatus. Globs and globs of hot glue waterproofed all connections. Continue reading “A Quick DIY Hydrophone”
Super-wide screen made from a single large sheet of bacterial cellulose “paper”
PJ and a number of other Hive members have been fortunate enough to participate in preparations for the Drexel Design Futures Lab “Projects 12/13” exhibition. PJ was almost certainly the most involved Hive contributor — he helped with the development of a number of key software elements for several of the exhibits.
Side view of a BC culture, showing the cellulose pellicle (white “gel” on surface), growth medium and some bacteria/yeast colonies (dark brown structures). The bubbles are CO2 produced by the yeast.
I wound up getting involved in the creation of a special display screen that was part of an interactive piece which allows people to “play” with a computer model of bacterial swarms. This piece was part of Tashia Tucker’s exhibit, and she wanted an “organic looking” display surface. After some brainstorming that included condemnations of the high price of silicone etc., PJ suggested bacterial cellulose. What!? The idea of a movie screen made by real bacteria to show movies of simulated bacteria was too “meta” to pass up.
I had grown some fairly large sheets of bacterial cellulose in the past, and was interested in having an excuse to grow something even larger — so sign me up! Tashia wanted a sheet that started out about 4’x8′ so that the final screen could be cropped to dimensions that were about the size of a slightly gigantic person.
Yikes — this was literally a tall order. Bacterial Cellulose (BC) is created by the same organisms that are used to ferment Kombucha — in fact, the “Shroom” or “Scoby” in a Kombucha culture is a big lump of cellulose. So this was simple, in principle, but the scale of the piece left a lot of novel details that had to be worked out.
On July 14th Hive76 will be hosting a class on piezo transducers! What’s so cool about peizo transducers? They let you turn anything into an electric instrument that you can amplify, record, and experiment with! These nifty little devices turn vibrations into usable electrical signals -and the nice thing is that they’re dirt cheap and easy to work with.
Basically microphones that work by touch, they can be used to electrify guitars, make drum boxes, or listen to sounds you can’t hear with your ears. Essential to the musical tinkerer and sonic experimenter.
The class will include a brief lesson on the science of music, sound, and practical applications of piezo transducers (music or otherwise). Participants will build their own contact microphones and leave ready to start making their own noise. If you have any cool old tins, boxes, or things that vibrate in an interesting way, bring them and turn them into instruments.
Please RSVP by commenting below with the number of seats you’d like to reserve.
When: July 14th, 2pm
Who: Open to the public
Where: Hive76, 915 Spring Garden Street
How Much: $10 at the door
Difficulty: Basic as basic can be
(Parents, please accompany minors under 18)
See the effects that small changes in environment have on evolution
I’ve been studying artificial intelligence for many years. One of the AI constructs that has fascinated me the most has been Genetic Algorithms (GA). With a GA, one “evolves” a solution to ones problem. A “gene” is a candidate solution to a problem, and individual alleles in that gene are individual parameters to the function that attempts to solve the problem. The output of the function is evaluated for “fitness”–essentially, how well it solved the problem–and good candidates are intermingled for the benefit of future generations, while particularly bad candidates are discarded; “survival of the fittest” in its most incredibly literal sense.
This little sketch was written for a couple of reasons. First, I’ve been seeing some AI code that I felt like has been overly complicated. A lot of principle AI algorithms are quite simple to implement, once you understand them. But also, I wanted to demonstrate the flow of a GA and how it tends to find intermediate solutions, improving over time.
This sketch will require some basic programming knowledge to be able to alter the fitness function and make the GA do different things, but I think it can be an exciting and compelling exploration into code. There are actually a few simple things one can do to alter the course of the algorithm. Each “gene” represents a row of pixels in the image being drawn when you click “start”. As it currently stands, it will “evolve” solutions converging on the color red. If you change “if((i%4)===0)”* to read “if((i%4)===1)”, it will converge on green. “if((i%4)===2)” converges on blue. There is a 4th opacity component at #3, but it basically just ends up showing black. It isn’t necessary but I just didn’t feel like fixing the code to get rid of it, and maybe someone else will find it useful.
Instead of “if((i%4)” you replace the 4 with another number–say a prime number like 31–you get some interesting results as well. There are a lot of things that you could do here, it’s just a matter of whether or not you wish to pluck at it.
* the percent sign, ‘%’, is known as the modulus operator. For positive numbers, it returns the remainder of a division operation. So, “13 % 5 ” return 3 because 13 divided by 5 is 2 remainder 3 (i.e. 2 x 5 + 3 = 13).
This Thursday, please join us at a FREE exhibition of the work of Cornelius Varley (1800-1860) put on by the venerable American Philosophical Society. It is a fantastic exploration of the life work of this fellow tinkerer and inventor who’s insight and explorations reminds me a lot of our Hive76 members!
A few of us will also be presenting at this event! We will have live 3D sugar glass printing, exhibitions of Brendan’s boom cases, Dan’s 8 mm RockBox, PJ’s electronics, Corrie’s textiles and artwork, Chris Terrell’s wood burning, and maybe a few more things.
We hope to see you there! Deets and directions below.
Deets:
Free Refreshments (wine, food, music) will be provided at the event!! APS Requests your RSVP HERE: museum@amphilsoc.org
Thursday, June 6th, 2013
5:30-7:30 pm
APS Museum in Philosophical Hall
104 S. Fifth Street, Philadelphia, PA
