Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

BristleBots and LED throwie art at Crash Space!

Posted on March 7th, 2010 • Filed under Events • No Comments

This upcoming Tuesday, 9 March 2010, 8pm at Crash Space in Culver City, we’ll be having some fun quick DIY projects for you to build. Come on over and have fun with us. The project kits are $5 for CrashSpace members or $10 for non-members and you can take them home after you build them.

In the kit you get the parts to build your own Bristlebot, a tiny robot made from a toothbrush:

(consists of toothbrush, pager motor, battery, and foam tape)

and LED throwie art:


(consists of two color-changing RGB LEDs, battery, and a magnet)

We’ll have a Bristlebot race track you can do time trials on:

And we’ll be showing you how to build all of this, no previous experience required. Come build bots and lights!

 

SpeedMake: Kick Off

Posted on March 5th, 2010 • Filed under Events • No Comments

At the March 2nd Tuesday night meeting, a few brave volunteers participated in the very first SpeedMake event. SpeedMake is a contest of skill and science in which teams race against each other to be the first to complete an electronics project.

For this event, competitors worked to build Larson Scanners (see the picture below), a device which lights LEDs in sequence to create a scanning effect. People reverse engineered circuit boards, puzzled through IC spec sheets, breadboarded their projects, and totally ignored the optional crypto breaking aspect of the event (more’s the pity). We even got some Madden NFL-style commentary going. SpeedMake may not be the most gripping, thrilling sporting experience since the invention of the monster truck rally, but it looked like people were having fun.

If you find SpeedMake intriguing and you wish to subscribe to our newsletter, there’s more information at the Crash Space wiki, here. There will also be some announcements about the next upcoming SpeedMake event at this Tuesday’s Public Night meeting.

 

monochrom: Of drunken machines and horny relays

Posted on February 23rd, 2010 • Filed under Events • 3 Comments

Sex machines! Cocktail robots! And more!

On Feb 24th, Johannes Grenzfurthner will be giving a workshop called “Of drunken machines and horny relays” in which he’ll be talking about how to build DIY hedonistic machines as well as about two of his on going conferences/project Roboexotica (which explores the under appreciated art of cocktail robotics) and Arse Elektronica (which explores the intersection of porn and technology). His talk will start at 8PM Wednesday night at Crash Space and will be open to the public (free for members, $10 donation recommended for non members)

UPDATE: We streamed the talk live, and an archive of the video is available online now but it broken into 2 parts for some reason. Watch it yourself: Part 1 (15:00) | Part 2 (48:00)

 

Take Apart Tuesday No. 6 – HP 1120C

Posted on February 22nd, 2010 • Filed under Events, How To • 5 Comments

So a bit of a rewind on Take Apart Tuesday. This is the write up for February 9th. I was going to skip it and just go straight for hard drive we dismantled on the 16th, but a potentiometer actually smoked (sorry, no flames). It seemed like a requirement to share what that happened.

So this week a bit on optical encoding, then some on stall torque and how it relates to component power ratings.  Just for giggles I threw in some DC Motor code on the Arduino at the end. So keep reading… The Case of the Smoking Potentiometer

Read the rest of this entry »

 

Public Night!

Posted on February 8th, 2010 • Filed under Events, News & Updates • No Comments

Are you curious about Crash Space? Want to figure out what people do at a hacker space? Want to meet some interesting people?

Now is your chance to check out Crash Space. Tomorrow night (Tuesday Feb 9th) at 8pm our usual Tuesday night meeting is open to the public.

What do we do at our usual Tuesday night meeting? A brief bit of CrashSpace business. A show and tell session by our members. Lots of interesting parts and projects show up. Finally, there’s Take Apart Tuesday. The group takes apart a couple pieces of hardware and figures out what’s inside them, how they work, and what parts might be useful to scavenge.

Come on by Crash Space at 8pm and see what it’s all about. We’d love to meet you.