Pumping Station: One

I know it’s a bit late but now that we’ve recovered a bit from the party I wanted to do a wrap up post.  We had a ton of people come through to celebrate, members and guests, old and new.  Thanks for coming and helping us raise money for the new kitchen!  I hope you had as great a time as we did!

Eric’s on the spot extraction demo was a big hit. Photo credit: @clocksailor

Getting them hooked early. Photo credit: @clocksailor

Make. Hack. Craft. Photo credit: @clocksailor

Picking locks. Photo credit: @clocksailor

Reppin’ the nerd life.

Yeah, that’s a trumpet. Photo credit: @clocksailor

Do you have pictures from the party?  Add them to our flickr pool or post them on our FaceBook page.

This Saturday (5.25) PS:1 will be holding a free members only event dedicated to playing (and possibly beating) some of the most difficult games on Xbox 360 around. Some titles you can expect to find are the classics like Mortal Kombat 2 (SNES), and Street Fighter 2 (SNES). But for some up to date titles – Super Meat Boy (Xbox 360), Monaco (Xbox 360), and the maddeningly brilliant, Braid (Xbox 360). But for the sake of fun and not entirely causing your brain to explode things like Castle Crashers, Battleblock Theater, and Geometry Wars will also be available.

This event will be held in electronics from 8pm to however long the group can endure. We’ll also be taking advantage of the whiteboards as you can expect dissection of game strategy, group plotting the next move, and making sense of the chaos in above picture.

When: 8pm
Where: PS:One, electronics
What to expect: Yelling, kicking, and screaming

This Thursday at 7:00pm  Edward Ford will be hosting a ShapeOko night.  Edward can help you build, complete, setup and use the ShapeOko router.

He will also give a quick overview of the web based MakerCAM program.  MakerCAM can be used to create toolpaths for CNC routers.  Edward and Inventables are working to develop this program into a full featured CAM program.

For those without ShapeOkos, we can talk about your CNC project or work with some of the digital fabrication equipment at PS:One like the laser cutter, CNC router or 3D printers.

Please RSVP via Meetup.com.

This week we have a presentation by Jason Huggins (@hugs) on Bitbeam and the Tapster robot he built with it.

When:

Thursday, May 9th @ 7:00pm, upstairs in the electronics area

Topic:

Jason will give an overview of Tapster, his open source, 3D printable, mobile app testing robot. In addition to explaining why creating a mobile testing robot is not the worst idea you’ve ever heard of, Jason will give an overview of Bitbeam, the open source building toy that he developed, which Tapster’s made out of. He’ll cover his making journey as he’s experimented with laser cutters, CNC mills, and 3D printers to make Bitbeam. For fun, the talk will also include live demos of Tapster playing Angry Birds.

About Jason:

Jason Huggins is CTO and co-founder of Sauce Labs, a software test infrastructure company, and is the original creator of Selenium, a popular open source web testing tool. In 2011, for an art project he was working on, Jason created Bitbeam – a 3D printable LEGO-Technic-compatible construction toy. Jason lives in Oak Park, Illinois.

CNC Stuff

Following the presentation we will break away to work on various CNC projects. The ongoing group project continues to be the mid-sized CNC Router. The machine is now fully functional under Mach3 control. We can talk about the Mach3 setup and cut a few things.

We had a great presentation by Jarvis Schultz on the Microsoft Kinect last night as part of the CNC Build Club.  Jarvis works with the Kinect as part of his PhD research in robotics at Northwestern University.  We had an overflow crowd of close to 30 participants.

The presentation was an introduction on how to get started with hacking the Kinect.  He described what is known about the internals and the data you can get out of it.  He talked about the preferred open source software tools and libraries.

He gave several live demos.  The pictures you see above are shots of how the Kinect saw the crowd at PS:One.  The still shots don’t do justice to the coolness of watching it live.  His presentation is in PDF format here.

PS: One’s fourth birthday party is coming up soon!  We’re going to have tons of cool projects to show off along with food, drinks and live music!  Don’t forget to RSVP and invite your friends!

Because, party

When: May 4^th, 7PM – Demos and reception; 10PM – Live music!
Where: Pumping Station: One, 3519 N. Elston (near Addison and Kedzie)
Cost: $10 for non-members (pay online if you like – http://psoneparty.eventbrite.com/)

We’ll have some of our awesome projects and demonstrations on display for you, so come check them out! We’ll have:

• Souped-up Power Wheels Racers
• DIY Quadcopter
• Brain-based Jacob’s Ladder
• WindowFarm
• THUNDER SLINKY!
• Other cool things!

It wouldn’t be a real hackerspace party if there wasn’t some good ol’ fashioned hacking going on:

• Make art with lasers!
• Silkscreen your own art poster!
• Learn to solder and walk away with your very own blinkie badge!
• Print your first object using one of our 3D printers

We’ll have liquid refreshments and some light snacks. Later on we’ll have music and a light up LED birthday cake.

All funds will go to helping us build out our new kitchen area.

Thursday, May 2 @ 7:00pm

Presentation

This week we have a presentation from Jarvis Schultz on using the Microsoft Kinect motion sensor input device and other related devices.  He is going to give an overview on how they work, what kind of data they can produce, what software is needed to interact with them, and what you can do with the data once you have it.  He will include some live demos of what the data looks like, and what you can do with it.

Jarvis is a fourth-year PhD student in Mechanical Engineering working on robotics at Northwestern University.  He is part of the Neuroscience and Robotics Laboratory, and he has been working with the Kinect since it was first available, and it has become an integral part of his PhD research.  Further information is on his research webpage in case you are interested http://nxr.northwestern.edu/people/jarvis-schultz.

Thanks to Steve Finkelman for arranging this.

CNC Router

Following the presentation and discussion we are going to continue with the CNC Router project. We are going to add the limit switches for the X,Y and Z axes. Limit switches can protect your machine from over travel, but also provide an accurate and repeatable home position.

We are also going to setup Mach3 as the machine controller. We will try to do this while hooked up to the projector, so everyone can participate in the process and learn how to do it. Mach3 is a professional level commercial controller and is a huge step up from the typical DIY solutions, like GRBL.

After a few projects with Mach3 we will probably also install EMC2 which is an open source, Linux based alternative to Mach3.

We had a great meeting last night.  We had over a dozen people working together to wire up a CNC control box.  At one point we had three soldering irons going at the same time.  Here is the pile of parts we started with.

Here are some people wiring the box.  A really nice job was done using wire ferruls wherever we could.  How many hands can fit in that little box?

Here is the nearly completed box.

Thanks to Chris, Matt, Aeva, Patrick, Donald, Steve, Jason & Alex, Cat, John, Will, Gabe, Norm, Allen and Colin.  Next week we will be testing the motors, adding limit switches and configuring the software.

We will start with Mach3, then switch to EMC2 when we find a dedicated PC for that.  Chris and John I think mentioned they do time at Free Geek.  I am sure they could find a little PC.

Special thanks to Automation Technologies Inc for giving/lending all the parts.

- Bart