As a result of last Saturday’s Hack-a-Thon, Latrokles finished up the first version of his speech recognition and synthesis library for openFrameworks. As a wrapper around the speech APIs in OS X, it only works on the mac at the moment, but there are plans to begin porting the same functionality over to windows and linux. There is also future functionality in the pipeline.

The lib could be used without openFrameworks with minimal tweaking, in the future there will be no tweaking necessary to use with or without oF.

Here’s a short video showing some of the library functionality.

oF + Mac Speech = ofxSpeech from latrokles on Vimeo

Today is world Scratch Day. Scratch is a project from the MIT Media Lab, a programming language that makes it easy to create interactive stories, games, animation, etc. It was designed to get kids involved in programming and to teach them the fundamental ideas behind computation and mathematics while allowing them to play around and work creatively. For more information, visit scratch.mit.edu

Jeremy Conn created, with in a matter of minutes, a full fledged pong game using Scratch with collision detection, score keeping, and a simple AI. 

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At the 3/7/09 Saturday Hack-a-Thon, James was able to bring by a batch of solar panels and its related equipment. The panels and equipment were generously provided to us to play with for the day by Sun Electronics of Miami, FL.

We successfully powered a laptop using only the power of the sun. We will be doing much more with this technology in the near future.

Sun Electronics has a great online store of inexpensive high quality solar products. You can visit them at http://www.sunelec.com or call them at (305) 536-9917.

Julian checking the voltage on the solar rig

A few of us drove up to Orlando, FL for the annual ham radio convention called Hamcation organized by the Orlando Amateur Radio Club. If you’ve never been to a ham radio convention I highly recommend it. Especially one of this size. It’s pretty much a flea market of radio, computer, electronics components and an exhibit of antique radio equipment. It’s also a chance to meet old friends you usually only talk to over the airwaves. We spotted the Cheshire Catalyst manning the Linux distro booth.

There was a lot of cool stuff at this convention. One item that we just had to video tape was this old morse code training device. It’s an all mechanical hand cranked device that was used by the U.S. Military to train radio personnel morse code. Again what’s cool about these conventions is while the vendor was demonstrating to us this device and older gentleman mentioned how he remembered using this device during the Korean War.

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Below we have a magnetic card reader made at the HACKMIAMI labs. It reads track 2 found on most magnetic striped cards (i.e. credit cards, drivers licenses, and student ids). Something interesting to point out, while testing the equipment with an old student ID card from a local university we found out it holds the person’s social security number on the card. The SSN use to be the student ID number. I wouldn’t be surprised if other universities did the same. The magnetic card reader was made using a Sanguino (a beefy Arduino clone), an LCD found on SparkFun, and magnetic card reader from All Electronics.

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Thanks to HacDC for mentioning us on their website! HacDC was one of the first hackerspaces in the United States. A great model for how a hackerspace should be run. Take a look at their wiki as it has a lot of info on the internals of their operation. A learning tool to base our hackerspace on. Other hackerspaces to mention are NoiseBridge, NYC Resistor, and The Hacktory.

I would like to add, the idea of starting a hackerspace in Miami was after attending Nick Farr’s talk “Building Hacker Spaces Everywhere: Your Excuses are Invalid,” Jens Ohlig’s “Hacker Space Design Patterns,” and NYC Resistor’s “A Collaborative Approach to Hardware Hacking” at The Last Hope. (click the titles to listen to the talks)

A few of us got together yesterday at FIU to work on our own projects. JP worked on how to get a ultrasonic proximity sensor to display on an LCD screen using an Arduino (code & pics here). Latrokles worked on making cables, and on a one chip servo driver. Don worked on a 3D BSP tree renderer using Python and PyGame. Mike took apart a webcam. Which he should have done at last weeks at “Learn to Make Stuff by Taking Things Apart” event but, everyone is entitled to use their hack-a-thon time as they wish.

Last Friday night FIU’s ACM-GISIG (General Interest Special Interest Group) had a “Learn to Make Stuff by Taking Things Apart” session at Florida International University and it was quite a success! We where not anticipating that many people and yet we had enough room to work with a dremel and burn our fingers with soldering irons… and everyone participated and got their hands dirty. You can view the photos in the slide show on the first page or click here.