If you are a student in Leeds then we’d like to invite you to come one of our open nights on Tuesday evenings (for free!) and see what it’s all about.
After some discussion we’ve decided to offer a student membership option. The details haven’t been finalised properly, but it’s likely to be £50 per term (half the usual cost).
Everyone else is of course welcome too!
For a while now we’ve had two big cardboard boxes full of ICs, power regulators and power transistors. On Friday I got bored, and catalogued them. The results can be found on the wiki.
There’s still an even bigger box of mainly surface mount passive components, I’ll leave that for someone else.
We’ve had a busy couple of months since my last update, with more new faces (more members are always welcome, there’s still plenty of room!) and some great progress on one of our larger projects. 18th/19th of August brought OggCamp 12 over in Liverpool, and myself and Martyn were in attendance.
The start of day 1 saw Bob from HacMan arriving with an enormous box of aluminium for Mendel Max 3d printer frames, he was especially pleased to meet me outside as he handed me the box with the comment “It’s your problem now” (It seems Martyn had gone for the biggest practical printer size, and the parts for 2 printers are HEAVY). Martyn’s presentation on 3d printing was well attended, and seemed to generate a lot of interest. We also got to meet Pete Lomas from the Raspberry Pi foundation (he’s a fantastic guy, and apologises profusely for not including mounting holes). My day was loaded with presentations on lots of different subjects (Nanodes, Fignition and Enigma machines to name a few), and ended in the bar back at the Adelphi chatting to Ken Fallon from HPR and listening to Dan Lynch’s band 20lb Sounds (Once they’d managed to get all their gear through the rabbit warren or endless corridors – guys, it was worth the effort, you rock).
OggCamp came to an end on Sunday afternoon after the raffle, where the winner of the tablet top prize insisted it was auctioned, and it raised £280 towards OggCamp funds (thanks to the winner of both the raffle and the auction!).
During the weekend in addition to doing Pi related presentations and selling a large pile of Raspberry Pis Pete Lomas was also allowing people to pick through a large pile of “scrap” components, and we’d heard they were to be disposed of, a short discussion with Pete saw an enormous box appear on my desk at work a few days later. We’ve got a lot of sorting and cataloging to do, but once we know what we’ve got I’ll publish a list and if anyone has any requirements for projects then we’ll ensure the components are distributed to people who can make use of them. A VERY big thankyou to Pete and the Raspberry Pi Foundation for this!
Entertainment for the bank holiday weekend was provided by a big pile of bolts, aluminium, and printed plastic parts, it’s a lot like Meccano for adults (or maybe big kids), and we now have this monster:
It’s the frame for a Mendel Max 3d printer (I’ve decided it should be named the Mendel SuperMax – it’s enormous). Martyn has a few more components to print (for both ours and his own Max in the background of that photo), and we still need to acquire electronics and motors, but progress is being made, and we’ll hopefully soon be printing our way to world domination.
While collecting some bits for the printer from the Farnell trade counter I noticed that they’ve now got stock of some Raspberry Pi cases. They seem to be pretty sturdy, you can get them in black, white, and clear, and at less than a fiver if you just want something to keep your Pi safe you can’t really go wrong.
TLDR: OggCamp was great, we’re well on our way to an enormous 3d printer, and Pete Lomas is the nicest bloke on the planet.
Some Hackspaces have “do not hack” stickers. We decided that this was probably a bad idea. If a sticker is accidentally overlooked, or falls off then someone is probably going to get upset.
Instead we have rolls of green electrical “hack me” tape. Anything tagged with green electrical tape is fair game and may be re-purposed/dismantled without warning.
DO NOT USE GREEN ELECTRICAL TAPE ON YOUR PROJECTS
I’ve recently been reviving a Thecus N2100 NAS box. This is a low-power ARM machine with 512Mb ram, 4 USB ports, a pair of 3.5″ SATA drive bays and lots of potential for hacking. However it does have one major flaw:
It requires manual intervention to turn on. When you apply power, noting happens. To bring the thing to life you have to then press the soft power button on the front. This is complete insanity for a machine that you want to hide in a dark corner and never physically interact with again. Whoever designed it should be ashamed of themselves.
Simply wedging the power button permanently on causes a continuous power-on/reboot cycle, so we need something a bit smarter. Experimentation showed that holding the button while applying power, then releasing shortly afterward does the trick. This sounds like a job for a 555 monostable and a relay.
I’ve never actually used a 555 before, so the first step is to see whether a power-on monostable actually works as expected. With a bit of cribbing off the internet I decided I want to tie the trigger and threshold inputs to the middle of an R-C bridge, !reset pulled high, discharge not connected and output does what it says on the tin. R=1M ,C=2uF should give me a 2 second delay, long enough to avoid issues when I fumble the power plug. 12v is within the operating range of a 555, and timing isn’t critical, so need to mess with additional regulators or trim pots. My relay isn’t breadboard friendly, so an excessively large LED was used on the breadboard mockup. Amazingly it worked first time! The LED illuminates when power is applied, and goes off after a coupe of seconds.
The next step was to build on strip board with the relay. I started by laying it out on paper, but realized half way through assembly that I’d omitted the protection diodes. Fortunately this was before I’d soldered anything in place. At this point I abandoned the paper layout, and rearranged components on the board until everything fit. I’m really pleased with the end result, even managing to pull all the connections to a single header block. Testing showed that the circuit still works. Some initial concern because the relay is so tiny I couldn’t hear it clicking, but probing with a multimeter showed it working as expected.
The final step is to install in the NAS. Flying leads from the underside of the motherboard connect the power jack and switch to the new board via one of my nifty crimp-your-own connectors. A blob of hot glue holds the whole thing in place.
The box has now been cured of its need for human contact, and can be safely left in the bottom of the rack with all the other grown-up hardware.
All I need to do now is graft on a serial port and figure out why the new kernel fails to boot…
Thankyou to all the people who dropped in on Saturday! It was great to see people from Manchester, Nottingham, Bristol and Edinburgh hackspaces – let us know if you build anything awesome with your presents! As well as people from further afield we had lots of local people drop in, and as predicted the party went on… and on… and on… and on, with some people not leaving until Sunday morning and Neil giving up on the buses (terrible service due to Leeds 10k) and returning to the hackspace until about 9pm. I’m sure the photos will appear online over the next few days. Thanks again to all that attended for making it an awesome day.
Hello All!
Just a quick reminder that after moving into our new space on Star Wars Day this year, we’re having a Space Warming and open day this Saturday (7th of the 7th).
Everyone is welcome; if you’ve got an interest in electronics, computers, making, breaking or just stuff then come say Hi =-)
There’s going to be people around from 11am (urgh) until late (I left this morning at 0545).
I think we’re planning on having a good-ol’ afternoons hacking (we have everything from Commodore 64′s to Raspberry Pi’s and plenty of arduino’s in the middle (and hopefully an old Mamod Steam engine to interface with)) and getting sillier as the evening goes on.
There will be cake, nibbles and caffeine (no lie) and whilst we’re not providing booze you’re welcome to bring your own (though we ask people stay safe/civil).
Directions for finding us are here as are contact details should you wish to say Hi before dropping down (mailing list and irc really is best). -if it all goes horribly wrong, feel free to ring/sms 07506404235
Its just over a month since we moved into our new hackspace, and a lot has happened since then. We moved in with what seemed like a lot of stuff, until we saw just how little space it occupied in the new place. We were critically short of tables and chairs, and we had an awful lot of work to do to get back to a working hackspace.
We’ve acquired chairs, built tables from broken desks, built workbenches from recycled wood, we have shelving to build, but things are finally starting to fit into place.
Last night we had our usual Tuesday open hack night, attended by 11 people, half them new. It was an amazing night, our lathe was dismantled to determine exactly how it should be wired, and conversations covered subjects from lighting automation to 3d printing. A staggering amount of coffee was consumed (along with a few acres of pizza), and the evening eventually came to an end just after 1am – the collective enthusiasm resulted in us simply not wanting to leave.
It’s looking like we’ll be taking part in the Global Hackathon this weekend, and I suspect with it’s broad theme of “make something” we’re very likely to be continuing to make a hackspace!
It feels like the beginning of exciting times, if you’ve been holding off dropping in then now’s your chance to be part of something awesome – see you on Tuesday!
Charge your laptop and your camera battery, clear some memory cards, its time for the Official Leeds Hackspace 2.0 Spacewarming Party, and everyones invited!
When? 7th July 2012 11am-11pm
Where? Leeds Hackspace, Mabgate Green, Leeds
Yes, it sounds like the opening line to a joke, but it seems that Fligg is getting himself a bit of a reputation at our handily placed local Maplin store. More on that later.
We managed to repair the smoking power supply in our BBC Master (it just required some new capacitors – everything you could ever want to know can be found on Sprow’s website). It took some fiddling to get everything set back up – we replaced the battery pack as part of the work and that required some fiddling to get all the settings in so we got BASIC instead of MOS when the machine was switched on. Sadly it seems the disk drive has seen some abuse and it won’t read any disks. It also can’t be heard stepping, so it’s possibly jammed – something to dismantle on another day.
The other weekend highlight was Rob turning up on his Powerisers (yes, the guy that London Hackspace know as the lunatic on the unicycle owns other weird and wonderful modes of transport). Here’s Fligg trying to get used to having very springy legs an extra foot long:
There’s video available of his spectacular collapse. Bribes will be accepted for both posting or losing it.
Tuseday’s hack night saw Fligg’s Maplin trip hinted at in the title – where we’re convinced they must now know him as the 8-bit weirdo. The quest was for a power connector to fit the CPC464. We managed to power it up, but having only a monitor which takes TTL input and an amstrad which only outputs 1V peak to peak video we found that it wouldn’t sync and so we’ll have to postpone further work on both the Amstrad and Commodore 64 until we have a more appropriate display.
