(Baltimore) Harford Hackerspace

RobotFest 2012 Pictures

superfro — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 21:18:08 +0000

Well another RobotFest has come and gone. If you missed it, well… there’s always next year. Here’s some pics you missed.

Thanks again to our member Mike for taking a bunch of pictures, and to everyone who contributed to RobotFest this year.

[Show as slideshow]

Meet 401k

superfro — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 06:02:19 +0000

Mark has been working on this full sized biped robot made of mostly spare parts for over 2 years. These are the first movements after adding the Axon II controller and getting all the servos wired up. The goal is to start teaching it to walk over the next couple months.

More videos are on Mark’s YouTube channel

“Kickin’ It Old School” Pays Off for Local Junk Collectors

bsom — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 05:09:33 +0000

NEWSFLASH – Dateline:BALTIMORE -STOP- Harford Hackerspace wins Sparkfun Free Day Text Browser contest -STOP- Snail-mails photos of member Miles using LSI ADM-3A terminal to load Sparkfun Free Day website -STOP- Chosen as winner from over *13* entries -STOP- $100 prize forthcoming -STOP- Photographs available via private courier -STOP- (This telegram is fee on delivery: you owe us 35c for reading it.)

3rd Annual Techno-Swap-Fest – SATURDAY!

bsom — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 05:00:35 +0000

Got junk? Need more? Come see us at the 3rd Annual Techno-Swap-Fest! The HaHas have reserved 4 tables which will be chocked full of recent acquisitions including bulk wire spools, test equipment, electronics part grab bags (only $2!), connectors, military and government surplus, heat shrink tubing, wire wrap equipment, and other indescribable stuff you simply must have.
This event is like a geek paradise. The HaHas acquired some awesome stuff in the prior two years and this year’s looks to be shaping up to be awesome as well.

BE THERE *AND* BE SQUARE!

National Electronics Museum
Saturday, February 25, 2012
9am – 2pm; $5 entry fee; 15 years of age and younger FREE (proceeds from entry benefit NEM)
Event website

Hackerspace Humor

bsom — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 23:34:56 +0000

I Won, I Won! Free Swag from Panavise!

bsom — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 02:56:30 +0000

I entered the Panavise Facebook contest in December and won! Weee! I posted a time-lapse video of me assembling a Drone Lab kit from Casper Electronics using my Panavise Model 315 on Panavise’s Facebook page and was informed a few weeks later that my video was selected as the December winner. And, boy, did Panavise come through with the swag. Their prize package contained NINE individual products, as you can see in the quickie video below. (Sorry about the video quality, I loaned my really good camcorder to a friend so I had to use my iPhone 4S…) Here is a link to the January 2012 GRIPnews Panavise newsletter where my win was announced.

Voiding a warranty on an external hard drive

superfro — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 21:52:03 +0000

After a recent hard drive failure, I realized I need to start doing some proper backups (Duh, right?) Anyway, while shopping for hard drives to build a backup NAS (for which I need some internal drives, not external USB drives) I discovered a trend where a lot of external hard drives are cheaper than internal drives at the same capacity. How does this make sense?

I ended up purchasing these 3TB hard drives for about $140 each at Office Depot. It’s a crap shoot on which hard drive will be inside, but it will normally be made by the same manufacturer, and be of that capacity. (You would be surprised to find out this isn’t _always_ the case).

Being a 3TB Seagate, a quick search over at Newegg shows this drive which sells for $229. That’s a $90 dollar difference. WOW! So doing this instead of buying internal drives is a bargain so far.

Lets see what’s in the box.

The drive in its enclosure.

A Mini USB Cable.

And a 12v 1.5A wall wart.

SCORE! So far we’ve gotten a free wall wart and mini USB cable that we can use on other projects! This enclosure would be nice for another project if we can save it, and whatever other electronics are inside might be cool, too.

OK, great, now let’s rip the hard drive out of the enclosure, right? Well, not so fast. Once we open this we will void our warranty. (Now you can put on your cool-guy “I void warranties” shirt.) We should check it out first before messing with it.

Hard drives are flaky, they randomly die, and if anyone could accurately tell you a drive was bad they probably wouldn’t have sent that one to you, right? So, what can we do? First thing is obvious: plug it in and make sure it works and shows up and doesn’t make any strange clicking noises.

Check the properties, make sure the capacity is all there.

Do a long slow format. (Make sure your ‘Quick Format’ box is NOT checked.)

Copy some files to it, delete some files… OK, what next?

Well, there isn’t much else we can do at this point. We can download a program to sniff out the S.M.A.R.T. data and maybe run some benchmarks on it. I recommend HDDScan and, yes, I’m just assuming you’re using Windows. If you were using a Mac you would most likely have just bought the right drive, and if you’re using Linux you can format with badblocks options and fsck the crap out of it.

Without going into a huge tutorial on using HDDScan, just select the right drive, and some read/write tests and check the S.M.A.R.T. data looking for anything odd. If you don’t notice anything standing out, well, this is the best you can do as any real hard drive failure will be while you’re actually using it and have your sensitive data on it.

Now be a good USB user and right click on your drive and ‘Safely Remove’ and wait for Windows to tell you it’s OK. Pull the power/USB cords and wait for it to power down. Now we’ll just unscrew this box and take the hard drive out.

If you’re a frequent warranty voider you know the usual suspects of where the screws hide: Under labels. On this drive that’s not a screw it’s just a plastic manufacturing stub.

The screws must be under the rubber feet, that’s where the screws hide. Shot down again. No screws.

Unfortunately the retail market is always about making manufacturing cheaper, and a cheaper trend is to make these plastic enclosures just ‘snap together’. After fiddling with the case a little bit and trying not to cut your hand open with a flat head screw driver, you can kind of feel where the plastic mates together and gently peel apart the plastic snaps. Remember, we are *trying* to save the enclosure.

Keep on working the split gently all the way across the seam, don’t worry if you hear some cracking noises as this is hardly avoidable.

You should eventually get the top off and see whats inside.

Uh oh, we broke some of those plastic ‘hooks’ that snap this thing together. So much for saving the case unless we get real creative and put some screws on (or juse use half of it with some panel mount knobs or something, you never know).

Four more screws with some rubber shock absorbers, some aluminum tape…

Our SATA drive is FREE! Oh, and we picked up a pre-wired 3mm green LED, with a USB-to-SATA adapter!

We got our drive out! Turns out mine is not the one I found on Newegg, but a ST33000651AS I found at Amazon for $257.25 (Even more of a price difference!) They didn’t carry it at Newegg. We got a free mini USB cable, a 12v 1.5a wall adapter, possibly part of an enclosure, and without stripping parts off of the USB-to-SATA adapter, we have a USB-to-SATA adapter we can use to temporarily hook up an external hard drive (assuming this isn’t firmware locked or anything).

Not a bad score and at a discount…

Coffee Maker Mod

Squintz — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:11:22 +0000

Sure… anyone can go to the local store and buy a coffee maker with a timer. That was not good enough for our new member Ryan Merl. Keeping in the hacking spirit, Ryan decided to make his own internet controlled coffee maker. He installed a relay between the wall cord and the power switch on the coffee pot. The relay is controlled by his arduino. He used this tutorial as a guide. An ethernet shield is used to connect the arduino to the network.

You can find the source code for this project here: https://github.com/theanti9/HTTPCoffeePot. Be sure to checkout the Readme.doc for more details.

Special Features

15 minute automatic shutoff
Controlled via HTTP Requests
Status, start, and stop requests
Returns JSON meant for AJAX interfaces
Ready and running LEDs

HTTPCoffeePot can be connected to your arduino with an ethernet shield and attached to the network. It will listen on port 80, like a normal web server, and take several different request URLs to control it. The URLs return JSON with the intention that an AJAX interface will be built over it:

/status/ – This will return some information about the current status of the coffee pot
/start/ – This will start the coffee pot assuming that it is currently ready to be started and not started already
/stop/ – This will turn off the coffee pot

Currently the process will work like this:

Put in coffee grounds/filter/water
Press ready button to enter coffee pot into ready state
When coffee is desired, send /start/ request
Wait for coffee to finish
Send manual /stop/ request OR wait for timed automatic shut off to take place after 15 minutes

I have a very simple coffee maker which is really only a switch. The modifications I made to the pot were to cut the power inside of it between the wall and the switch on the pot and place a relay in between. The relay is then activated by the Arduino board when sent the /start/ request.

[Show as slideshow]

Hacking is not a crime

Squintz — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 03:34:27 +0000

We want to send a big THANK YOU! to Mars Brown from New Orleans for sending us these awesome vinyl stickers.

Useful wireless solution comparison chart

superfro — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:46:30 +0000

Last week I was having a discussion with one of our members about solutions on how we can control his biped robot he is working on. I was trying to explain that we could go something like zigbee (which he has a zigbee servo controller already) but you’re going to trade off throughput, if you wanted to add streaming video to it, and we’ll need to construct something for the pc to talk to the zigbee network. We could go bluetooth, or even wifi, etc. And it became a discussion of push pull’s difficulty implementing it, writing code for, cost of parts, etc.

(Biped robot pictured below if you havent’ seen it, it’s really awesome!)

Anyway, I stumbled on this article on digikey’s web site that goes into further detail, but I wanted to share this nice little chart they have in the article. It really sums up cost vs range vs throughput vs robustness. I found it useful, thought someone else might also. Enjoy.