Open hack sessions are an opportunity to see what the space has to offer. Bring a project or check out what Node members are working on. Everyone is welcome.
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.
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/
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.
Apologies for the late notice! This has been in the Node calendar for awhile, but I failed to send out an announcement.
This Saturday, March 26th starting at 2pm, the Baltimore Node MakerBot Users Group (Node MUG) will be hosting a meeting of the Baltimore/DC RepRap Users Group.
Hot on the heels of the first MakerBot User Group challenge, we’d like to have folks come to the space, see a some 3D printers, ask questions, meet like-minded individuals, make plans, etc. We’ll also be planning for the RepRap Users Group presence at Robot Fest this April 30th/May 1st.
So!
Do you have a 3D printer? Bring it out!
Would you like to have a 3D printer? Learn more about how to build your own!
Just curious about what this is all about? Bring your questions!
Want to see some cool 3D printed objects? Bring your eyeballs!
What: Baltimore/DC Area RepRap Users Group meeting hosted by the Baltimore Node MakerBot Users Group
Where: Baltimore Node (120 W North Ave, Baltimore, MD 21218)
When: Saturday, March 26th at 2pm
Bring: Your bot, bot parts, questions, crazy plans, hopes and dreams! Maybe also snacks, if that is your thing.
MakerBot has issued a challenge to MakerBot users: get together in a group and get free stuff!
The rules for this first challenge are simple: create a mailing list, meet in person, photograph 2 or more bots together and post them online, then send the results to mug@makerbot.com!
The first part of this is done: Baltimore Node MakerBot Users Group is our new Google Group! I’ve sent out invites to the folks that I remember contributing towards the Node’s ‘bot, but everyone is encouraged to join. This group will be a good way for us to keep track of what’s going on with the Node’s ‘bot, organize events, share info about becoming better MakerBot operators, and more!
Tonight at Open Hack we will have the first (informal) meeting of the Node MUG. Amy and I will be bringing our bots, making a total of 3 MakerBots at the Node! Amy will bring her Thing-O-Matic, and I’ll have my Cupcake CNC with the awesome new MK6 stepper extruder. We’ll also talk about hosting the B’more/DC RepRap Users Group at the Node later this month, and some tips for getting started with printing, learning to 3D model, or whatever you’re interested in.
With our move to the third floor of the Load of Fun building, Baltimore Node gained an awesome new space, with a ton of new opportunities! Unfortunately, we also lost one good feature of the old space – having a street-level entrance that we can leave unlocked while we’re in. Anyone with a key can let themselves in to the building, but folks without a key need to be let in.
We have a lot of ideas in the works for solving this problem, involving everything from RFID and electronic strike plates, all the way through a key hanging on a string. There’s no telling which of these will be our final implementation, but here is one that is ready to use now!
NodeNock is an “access system” that’s designed to be easy for everybody!
If you’re outside the Node and need someone to let you in, just call the phone number posted on the door. NodeNock will connect you to someone who is already inside.
How does NodeNock know who to call? It looks at the list of people who recently checked-in with Foursquare. Anyone who has registered their phone number with NodeNock can get the call while they are checked-in at the Node.
Registration only needs to happen once, and it’s pretty simple:
Make a Foursquare account, if you haven’t already.
Visit NodeNock from your smart phone, using your Foursquare account to log in.
Register your phone number with NodeNock. You’ll get a validation link sent to your phone in a text message.
NodeNock certainly won’t solve all of our access problems, but it does make it easy to get on the phone with somebody already inside. For now, it should help members who forget or don’t yet have keys, as well as visitors for Open Hack and other events.
Yesterday was the CreateBaltimore event and wow what a day! The Baltimore Node was out in force and I was really happy to meet a number of our neighbors (Effervescent, Single Carrot, Hexagon/Charm City Art Space).
The goal of the CreateBaltimore barcamp was to bring together artists and technologists and inject some design thinking into Baltimore. Of the three rounds of sessions I went to the entrepreneurship and business session, the Betascape session and the community spaces session.
The big takeaway from the first session is that there’s a lot of discussion and mentoring to be done to help people figure out how to put together their business plan and how to profitable. Shameless plug: come out to Monday night’s Baltimore Business Book Club meeting to learn!
The second session on Betascape went well and if you’re interested in participating we’ll be hosting out Kickoff meeting on January 26th at 7pm at the Node. You can find details on the meeting here please come out with your ideas.
The last session was on Community Spaces and it seemed to really focus on how we could better connect with people and promote ourselves to the greater Baltimore area. One of the topics that came up was pushing for more involvement with the Second Saturday’s project that apparently has funding for groups in the Station North area. Moreover, I’m going to work at putting together a roundtable of people running community spaces/organizations in Baltimore so we can get together to share our successes and help mentor each other, drop me an email if you’re interested.
Overall the event was a stunning success, big thanks to Scott, Buck, Andrew and Dave for making it happen, I can’t wait for it to happen again!
The Node Book Club met yesterday at 6:30pm to discuss our first reading – the original paper on Hamming codes. There was a lot of interesting discussion about the history of computing (from mechanical relays to modern consumer radios), and many other topics. (Disclosure: I missed a lot of discussion because I thought the meeting was at 7:30pm. Whoops!)
You should learn a programming language every year, as recommended by The Pragmatic Programmer.
But if one per year is good, how about Seven Languages in Seven Weeks? In this book you’ll get a
hands-on tour of Clojure, Haskell, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, and Ruby. Whether or not your favorite
language is on that list, you’ll broaden your perspective of programming by examining these languages
side-by-side. You’ll learn something new from each, and best of all, you’ll learn how to learn a language quickly.
The book can be purchased in ebook (epub/mobi/PDF) form and (when they’re back in stock) paperback from their website. It can also be found online and in some stores at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.
Our next meeting is less than seven weeks away, so we don’t expect anyone to make it all the way through the book and all of its activities. Feel free to skim it at a high level, read about the languages that are the most (un)familiar to you, or just pick a couple of really interesting/different languages and dive in. The hope is that we’ll learn some new and interesting things about the theory behind these languages, how to find similarities between languages, learn new tricks for picking up a new language, and get a lot of inspiration for using these languages in our projects!
Feel free to start the discussion early by posting your plans, progress, thoughts, and ideas in the discussion thread!
Thanks to Colin Freas for getting this club organized and underway!
Call 1 (410) 680-NODE (6633) to see if anyone is home or if you want to get into the space and don't have a key.
NodeCam
On the Twitter
Jason Denney:@ShepherdJeff Still doing woodwork stuff? You should check out the @baltimorenode on a Thursday open night and see if you can use the space
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