Open evening Wednesday 8pm
Open Evenings at the space in May.
We’ll be running a couple of extra open evenings on Thursday 25th and Tuesday 30th May for people who want to come and look around the hackspace but are unable to attend our regular Wednesday night open evenings.
Same time as usual, 8pm-11pm.
See https://york.hackspace.org.uk/wiki/Weekly_Open_Evening for more information including how to find us!
I decided that I need an apron. I mostly turn up at the space in whatever I am wearing from work and sometimes things might get messy. An apron should do the trick but as it’s a hackspace I can’t just buy the first one I see. So it’s time to break out the sewing machine.
First off I needed a pattern or something to to copy from. Luckily Aimee already had something so I set about finding some suitable material. Traditionally these things seem to be made from something like a heavy cotton or even leather. I went for chord. Brown chord with blue trim.
I laid the pattern apron out on the big table over my cloth and after some pondering we decided to mark up a rectangle of the right length and width and just mark up the curved parts that go under the arms from the pattern. A small bit of scrap ply-wood was brought in to use as a square to get things lined up and a point of no return was passed as I made the first cut. Pinking shears are great fun, it’s like setting an alligator to work and you end up with a zig-zag cut that should not fray.
I added a centre line to help keep things lined up then chalked out the curve from the template apron. Then cut both curves in one with the sheet folded in half.
Now for some practice runs on the machine. It’s been a while since I last had a go with this so here was some browsing of the PDF copy of the manual to see how it threads together. Then some tweaking of the tension to get it sewing right on the chord. ( I make this sound simple but I think this bit took almost the most time but I now consider myself an “expert” ) I added a plain hem along the bottom and its almost straight.
For the first attempt to attach the tape round the sides I used pins the tape in place I found that it moved about too much and the pins then made it to difficult to correct so I switched to just feeding things in an adjusting the fold as it went which worked quite well. In the end I had to unpick things quite a bit on the first run but then worked out that I needed to have a bit more tape on the front or it would work itself out.
Then finally adding on the the loop round the top and the strings round the back and it was done.
It may be a little long and I should have made the strings round the back, up the sides and around the neck from the a single piece. I also think the bit under the neck is a little to wide so it sticks out a bit but other than that I’m pretty happy with it. ( Oh and it could do with an iron, we should probably get one for the space)
You may have spotted a little while ago that we got a place at Maker Faire UK for the fourth year in a row.
For the past few years, setting up Spacehack hasn’t been a simple job, mainly because of how the server box (the gold pyramid) was a flimsy cardboard box with various things taped to it. We also had issues with the four consoles. Many LCDs were failing, pots not rotating correctly, switches not working or missing. So we had to do some upgrades.
One of the most ambitious upgrades was the server box upgrade. We wanted to get this one done before the Maker Faire this weekend, to make setup easier. I’m pleased to say that we have completed it on time! You can look forward to seeing the new server box this weekend.
The upgrades have enabled us to make the server more rugged and much more compact. We’ve eliminated the need for three of the five power supplies by making everything run on 5v. We even have a touch-screen GUI for managing the game. The GUI’s written in pascal, of course. 🙂
Just to be clear about why this needed doing; see this picture of the guts of the original server box. Yuk!
Nat needed a PCB recently, so we decided to see if we could make good use of the PCB etching equipment we have in the hackspace. It’s a fairly simple process, print a positive on some laser-printer-acetate, stick it to a pre-sensitised PCB, expose it to UV, dip it in developer, then dip it in etchant.
The UV exposure box
At least, we thought it was that simple. We had a couple of failed attempts before we got a good board. We couldn’t agree on the correct time for exposure and development. On our third attempt, with two minutes in the light box and about thirty seconds in the developer solution, we got a decent image.
The first two attempts
Now we really should have rubber gloves for this next bit, but we couldn’t find any. Fortunately we did have a pair of thick plastic carrier bags for handling the etching chemicals.
After allowing plenty of time in the etchant, agitating it for extra speed, we finally got a good looking PCB out.
Some of the tracks needed a little bit of fixing up afterwards, but this was just a quick test board. If this works, there will be two more done properly.
Now that we know how best to use the kit we have, if you have a project that requires a home-made PCB then why not come along and let us lend a hand?
After having this lovely glass-sided fridge in the hackspace for many weeks, we’ve finally got it to a working state.
We got the fridge for free, in mostly working condition. It really needed a clean and the fan motor was very noisy. It also had a fluorescent light bulb in the top, which wasn’t working. We tried fixing the fan, but couldn’t get it quiet-enough to prevent it being a nuisance to people working in the hackspace. In the end we decided to replace the fan with an old PC cooling fan that was much quieter.
While we had the thing open, we decided to do something about the lighting. We removed the old light bulb and instead fitted some much lower power LED strips inside the fridge. Nick did a great job of wiring these up to the switch for the old light and even added a little microswitch to detect the door opening and turn on the white lights to make it a little easier to see. (As pretty as the blue and red lights are, they’re not ideal for reading labels on things.)
Let us know what we should stock!
Despite crashing the USS guppy into the Life Science Centre’s unique exhibition space numerous times, somehow we’ve been invited back for the next Maker Faire UK.
This will be the fourth year that we’ve been at the Maker Faire UK. We will, of course, be taking spacehack. We’ll also be bringing along some other projects too. John’s tetris table shall be making an appearance and we’ll no doubt have some other goodies you can play around with.
Be sure to check out http://www.makerfaireuk.com/ when details of who else is exhibiting are released.
Some photos of our past adventures in the Life Science Centre…
It’s just another week at the hackspace, here’s a few thing that were going on last Wednesday.
We recently had a generous donation of some old tech, it included this intriguing Ferranti Laser. Nat had a go switching it on, it seems to do something, we’re just not sure what it’s purpose is. If anyone knows, help us out by letting us know how to use it. (We’re already fairly sure it’s not powerful enough be used to make a laser cutter.)
Another fabulous little relic included in the donation was this this Vest Pocket Kodak. If anyone has any film that will work with it, come along next Wednesday and try taking a picture! We’d love to see the results.
In other news; Dave found something to do with some of the used bottle caps that are awaiting recycling.
And Bob modernised a ZX81 with a composite mod kit. So there’s even more retro projects going on in the space. No luck with the ZX printer as of yet, but perhaps with some tinkering it could rival the other sinclair-computer-printer project by being even more retro.
After much discussion, we finally decided what we needed to do to make better use of the space we have. We haven’t quite got it all done, but we’re most of the way there, so we decided to share some photos of how it’s going.
What we wanted was a shelf above the electronics workbench so that we could put all of the test equipment on the shelf so that it leaves the workspace below free. Most of the wood we used came from old pallets, the shelf is one large plywood sheet that was otherwise going to end up in a skip. In addition to the large shelf, we have most of what we need to in place for some extra smaller shelves above.
Of course this shelf is going to cast a shadow onto the desk, but with an abundance of white LED strips in the hackspace, it’s just a matter of time before somebody sticks one to the bottom of the shelf.
We’ve also addressed the issue of the overflowing bookshelf and cupboard. They now have a friend in the form of a black plastic shelf unit.
Just a quick one;
With the rising popularity of small UAVs for hobbyists, it’s unsurprising that the hackspace has at least one drone enthusiast. Dave has quite a selection of drones in a range of sizes, recently he’s been experimenting with video cameras mounted to them to record the flight or provide a live feed to the operator during the flight.
At our last open evening he had a go at mounting a really tiny camera on tiny quadcopter. With a little help setting up a print on the 3D printer, Dave had a camera mount printed and ready to go before the end of the evening. The design for the mount was a slight modification of a mount for a similar camera and drone found on thingiverse.
Here’s a quick demo video…
Many things happened in 2016. Lots of the people reading this probably have mixed feelings about this past year. But at least we can all agree, I hope, that it was a great year for York Hackspace.
As we, the hackspace went into 2016, we had our own space with 24 hour access. Members could make use of the space whenever they wanted to. This space was in Stonebow house. Sadly we had to leave Stonebow quite early into this year. We knew that this was coming and it helped us by forcing us to keep moving forward. Within six months we had moved into a bigger space with easier access and registered as a company. Our membership has grown and we hope that it continues to grow. If you’ve not seen our new home in Fulford business centre, you should come and check it out!
Our new space at Fulford Business CentreOur fifth birthday was this year, and it fell on a Wednesday, so we decided to have a celebration combined with a sort of space-warming party on our open evening. There was lots of food, including this giant cookie…
Our much-loved spaceship disaster game Spacehack has had another spin around the galaxy UK as we took it to four maker events. It was at the UK Maker Faire in newcastle, EMF Camp, Manchester Makefest and the Derby Mini Maker Faire.
Spacehack at Derby
The hackspace blog is also looking much more active than it did at the start of the year. We hope to engage with makers as much as we can, and sharing the interesting things that go on at the hackspace is something that helps us do that. We even got our fifteen minutes of fame from hackaday this year. Seven and a half of those minutes with a post about Spacehack. and the remaining seven and a half with a post about John’s LED tetris table.
John’s world-famous tetris table
So it’s [almost] time to say goodbye to 2016 and find out what exciting things 2017 has to offer. I hope you can join us and help to make it a good one.
