Power over ethernet, sorta

So we’re still busy decking out the new facility and one of the things we wanted to get up and running is some cheap surplus ethernet cameras to … keep an eye on things and check out whats going on remotely.   So I thought I’d go ahead and set these guys up.

First thing up was to make some cat5 cables.  I got a cheapo crimper, cable tester, and connectors off eBay.  While trying to figure out how much cable I need to run  I was thinking about how I’m going to plug the cameras in to supply power.  They have wall warts with barrel jacks running 12 volts.  I started thinking about how power over ethernet works and thought I’d try to see how I can do the same thing to run the power to the camera.  These aren’t POE cameras so the idea was to only half crimp the connectors, and use the unused pairs to run the 12 volts.

Here is the layout of how cat 5 cables should be done.  Credits to wikipedia.

So there are 2 color coded standards for crimping cables, but oddly enough, the ones we care about are blue, blue/white, white/brown, and brown.  Pins 4, 5, 7, 8.  These pins aren’t used in 10/100 connections, however if it was gigabit then they would be used.  So the unused pins are the same on both standards, so I just chose the first one.

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Roly Kit – Amazing Retro Storage for Makers

The Roly Kit storage box. I vaguely remember seeing these things from my childhood, sometime in the 80′s, but that was a long time ago.  I think I had totally abolished these things from memory…until a year or two ago, when one of our members brought one to hack night filled with lots and lots of electronic components.  We’ve all used the tiny drawers for parts storage, like the ones on our workbenches.  I even have a more modular one that has a handle to carry it around, but nothing compares to the storage capacity of the Roly Kit.

After admiring the sleek rolling storage for so long, I finally decided that I had to have one.  Doing a little research, it appears these things were invented sometime in the 70s, and made by a company in the Netherlands.  Sadly, the only reliable place I’ve seen them for sale is eBay, and occasionally a thrift shop.   They appear to come in a few colors and 2 different sizes (‘big’ and ‘medium’). If you’re a maker and need a nice travel friendly holder for all your resistors / caps / knobs / switches / 555 timers, I recommend you snag one up too.

New Hackerspace facility in Baltimore, MD

We recently moved into a 1250 square foot facility and are in the process of renovating it to suit our needs. The space is located at:

6410 Landay Ave
Baltimore, MD 21237

The floors were looking pretty bad when we moved in, so we gave them a vigorous cleansing using a floor buffer and a power washer. The floors still were not up to par, so we painted the floors using acrylic floor paint and then added paint flakes to really kick it up a notch.


Painting Floors at Baltimore Hackerspace
Painting Floors at Baltimore Hackerspace

 

We need a place to work, so we built a few work benches. 40 2×4′s, 2 sheets of plywood and 2 sheets of laminate was just the right amount of wood to build 6 benches which are 32″ high x 30″ deep x 48″ long.

Photo of Work Benches

As you can see in the background, we have also moved much of our stuff into the space.  That’s not all…We have really been hard at work in making this space feel like a warm and welcoming place to hang out and learn new skills.  Paul King gave the place a slightly more social feel by adding a little graffiti to the newly renovated office wall.

Baltimore Hackerspace Graffiti

 

Maybe that should be E=I*R but does it really matter? Google ‘Ohms Law Chart’ and you mostly find V=I*R as examples. Besides, it’s only paint so we can fix that! We plan to add a lot more electronics-related graffiti to the wall. I bet that Ohms law triangle will get used more often that people think…

 

 

Another RedBull Mystery…

So it appears the BullDuino has another hidden morse code message on it.  We smell something wargamesish.

— UPDATE —

Looks like the decoded message is ‘Wouldn’t lou prefer a good game of chess?’ …. is LOU a typo instead of YOU ?  L is inverted Y in morse code…  could be.  Or could be a clue.

This is obviously a quote from (or a play on a quote from if Lou is real) from WarGames.  Hmm.. 1983… Global Thermonuclear War. Joshua/WOPR  WHAT DOES IT MEAN?