Pumping Station: One

The new year’s first NERP Meetup will be at 7pm tomorrow night.

In the first half hour, we’ll have a beginner’s look at the Raspberry Pi board and software. We’ll see what extra hardware you’ll need to get started with the Pi and how to boot up a new board.

In the second half-hour, we’ll connect a homemade circuit to a Pi and see one method for controlling stuff with Python. You can find out more about NERP at the Meetup page,

http://www.meetup.com/NERP-Not-Exclusively-Raspberry-Pi/

Are you new around here?

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, and you’re hardly alone. PS:One has seen explosive growth in the past year or so, and we’ve decided to create a formal way of teaching new folk how to be a healthy, happy member of the PS:One community.

Meet with PS:One old-timers (including at least one former president) to learn the many opportunities available to PS:One members, plus hacks for getting around easier.

You’ll learn:

• the one and only rule you need to remember at PS:One!
• what mailing lists and IRC channels you should join
• how to get discounts on classes, tee-shirts, stuff around town, and even monthly dues!
• how to get certified on equipment
• how to bring new equipment into PS:One
• how to create a class, event, group, meeting, or what have you
• how to request a class, event, group, whatever
• how to blog
• the wiki.
• do-ocracy and how to do-ocratize things

The basics:

• Who: anyone who wants to learn how PS:One works
• When: Sunday January 13th, 4 pm until about 6pm
• Where: PS:One 1st floor
• Cost: free

Here are the class notes – please feel free to read beforehand or if you can’t make it.

Bring your favorites!

Anyone got a cool new game to play this holiday season? Wanna play it with a bunch of other gamer geeks? Got any awesome new minifigs, counters, or gaming dice sets that you want to show off to people for some geek cred? Just wanna hang out with some fun people and play games, drink beer, and eat some tasty snacks?
Bring  your favorite games over to Pumping Station: One this Saturday, the 5th, at 7pm and play the night away! As usual, all games are welcome [even cuddle dice, though you may have a hard time finding people to play with], major gamercred to homemade games.

See you there!

Allen Kapusta will make a presentation on types of task dispatching. Any processor more complicted than an Arduino will be shared by different pieces of running code. Allen’s presentation will be a general overview of how tasks are selected for execution by the processor and what guidelines the task should follow in order to co-exist well with its neighbors.

Drew Fustini will show us how to display tweets on a character LCD connected to a Raspberry Pi. His Python examples will demonstrate a simple way to make a read-only connection to Twitter and print tweets on a 4-bit parallel connection.

NERP will not meet December 31st, but will resume its regular bi-weekly schedule starting Monday January 14th.

Eric Gregori will be giving a talk about doing computer vision on the Android platform using the OpenCV library. It will take place at Pumping Station: One’s (http://pumpingstationone.org). Automated Manufacturing Night on Thursday, 1/10, at 7pm.

Manufacturing applications for computer vision include assembly:

And inspection:

After his talk and questions, we will discuss, repair, and build CNC machines ranging from 3D printers to electronics pick and place machines.

Thanks to Eric for a wonderful talk and to everyone who came out.

Eric included the presentation, and the links he mentioned during it, here: http://buildsmartrobots.ning.com/profiles/blogs/pumping-station-one-a-great-group-of-hackers.  He has written an article on the topic here:  http://www.embedded.com/design/programming-languages-and-tools/4406164/1/Developing-OpenCV-computer-vision-apps-for-the-Android-platform

A recorded version of the talk is available here.  Unfortunately, the video and audio quality are low.

Eric is the President of EMGRobotics (http://www.EMGRobotics.com). He is a robot enthusiast with over 19 years of embedded firmware design experience. His specialities are computer vision, artificial intelligence, and programming for Windows Embedded CE, Linux, and Android operating systems.

Automated Manufacturing Night is a monthly event where a speaker will discuss a topic related to Automated Manufacturing on the third Thursday each month. It is affiliated with the CNC Build Club (http://www.meetup.com/CNC-Build-Club/), a group where folks work on automated manufacturing machines at Pumping Station: One. It is also open to the public.

Pumping Station: One is a Chicago hackerspace located at 3519 N Elston, Chicago IL 60618.

This talk was organized by Jeff McAlvay, who is working with a team from PS:One on an open pick and place machine (http://www.boardforge.com).

Monday Dec. 3rd. is back-to-basics night at NERP. In Part 1, Carl
Karsten and Bonnie King will give an introduction to Python programming
for novice programmers. The target will be the Raspberry Pi, and the
focus of their teaching examples will be on input/output to simple
hardware. In Part 2, yours truly will demo control of output devices
including simple circuits for interfacing electronics to
electro-mechanical devices.

Find us here…
http://www.meetup.com/NERP-Not-Exclusively-Raspberry-Pi/

-Ed

Hello again, with a fresh Beer Church event hot off the presses! No plans this Sunday at noon? No problem! Now you’ve got one: come down to Pumping Station: One at noon, sip a few unusual beers (bring one of your own, potluck style – we’ll supply the tiny steins), theorize on the nature of brewing and Sundays, and – Ninkasi willing – we’ll brew a doppelbock all-grain style. It’s possible we’ll also keg “I didn’t mead it that way”, but it may well need another week in the fermentation chamber.

Kegged beers set to condition for a few weeks

Due to the lager nature of doppelbocks, we may find that we need to modify our fermentation chamber to support lower temperatures and/or split temperature. That means physical build and some software tweaking; if you want to pitch in on that, by all means join us. Everyone is welcome who is 21 years of age or older, even if you’ve never brewed before, and aren’t a member of PS:One. A tour of the hackerspace will be available for the curious at some point in the afternoon.

The brew may last until 4PM or so, depending on the complexities that arise. You’re of course welcome to come and go, but it’s advised to come at the start so as not to miss the beer tasting – which will feature the last of Anisethesia on tap at our bar, which we first tapped for Locktoberfest.

If you can’t make it in person (or if you’re just that intrigued, which you should be), you can follow @ps1beerchurch on twitter. We post updates frequently! See you Sunday.

Beer Church is doing great lately. We’ve made 3 beers so far – 2 stouts and a spiced pumpkin ale. We just racked the spiced pumpinkin ale last night. We’re not sure how good it is yet, having only tasted it warm and halfway through the ferment, but it’s quite unique and we look forward to kegging it in a few weeks.

We served both our stouts on October 20th, at Locktoberfest Chicago 2012, alongside Cross of Gold beer from Revolution Brewery. Good times had by all, and all the beer poured out into waiting cups at a spirited pace. We look forward to seeing what happens with Locktoberfest 2013. We served out of our brand new taps built by Ryan Pierce!

More developments are… developing, on the bar! It’ll be even cooler later, when we’ll post a full writeup with pictures.

This Sunday, we’ll have a standard Beer Church event; with the addition of a random chance of whether we’ll be making Wine or Mead. Depending on when we hear back from participants, it’ll go either way – this post may be updated in a few days.

For those new to Beer Church, we hold pot-luck beer tastings, where everyone brings their favorite unusual beer and we taste them. We discuss the state of technology, brewing, and science in an informal midday Sunday setting at Pumping Station: One.

Once we’ve satisfied palates and our conversational avenues, we’ll either make wine, or mead! That depends on whether our winemaking correspondent is able to make it. Either way, we’ll be learning something new and making a delicious beverage. Come on down – both ends of the beverage cycle will be covered!

Details

* Date/Time: 12:30 PM, 11/11/2012
* Location: Pumping Station: One, 3519 N Elston Chicago IL
* Attendance: Public, no RSVP required, must be 21 or over

When a fifth Tuesday rolls around, PS:One usually has a pot luck following the membership meeting.   October 30th is the fifth Tuesday in October, so there will be a pot luck starting around 8:30 pm.    Since it will be so close to Halloween, spooky food is particularly encouraged, but spookiness is not required.  Come and bring a dish!

Demo from Tuesday night

It’s that time of the year again, boils and ghouls! Do you still lack ideas for costumes? Maybe you just want to take your existing costume a couple steps further? This three part course will teach you what you need to know about making realistic bruises, contusions, and wounds that would make your mother scream!
Part 1 on Thursday @ 7pm will feature the basics of wounds to make them look real and painful, instead of painted on.
Part 2 on Friday @ 7pm will feature how to use latex to create torn or blistering skin that bleeds.
Part 3 on Saturday @ 7pm will feature how to use makeup wax to create wounds with deapth and how to include embedded objects.

Single class: $10
Full course: $20