Pumping Station: One

NERP October 22 Summary

Last nerp, Drew got things going with another well produced demo of the Raspberry Pi doing hardware i/o. In keeping with the spirit of the season he and Bonnie King put together a network controlled musical multimedia Jack o’ Lantern that blinked and played mp3′s through browser interaction. There are lots of ways of doing physical i/o though an internet link. To my untrained eyes, the high points of Drew’s and Bonnie’s approach included

• Python on the RPi

• On the Rpi is the bottle.py framework which provides a small, simple (so they say) web server for people who make stuff http://www.marginhound.com/bottle-py-resources/

• ajax to help push the data back and forth between the web page and server
• the RPi gpio module for reading switches and turning on and off the lights
• the python thread class for allowing the RPi to blink the lights without stalling the program
• a hook to control mplayer to play the sounds.

Check out Drew’s full write-up on his Element14 blog http://www.element14.com/community/groups/raspberry-pi/blog/tags/pumpkin_pi

Joe Walnes, known for his PiCrust http://picru.st/ adapter board, was our dark horse presenter. One of his other Raspberry Pi based projects is a coding environment called quick2web for people who are new to web programming* and also for rapid prototyping of web connected hardware control. Joe demoed web-slider:

• …a mobile web-app that contains a slider bar…
• …that communicates to a Python program via WebSockets…
• …that adjusts an LED bar-graph.
• Then point your desktop or mobile browser to http://[hostname]:8888/. Try multiple browsers for fun.
• https://github.com/joewalnes/raspberry-play/

The web interface allows multiple locations of interaction with the Raspberry-Pi through a browser. This is neat, but his main interest is in bringing a simplified, event driven programming model to beginning programmers. The demo made things like gui building and asynchronous hardware events look easy. When Joe’s quick2web environment takes off it will do for hardware-interactive web programming what the Arduino has done for microcontrollers and Libre development tools (gcc). I was pleased that Joe presented at nerp, and I hope he’ll do it again soon. Quick2web needs programmers. This is a worthy effort. Volunteer if you can!

*This is me.

Monday November 5

Ryan Pierce will show us how he is rewriting an Arduino 1-Wire library “…to be (mostly) non-blocking. My project is AC phase dimming with triacs while still reading temperatures… Each half of the AC sine wave is 8.333 ms. And reading a temp from 1-Wire is a 10 ms operation. So the new library allows me to start an operation, get a (nearly) immediate return, poll the timer for the AC to see if it is time to fire the triacs, go back to polling 1-Wire to see if it is time to bang a bit which should return (nearly) immediately, check the triac again, rinse, lather, repeat….. “

 John Dolecki will bring his Robot to this meeting. He says “Please don’t expect techno mumbo jumbo from me as my programming skills are on the beginner level. I’m sure once you are introduced to Microsoft Robotics Studio, the C programming will look familiar to you.

Let the Robot Apocalypses start here!”

Sounds great, John!

Hey “Open Science” people and folks interested in Fungus…

A few months ago we got ahold of some very rare and insider information about fungal infestations on board MIR, the International Space Station, and the Apollo Missions. It turns out, the reason we let MIR burn up in the atmosphere was to protect our ecosystem from being exposed to mold species that had mutated during their time in space.

The super-fungus became more aggressive and could etch glass, eat through rubber gaskets, and grow four times as fast as fungus does on earth. Crazy, right?

Anyway, my family and I spent the last five months or so compiling this information into a 45-minute documentary. This documentary is just now starting to make the rounds in the microbiology world. It’s been screened privately for groups of microbiologists, the US Military, and other industry professionals.

We will screen this movie at PS:One, October 17 at 7pm.

Here is the trailer for the film:

If you are into science fiction, biology, Star Trek or real space exploration, this is really up your alley.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Hello! We had a good time today – moved the bar, planned out the draft tower design, figured out which parts to order. However, the interesting part is on the brewing front. We picked up another keg and cleaned/redid the hardware on 2 kegs, then kegged our two stouts.

Boiling priming sugar

Ryan Pierce kegging the Anise Stout

Kegged beers set to condition for a few weeks

We’ll definitely be ready for Locktoberfest on the 20th and possibly an upcoming party!

EDIT: this is on 9/23, not 9/20.

Taken on our last brew day – why not use the hydraulic jack to siphon? You would if you could.

I never expected Beer Church to be as popular as it is! You’re all great. We now have 2 beers in the Brewing Station: One fermentation chamber under the patient temperature control of chillmon. We aren’t sure which of them is going to rejuvenate TOOOL during Locktoberfest on October 20th, but one these is it!

I don’t know if we’ll brew on Sunday, but the great thing is that we’ve got a Brew & Grow a quick saunter around the corner and all the gear we could need right on hand. If you want to brew this weekend, hit up the comments or the thread on the public mailing list and we might get something going!

Beer tasting: bring a few bottles of something you like that you think others may not know. We will do a potluck beer tasting. Tiny beer steins (for tiny beers) will be provided but bring your own chalice/mug/other drink receptacle if you prefer. Homebrews are highly esteemed, and you will get some beer peer review from your peers in beer! Neither of our brews are ready to rock yet, so we’ll have to wait for tasting our own creations.

You are of course welcome to come even if you do not consume beer or other alcoholic beverages! You must be 21 to drink at beer church. Come on down to 3519 N Elston at 12:00 PM on 9/23!

In this basic soldering workshop, Moldover will take you through the steps to build your own Light-Theremin CD case (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8UzSVFUIc0).  Even if you’ve never soldered before, this workshop will give you the confidence in two hours.  If you do have experience you’ll learn how to solder better, and walk away with a fun and unique instrument, plus a copy of Moldover’s latest album.

This workshop starts at 7pm, entry is free, and the kit will cost $25 to purchase. Space is limited and all ages are welcome! 8 seats taken 7 remaining! Want to reserve your seat? Email my name at gmail.com

The next NERP (Not Exclusively Raspberry Pi) meeting will be at 7pm Monday August 27th. The new regular format of the NERP meetings is

1. a new user orientation (first session) at 6pm
2. The regular meeting (second session) from 7-8:30pm.
3. The after party which goes on until the building closes.

The orientation sessions help new users get their Raspberry Pis booted and quickly demo where the start buttons are in the operating system. The second session is a forum for talks, demos, free discussion, and questions. Subjects can be of general interest or advanced and highly focused. *

occidentalis – the black raspberry

The purpose of NERP is to promote discussion and exchange of knowledge and ideas. Interruptions and dumb questions are encouraged. The flow of a meeting can be deliciously chaotic.

I didn’t set out to take minutes at the NERP meeting last Monday, but there was so much good information flying around that it was hard to resist jotting some things down.

• Drew demoed many of the apps that come with the pi by default.

• Looked at Quake on the RPi. Learned about the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) (“…a cross-platform, free and open source multimedia library written in C that presents a simple interface to various platforms’ graphics, sound, and input devices…”)
• Looked at /opt/vc where the broadcom videocore libs and utils live. Note to self: some of the utils look useful for low level tweaking at run time.
• Clarified the difference between Arduino and Rpi by running a blinky demo with the arduino hosted by the Pi
• Cortex M-series is the microcontroller family of Arms. There are <$20 ARM M4 boards.
• The logic level output lines are weak. Voltages are: USB = 5V, general i/o = 3.3V, HDMI = 1.8V.
• It don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that adafruit clear box and breakout board.
• Everything is a file. How to do output in Bash:

echo “out” > /sys/class/gpio/gpio4/direction
echo “0” > /sys/class/gpio/gpio4/value
echo “1” > /sys/class/gpio/gpio4/value

• The video output problem… There are cheap 3.5” video screens (for car rear view cameras) on amazon
• From Jay: Demo of a Motorola dock for a phone for $55.   11.6” HDMI 1333 x 800. Works well with RPi.
• Watch ebay, amazon, China direct sellers for cheap $15 -to $50 HDMI to VGA adapters.
• In the initialization/setup tool set Pi to force HDMI so it doesn’t try to default to composite output at boot. It’ll get stuck there and won’t see the HDMI if plugged in later.
• Pi has undocumented connectors for CSI (camera serial interface) and DSI (display serial interface) Broadcom is planning a backpack HDMI rez camera for RPi
• The broken wireless driver problem is sometimes helped by using the Occidentalis v0.1 distro/mod from http://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-raspberry-pi-educational-linux-distro/occidentalis-v0-dot-1
• All the cool kids are ditching plain Raspbian. Occidentilis (derived from Raspbian) is the one to have. It’s specifically for doing electronics. It has good support for SPI, I2C, one wire, and more WiFi sticks.  Black Raspberry – wheezy. Yes.
• Drew will make a wiki at PS:One (DONE)
• Computer vision is the killer app.
• That, and network services that interact with the physical world.

-Ed_B

*If you would like to show your work or lead a discussion on NERP, email ed at kineticsandelectronics dot com to set up a time.

We’ve been doing this for a while! I guess people enjoy alcoholic mixtures of grains, hops, and other flavorings!

Beer tasting: bring a few bottles of something you like that you think others may not know. We will do a potluck beer tasting. Tiny beer steins (for tiny beers) will be provided but bring your own chalice/mug/other drink receptacle if you prefer. Homebrews are highly esteemed, and you will get some beer peer review from your peers in beer!

We’ll keep on discussing brewing, and even have a few guests coming who have brewed on a pretty large scale before!

You are of course welcome to come even if you do not consume beer or other alcoholic beverages! You must be 21 to drink at beer church. Come on down to 3519 N Elston at 12:00 PM on 8/12!

Pumping Station: One is one of the main driving forces behind Mini Maker Faire Evanston which runs tonight and all day tomorrow (10AM-6PM tomorrow). Electric car races, the TARDIS, tons of makers and hackers, people from far afield coming to Evanston to show what they can do and what they can offer you! Makerbot, Makerslide, Photoboop, Power Racing Series, and tons more! Check out the Maker Faire Evanston site for more information, and come on down tonight, tomorrow, or both! We would love to see you.

It’s that time again…the Unusual Musical Instrument Jam is tonight: Friday, June 11 at 7pm, at Pumping Station: One.

Come to the space with all of your loud things. We’d love to see your circuit bent toys, electronic contraptions, loud computer programs, microcontroller gadgets, MIDI controllers, absolutely anything–whether it was intended to make noises or not. If you’d like to be a little offbeat and bring your “usual” musical instruments, those are welcome, too. IF you don’t have any musical gadgets, don’t worry…there’ll be plenty to go around, or plenty of avant garde ways to make some noise when you come to the space.

It’s free and open to members and nonmembers alike, so bring your friends. See you there!

(Picture licensed Creative Commons BY-NC-SA, by shankar, shiv on Flickr.)