Pumping Station: One

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.

Have you ever wished you could help direct investigations or do some hacking in areas like chemistry and biology (or others), but feel shut out of the scientific process because you don’t work in academia or industry?

Are you working in science within industry or academia, but feel locked into a narrow field of R&D that is dictated by conservative sources of funding either via business allocations to meet short-term profit imperatives or from government grants?

Open Science is the practice of making methodologies and results publicly accessibe as well as facilitating various degrees of distributed collaboration in the research process. “Hacking,” or altering the objects of study for various reasons, will be emphasized in our program for purposes that could range from art to biofuel development.

Please attend our meeting this Sunday and subsequent meetings every third Sunday of the month to help shape this nascent program. Early meetings will develop strategies for acquiring lab space and equipment, formating the program, and selecting initial group projects.

Who: Open to the public

Where: Pumping Station: One, 3354 N Elston Ave, Chicago, IL

When: This Sunday, December 18, 6pm (and every 3rd Sunday at 6pm)

Cost: Free

We look forward to meeting you!

The most excellent Mitch Altman, co-founder Noisebridge & TV-B-Gone inventor, is in town to speak at Flourish Open Source Conference at UIC this weekend.

Mitch Altman presents ‘Hacking Cool Things with Microcontrollers’ at Maker Faire Detroit 2010

Mitch loves hackers, so he’s coming by our space for a special Thursday edition of the our bi-weekly Circuit Hacking Wednesday: Circuit Hacking Fun Night!

Come get your electrons & solder on with Mitch and other friendly hackers on Thursday, April 7th, 7pm-9pm.

Inspired by Noisebridge’s Circuit Hacking Monday, any experience level is welcome. Beginners can learn to solder and make cool stuff in a couple hours. DIY electronics kits from Cornfield Electronics (Mitch’s company) and Adafruit Industries will be available for cash sale.

And remember: Soldering is Easy!

In The Laboratory by Henry Alexander

Art museums appear to be impenetrable fortresses after closing time. What is often unknown to the majority of the visiting public is that the majority of these collections are stored and cataloged outside of these main halls. In many cases up to 99% of museums’ collections are stored away never to be seen for decades, if that often.

Over the last 8 months I have researched the difference between movie museum security and the reality of museum security.

Just published is a some of my results in the Journal of Physical Security at Argonne National Laboratory.

You can find the article here.

Or here.

My flex resistor jacket is finally finished. After a month and a half of failures and a whole bunch of setbacks, the PS:One logo is finally embedded with twenty big LEDs which are attach to a circuit board and a flex resistor. The LEDs only light up when the right elbow is bent to a certain extent. It runs off of two AA batteries held along with the circuit board in a pocket on the left shoulder.

The jacket was premiered (sort of) at Digital Breakdown on Dec. 18th to help promote PS:One. Bunches of recently printed stickers didn’t hurt either. Luckily, the jacket is perfect for dancing.

Thanks to Jeff Kantarek and Jordan Bunker for their huge amounts of help on this project. Without their expertise this jacket would not be glowy.

Go ahead! The link below this post will take you to V1.1 of the PDF How-To to build one yourself, with step-by-step instructions and a pretty exhaustive materials list. Also some pictures, but perhaps not as many as there should be. Regardless! Is the PDF confusing or vague? Any questions? Go ahead and e-mail me at eli.skipp@gmail.com so that I can update the PDF and so that your questions can get answered. Happy hacking!

Fabric Light Bright PDF

[EDIT!]: This project is under a Creative Commons license!

Fabric Light-Bright by Eli Skipp is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.