Jeremy Awesome’s Amazing Technicolor Soapbox Kart

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!

DIY 8×8 LED Array

Like most normal people, I enjoy blinky lights. Although I helped build the ring of lights in the Tron disc, I was not involved with any of the hardware or software used to actually control the LEDs. Prior to this project, I had never done anything more than simple PWM control of a few LEDs directly from a micro-controller, so I decided it was a good time to learn how to control a lot of LEDs. Since this was done for the purpose of learning, I did everything as difficultly as possible, such as building my own LED array on a protoboard instead of just buying an array. I also wrote code to bit-bang the serial data instead of just using the compiler’s built in SPI function. But, I wanted a generic serial data module anyway after dealing with the Nokia 6100 and it’s weird 9-bit SPI. The main point of the whole project was to simply do it myself without asking anyone at the space for help with anything. I’m sure the code could be a lot better, but it does what it is supposed to do (I think). :)

Tron Identity Disc Mod

Over the past several months the members of Harford Hackerspace have been working on modifying a Delux Tron Legacy Disc. The modification uses a Netduino and MAX7219 to increase the number of LEDs from 8 to 33. The project was featured on Microsofts Channel 9 (video) and now there is a complete tutorial of the build on Coding4Fun.

This Friday – December 17th, Disney is releasing a sequel to the 1982 movie. Tron Legacy (Official Site)

Harford Hackerspace at Betascape 2010

Betascape was this previous weekend and Harford Hackerspace was on hand with robots, lightning bug jars, and general awesomeness. We setup early Saturday morning between Baltimore Node and the First Lego League representatives. The day was spent forging various cardboard blades with crayons and stickers with various children blacksmiths quietly honing their craft. All in all we gave away approximately 50 swords to young lads and lasses who, no doubt, brought these mighty cardboard weapons to bear against a variety of fiends.

The previously mentioned Baltimore Node was there demonstrating various projects such as air powered rockets and some sort of power tool drag racing. Set up across from us was The Digital Media Center from Johns Hopkins demonstrating cloth circuitry and teaching others about cloth circuits. The National Electronics Museum was setup in the back with some kind of robot (which I did not see). Various other people included a company demonstrating a 3D picture taking technology, Bryan Dolge with a makerbot, as well of a bunch of gamemakers in the game making section.

CNC v1.5 revision update

We are currently in the process of revising our CNC design since the Y/Z axis was eating its rails over time due to slight alignment issues. We decided to upgrade the bearings in general to avoid the problem in the future. The x-axis seems to be working fine, so we are going to leave it alone for now. The revision includes CNC cut pieces instead of hand cut pieces (using table saws and drill presses). We also did a major upgrade to the bearings and went with ACME-type lead screws to minimize backlash and improve accuracy. We updated the stepper couplings to the lead screws to make future maintenance easier. The redesign is expected to be complete within the month.