On October 1st, 2009, Kwartzlab opened it’s doors and have been making & hacking ever since. Come celebrate Kwartzlab’s 3rd anniversary on Friday, October 19th with a night of fun and music from ARGYLE SPEEDO, AURALPLANE and SCHEMA FACTOR!

Tickets are $10 and can be purchased online:

Tickets will also be on sale at the door.

7:00 – DOORS OPEN
8:00 – ARGYLE SPEEDO
9:30 – AURALPLANE
10:30 – SCHEMA FACTOR
1:00 – LAST CALL

Kwartzlab is located at 283 Duke Street West, 1st floor. You can reach us either by the front foyer (door straight ahead) or via Breithaupt St. (red double doors). Parking is available on Breithaupt St. or in the GO Train lot across the tracks on Duke Street.

Hope you can make it out to help us start off our fourth year in style!

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I spent some time learning about the chipKit and was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get up and running. I assumed that “Arduino Compatible” was a marketing gimmick, and the only thing compatible was the shield pinout.

However it uses an IDE forked from the Arduino IDE, and uses many of the Arduino functions and libraries so that many Arduino projects can be recompiled for the 80MHz PIC32 with little or no changes to the source. You can also use Microchip’s MPLab too if you need a more powerful development environment.

The Basic I/O Shield is very convenient. What caught my eye was the four FET switches (20V, 3A) and 4-line OLED display. It also has an EEPROM, temperature sensor, I2C, and some switches and buttons. You can learn more about the board from Microchip, and there are some reviews of the board.

The Uno32 itself is also impressive. Besides running at 80MHz and 32 bits (versus 20MHz and 8 bits for the Arduino), it has 2 UARTs, SPI and I2C, way more memory, a RTC, and 42 I/O pins, including 12 analog inputs. Microchip has more details. There’s also a review. One gotcha I’ve seen so far is that the board is 3.3V and not 5V like the Arduino.

To get it running on my Windows 7 PC, I had to do the following:

1. Download and install MPIDE from GitHub.
2. My PC couldn’t detect the Uno32 board, so I installed the latest FTDI drivers.
3. I downloaded the Basic I/O Shield libraries and unzipped them to My Documents/mpide/libraries.

That was it. It took just a few minutes to look at their samples and get something working.

There’s an active forum at http://www.chipkit.org/forum/ with links to additional libraries, and help/information.

I’ve only been using it for the morning, but I”m quite impressed with it so far. I’ll try porting my Arduino MIDI-CV Shield which will be a true test. But in the meantime I have an idea for another project that’s perfect for this board…

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So I’ve decided that it’s time to expand my horizons and put a new programming language under my belt. I’ve been told by a number of people now that Haskell is awesome, so I decided to give learning it a go. I’ve been reading over Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! I’m not done reading through it, but I definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to learn Haskell. Anyhow, over the course of my tinkering around with Haskell, I’ve learnt that Haskell is full of freaky voodoo mathemagics (yes, that’s a word now).

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Tags: haskell, voodoo
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I used the laser cutter to make a set of coasters with stylized pictures of  a couple whose wedding’s coming up.

The end result!

The pictures are etched in paint on plexiglass.

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I wanted to be able to communicate and play with my Raspberry Pi.  Specifically, I needed it to be set up with the following:

• Monitor
• Keyboard
• Mouse
• Intarwebs

For the monitor, I happen to have a few to play with.  Unfortunately, they’re all VGA, and the Pi only outputs to composite and HDMI. Also, since I don’t have a spare wi-fi USB stick, I can only hook the Pi up to the network at the router – which is far from my desk.

So, I decided to look into a “headless” option – running the Pi without any peripherals, connected only to the router.  I wanted to be able to control the Pi from not only a shell (SSH/Telnet) connection, but also via its GUI.  Turns out, for a total Linux n00b, it wasn’t so hard to do – just a matter of researching and experimenting.  Here’s what I did.

Get thee to an OS

To start, I got an SDHC card (8GB, but I think a 2GB one will suffice), which will hold the OS “image” (data and applications), and inserted it into a PC.  As of August 12, 2012, the current OS of choice according to raspberrypi.org is Raspbian Wheezy.  As per instructions, I downloaded the SD image, as well as Win32DiskImager (careful – the latter has a few false “Download” advert buttons).  I then used DiskImager to install the image (Don’t just copy the image to the SD card – it won’t work!)  I then tested that the OS booted up on the Pi by sliding the card into the Pi. This is required before you can do the headless connection, so it requires borrowing a keyboard and monitor that has HDMI or composite support.

My main monitor accepts composite (I don’t recommend this – so blurry!), so I attached that.

Get an SSH connection

First, I had to get SSH set up.  SSH is like a command-line interface, like Telnet – think being able to type and run DOS-style commands, but on another computer.

I then booted up the Pi, and started raspi-config (this runs on first boot).

Unfortunately, I had an error where the SSH keys would not generate, with the message: “Invalid ssh key generation still running. Please wait and try again.”  So, I exited raspi-config, and ran the following at the command line:

sudo rm /etc/ssh/ssh_host*
sudo ssh-keygen -A

Then I re-ran raspi-config, then selected “ssh” again to restart the SSH service, and set a password.  Success!

Connect to network

I was then able to disconnect the Pi from the monitor/keyboard, and connect it to the router.  This router controls my local area network (LAN), so I should be able to connect to the Pi from another computer within the LAN.  First, I had to find what IP address the router reported the Pi at.  I found that the hostname of raspberrypi usually works.   If not, try the following:

I consulted the manual of the router, which directed me to load http://192.168.1.1/ for my Linksys WRH54G in a browser (Your router may have a different address).  The front page shows all connections, and I was able to easily find my Pi. In this case, it’s at IP address 192.169.1.106.

Phone home

I then installed PuTTY, which is a pretty good, simple SSH client.  I opened it and set Host Name (or IP address) to the IP address of the Pi, and clicked Open.  I was immediately prompted to log in.

 login as: pi
 pi@<IP address>'s password:  <SSH password I set in raspi-config>.

If you get something like this screen, you’re doing it right.

Getting a window

The next thing was to be able to see the PI’s GUI on my desktop.  I followed the instructions here to install TightVNC on the Pi.  This involves using apt-get, an application that installs Linux apps from an online repository.  It’s an extremely useful and quick way to install the most popular free software.

sudo apt-get update
 sudo apt-get install tightvncserver
 /usr/bin/tightvncserver

You’ll need to set a password as well.

On the desktop machine, I then installed a VNC client.  Both TightVNC and Real VNC have good clients.  I’ll show TightVNC connecting.  I installed and started the client, and typed in the IP address.  NOTE: You need to append “:1″ to connect on port 1 of the Pi.

And if you get a screen like this on your PC, then grab a party hat, because you’re done!

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Hey, I painted the Heavy Equipment Lab door today.

Here is how the door originally looked. Not very inviting, and very beat up, with many layers of tape and cruft from years past. I couldn’t help myself.

Some tools I used. I got a pair of vinyl decals from XL Screenprinting, some John Deere Yellow spraypaint, matte black, tape, and a set of protective masks, all from KW Surplus.

The door is off its hinges and in the painting booth! I used a razor scraper to remove the tape and residue, filed down the burrs from ancient drilled holes, then cleaned it down with a wet cloth.

I painted it yellow first, concentrating around the edges and top half, where the hazard stripes and logo will go. I actually had to go get another can of paint, as one is not enough for a door.

I marked 45-degree angles by measuring a square on the door, then running tape from one corner to the other. I placed rows of tape carefully, one after the other, until the door was completely taped. Alternating rows I only used a couple of short pieces, just to keep subsequent rows lined up. I then removed the small pieces. I marked the inner rectangular area, then cut and removed those inner pieces.

I added a decal to the top-centre, smoothed down all the tape and decal with a putty knife, and then painted it all black. I can’t wait to peel back the results!

Peeling off the tape! Now it’s looking like a door! It’s mostly coming off easily.

The door, finished and re-hung! There are bits where the paint peeled off with the tape. They’ll be touched up with model paint.

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Another year, another fun-filled weekend at The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Agnes, Ben, Bevan, James and yours truly spent the weekend manning the Kwartzlab booth, handing out hundreds of buttons and stickers, meeting a plethora of really interesting folks, and chilling with peeps from other makerspace booths such as Kansas City, PGH (Pittsburgh) and I3.

Thanks to those above who came out to man the booth! Special thanks to Agnes for the banner and fabric plants, Ben/Bevan/James for making stickers and buttons, Ben for the Kwartzlab passport stamp, Mark P for the TARDIS and glowing Kwartzlab sign, Chris B for the mechanical webcam eyes project, Paul W for the Bananaphone, Jeff S for the laser guitar and Brainiac component tester.

We won an Editor’s Choice ribbon! Woot! And Agnes won three for her booth, Agnes Makes! Woot^3!

Pictures are pending!

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A couple weeks ago I gave myself a challenge to see what could be made in a couple hours with only scrap.

The only none-scrap part was the LED strip (which was destined for the laser cutter). The rest was found in the blue bin.

It’s designed so that the acrylic sign can be easily swapped. If you want to make a replacement sign there’s some scrap acrylic left that’s just itchin’ for a Tesla head…

Instructions are up on Thingiverse.

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Cement for “gluing” acrylic can be easily made for next to nothing out of scraps. The bonding is fast and very strong.

All you need are acrylic scraps, and acetone.

The acrylic is broken up into tiny pieces that fit into the syringe.

Acetone is added to dissolve the acrylic, turning the mixture into a very thick goop. The air bubble in the above picture took about a minute to go from the bottom of the syringe to the top.

Place a little dab on the acrylic you wish to join. It sets very fast and doesn’t run. If you need more working time, dilute the mixture with more acetone.

The cement dissolves the acrylic, welding the two pieces together. The acrylic suspended in the mixture hardens when the acetone evaporates leaving a nice fillet.

Even edge joins like this are very tough. I couldn’t break these apart without tools. These samples (and ready to use cement) are on the soldering bench shelf above the monitor — check them out!

Tags: acrylic, chemical weld, weld
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Here’s a new buy/sell crafting website dedicated to electronics: https://tindie.com/ Looks fantastic!

Tags: tindie etsy bullweevil
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