3rd Annual Techno-Swap-Fest – SATURDAY!

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

I Won, I Won! Free Swag from Panavise!

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

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.

Coffee Maker Mod

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.