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.
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.
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.
This Saturday, Oct 18, 2008 at 1 pm at FIU we will be having our bi-weekly hack-a-thon! Do you have any electronics, computer programming, or other hacking projects you want to work on? Join us this saturday!
You can find the agenda wiki page here. If you want to teach something at the hack-a-thon just add it to the wiki!
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.