Baltimore Node Hackerspace

Art Class – Friday, Feb 10th, 8:30pm

jdenney — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:49:52 +0000

The Node will be hosting an art class for the first installment of “The More You Node” led by folks from the Baltimore’s Playground Meetup. We’ll be making a simple painting using only primary and secondary colors and basic shapes, which will leave you with something nice to show off on your fridge. The grading scale is 80% participation and 20% effort, so should be an easy ‘A’ for you. We will provide paint, paper, and some brushes, but if you have your own supplies please bring them! You should also bring a ruler if you can.

RSVP to help us gauge supplies. You’ll need a meetup.com account, or you can simply email me: jasondenney “at” gmail.

Classes, Workshops and knowledge nights coming soon

tblatt — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 06:19:34 +0000

We’re (re-)starting learning nights at the Node. Watch this space for announcements. We’re appropriately naming this learning endeavor The More You Node

Hack Friday, November 25th @ noon

mattyfo — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:47:20 +0000

Hey Y’all,

Why spoil your Thanksgiving vacation on hunting for Black Friday deals, when you can make!?!

We will celebrate Baltimore Node’s first Hack Friday on November 25th.

We will start around noon, and hang out until people get tired.

Bring your projects, or start a new one.

Hope to see you there!

–Amy

וַיְהִי-אוֹר כִּי-טוֹב

tblatt — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 04:30:26 +0000

יְהִי אוֹר

tblatt — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 02:13:00 +0000

LED Window Project update.

tblatt — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 03:04:56 +0000

As you may have heard, we’re working at least once a week on the window display project. On Mondays at 7:30pm we meet at the space for this. Here’s how it works:

This is what charlieplexing looks like. If you turn pins A,and H on, and also turn on pins 1 and 8, you’ll have the top left LED turn on blue, the top right LED turn on blue, and the bottom left LED turn on green, and the bottom right LED turn on green as well. you can control all of these LEDs in this manner, and automate it with a Rainbowduino.

If you feel comfortable and you’re in the space, please start wiring LEDs together, since we’ll need a bunch.

The conventions we’ve established are red wires for red, green for green, black for blue, and white for power. Each wire should be 3.5″ long. Solder two wires to each colored lead, and one white wire to the long lead. The color of the LED leads are white/power for the long lead, and red is the shorter single one by it self to the one side of the long lead, and green and blue are on the other side of the long lead. From left to right, it’s: Red/Power/Green/Blue, with the power being the long lead.

If you feel comfortable and you’re in the space, please start wiring LEDs together, since we’ll need a bunch.

When you do the second one, attach a set of red, green and blue wires from the first LED to the second LED.
It should start to look like this:

You need 8 LEDs wired together like that, with two reds going to each red lead, two greens to each green lead, and two blues to each blue. Whites go the other direction.

Once we finish 8 sets of 8, we’ll connect up the whites from each column to the next, and a set of 64 lights will go into a box like this, and be displayed up in the window. We need 16 sets of 8 sets of 8 to fill both windows, all the way across. The resulting display will be a 64×8 pixel display.

more pics:

Geocaching Workshop!

tblatt — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 17:20:19 +0000

Sunday October 9th, come meet at the Node at 1:00 pm to learn about the global GPS trasurehunting game and hide some geocaches of our own. There’s one hidden near the space already, but we have dozens of black boxes from mp3car that have just been sitting in the space, and they make great hiding boxes for geocaches. Come by with a snack, and a sense of adventure! http://www.geocaching.com/

3d printed spinning bowtie!

tblatt — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 21:46:19 +0000

3d scanning with just a digital camera

tblatt — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 20:10:36 +0000

Computers are able to extract a lot of information from a photograph. People generally just look at a picture and see colors, but there is a lot more data contained in a photograph besides just colors. Cool software can determine depths and distances of objects in photographs based on the intensity of light at each pixel.

In the picture above, you can see thumbnails across the bottom of some of the photos I took. In the main area, you see a mesh automatically created from the photographs, and the cameras show the calculated camera positions. The mesh is both the MakerBot in the center, as well as the desks, wall, floor, arcade cabinet, and couch in the background.

It works kind of like radar. If you have enough digital photographs of an object or a scene from enough angles, this cool free software by Autodesk called Photofly can construct a 3d model of whatever it is you are taking pictures of. Photofly lets you export your 3d model into a variety of formats, and you can even upload the file to www.shapeways.com which is a 3d printing website.

Shapeways can take this 3d file created solely from photographs and turn it into a real live plastic, glass or metal copy of the original object. I tested this on Friday, and here is the first video of the 3d model I made. I took 99 photographs of the MakerBot, and uploaded them with Photofly, and that’s it! No more work! How easy is 3d modeling now, eh?

Here’s a video flyby of the model. Not so nice but you get the idea. With a better camera, more photos and better lighting, you’re able to get an amazing replica of the object.

Arduino Counter Zeroer

mehuman — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 14:29:50 +0000

A quick/very simple project Marty and I threw together to zero out a counter. Hardware by Marty. Code by me.

Code