Know what that is?  It’s a winning idea, that’s what!  Well, we hope it is, anyway.  It is just as tiny piece of what is drawn on our whiteboard, a small morsel, a teaser of our build idea.  Any guesses?  So, the junk pile was a bit disappointing.  Miles was not too happy about the item selection process and let everyone know it.  Hopefully, he’ll cool off soon.  We need his delicious brainssss!

We’ve been Hack-a-Day’ed!  Thanks for the traffic.  You should all bookmark our site now so you can come back and see the awesome (and usually ridiculous) things we build on a regular basis.  Also, keep track of the happenings at the Red Bull Creation challenge as we’ll be updating out site throughout this grueling 72 hour hack event.  Gotta run to the sheet metal store now.  So long and thanks for all the hits! {eeek squeak eeek for all you dolphins out there…}

Rain delay?  No way!  The hack continues through the rain.  Nothin’ gonna stop us now!  Paul snapped these pictures of all of our stuff getting wet.  Who was the genius at Red Bull that thought building us roofs would be a good idea but then left big holes in them?  Oh, well, water is good for laptops, right?

Our digs @ Red Bull Creation.  Notice the sombrero on Jeff?  Our signature ‘uniform’ for this challenge.  Might come in handy later.  Looks like rain.

Not sure how to take that yet, but that is the topic.  Jeff noticed when the tool list was posted over a week ago that one of the sponsors makes tools almost exclusively for the bicycle market.  Because of this, we figured some type of kinetic sculpture.  I guess we aren’t too far off…  Additional details forthcoming.

Paul just got Rick-Rolled by their Red Bull badges.  Click the thumbnail for the full story.

The liquor has all be dranken and now it’s time to get hackin’!  Paul and the gang have made it back to the RV (this was no easy feat after being drowned in booze at the kickoff party) and have begun reverse engineering their electronic badges.  The badges appear to be banging out some Morse code to a single red LED.  Paul is trying to get past the fuses on the PIC to read the code inside while the others set up our Rigol portable digital oscilloscope and try to record the LED blinks to a file to decode the Morse.  Crazy but true, the wacky guys from Two Hands Project are hanging out in the HaHa RV right now.  Apparently they are covered with stickers?!?  You may remember them from a while back (over a year ago?) when they came to HaHa and filmed us for inclusion in a documentary about hackerspaces.  Hey guys, what happened to that film project?

After many hours of butt-numbing car rides and New York traffic, four intrepid HaHa hackers have taken on the wilds of Brooklyn to journey into the mouth of the caffeine-addled beast, also known as Redbull Creation. Dave, Paul, Jeff and Miles have arrived to bring the hack, Baltimore-style, to the soon-to-be-unwashed masses of McCarren Park. Our dedicated compatriot, Jason, will do his best to record all of our rants and photos here at HaHa central for all to see.  Yes, that photo is Paul in a sombrero; they are expecting it to be quite hot.  Warning: After over 72 sleepless hours, it could get ugly.  This should be fun…

What are we going to do with our newly acquired vintage 1977 Lear Siegler terminal?  Why, we’ll play ASCII Star Wars Episode IV on it, of course!  Recently purchased at the 2011 Techno Swap Fest, this baby-blue beauty has classic 70′s styling, comfortable keyboard and gets 80 columns on the screen in a lovely white uppercase font.  It took some coaxing to get Baby Blue to play along with an Ubuntu-equipped laptop including tweaking some DIP switches hidden inside her chassis, some clever character substitutions in the ASCII Star Wars file, reading the datasheet for the terminal itself (thanks, Wikipedia!), and wiring up both a FTDI USB-to-serial converter and a MAX232 level converter IC.  But the results were worth a quick video.  Future improvements could include a way to hide the cursor (hardware modification?) and possibly speeding up draws by only painting the characters that have changed.  What do ya think?

When Jeremy ‘Awesome’ Ashinghurst is not busy hacking at HaHa, researching new and interesting ways to make power tools dangerous or just generally being awesome, he’s busy riding his custom-built gravity-powered vehicle, also known as a soapbox kart, at dangerously high speeds down steep hills.  Well, all of the hard work and road rash paid off for Jeremy recently when he won the grand prize in Make Magazine’s Karts and Wheels contest. Keep your eyes peeled for Make Volume 26, starring Mr. Awesome’s Kart, at your local newsstand.  In the meantime, read his entire, well-documented build on the Make Blog.  Go Awesome, go!