Hive13

Sunday December 20th is Arcade Night.  This is were anybody who is interested in fixing up arcade machines or building your own game system or augmented reality game should come and collaborate!  Starting at 5pm on Sunday show up to help out or start your own project.  We will be fixing up several standup cabinets as well as the rather large arcade units.

Note:  This is not a night to play arcade games but to build/refurbish them.  Although we will always need to test our final products, of course…

I had some spare time down at the hive last night so I finished assembling the framework for the RGB Glass Block Matrix display.   The next step is going to be to mark out where to drill the holes for the LED.

After that is done we can start soldering up the LEDs.

A few of our members stopped up at the UC surplus sale on saturday and picked up a couple of largeish projectors.  One of them had a working bulb and a bad powersupply ($25), the other had a bad bulb ($50).

After moving the bulb from the projector with a bad powersupply to the projector that just had a bad bulb we discovered that we now had a very nice working projector.

This should provide a nice start for our Laser Graffitti projects, also, we still have the other projector that needs a new powersupply but could serve as the base for testing more powerful light sources.

This is another project initiated by PlayerTwo.  This is an older arcade game called Meltdown.  The way the game works is the game will move a goal box up and down a center tube.  Inside the center tube is a radioactive sample that the gamer must keep centered inside the goal box by adjusting the flow of the air through the center tube.

The main problem at the moment is that the goal box is on a cable that keeps getting snagged and is a bit stretchy so it slips.  Once this problem is worked out there is a bit of surface work that needs to be done.

Some of our members picked up five flouresent light fixtures that would normally mount under a shelf in a cubical at the University of Cincinnati surplus sale.  I was down at the hive tonight and decided to look into how we might mount them on the workbench and have worked out what seems to be a good method.

First take the bulb out, then drill out the rivets that hold the light fixture to the case of the light.  Then use the holes left by the removed rivets for screws.  The end result looks fairly nice and seems pretty sturdy.

Now… just need to mount the remaining four light fixtures.

After our regular weekly meeting last night, Dave Menninger mentioned on the way out the door an idea he’d been kicking around: wiring up LEDs in the 5×7 glass block window above the entrance to the hive. Enthusiasm was expressed, and several of us came back in put together some tests with a couple of LEDs.

This was deemed a great success, and the project brainstorming quickly escalated from a simple 8×7 array of single color LEDs to a full color display capable of video. The video part we will hold for phase 2.

So, this Friday, we will be building phase 1 of the Hive13 windowmatrix. How capable it will be depends on just what parts we are able to procure by Friday.

Stay tuned…

update: The rainbowduino LED controller board has arrived – thanks to Great customer service from NKC Electronics – http://www.nkcelectronics.com/ I can definitely vouch for that!

One project that was used for the passcode challenge is called the Zen PIN.  The problem is people who shoulder surf can see your PIN on a keypad system.  So a fun and simple solution is to have the user memorize an algorithm instead of a PIN number.  For a Proof-of-concept the Zen PIN was developed that uses three lights.  The user enters a random PIN and the system then generates an internal random PIN.  It then blinks certain lights to indicate if the next number is greater or less than the one last pressed.  The user follows these visual clues to "unlock" the keypad.  In the PoC this just lights up the green light and plays a "good" tone.

You can take any type of spin with this.  Such as, using multi-colored LED buttons that randomly display a color and the user knows to always press to the left of the "orange" button.  Etc.

For more information on this project see the wiki

We are going to start taking time to share some of the projects that are finished or are at least to a working level.  Both Paul and TP have made some intelligent self guided modded RC cars.  TP has a model with a swivel head that looks around and uses a Neural Network to learn.

For more information on TP’s design check the wiki.

Paul’s design uses an Arduino and a pair of sensors to do obstacle avoidance and has been rather successful at navigating the space!

Details on Paul’s RC can also be found on the wiki!

We had 5 attendees (no including myself) and we tinkered with the first two chapters of Think Python and learned about comments, variables, values, types, orders of operation, and more.  We also discovered that print is a function in python 3.0, and that printing the value of a variable can yield slightly different results than the raw output.  also, we discovered that print is a function in python 3.0

If you couldn’t make it this week and are worried about falling behind, have no fear.  We can recap last week’s progress before we proceed to chapter 3.  So don’t be shy!

Every week we get together to share project progress and deal with the business matters for the space.  Every so often a special guest shows up to demo something really cool that they have been working on.  That happened at the last meeting when Joe stopped by to show off his Sketchduino. He has taken an Etch-a-Sketch and paired it with an Arduino and a laptop to draw any image.  He gave a demo using one of our logos.  Check out the YouTube video of the demo!

Thanks Joe!  I can’t wait for the Party on the 29th!