Hey Pete, I've got it sorted now. I believe it was just that I had to have blog posting rights enabled, and I believe that's been done now.

I went back in to the wordpress thing and saw what I hadn't seen before.

Thanks for the help, and thanks to Pyro, I imagine, for setting that up.

I'll be blogging soon. =)

Riley

Another thought I had last night, was that picking a night and live blogging what's going on would make for some good content. Just last night, Bil, John, Johnathan, David, Mike, and Riley all had interesting stuff going on. I think a simple, what are you making, how the HF or TC Maker members made it possible, and picture would be interesting to a lot of people.

I'm happy to be the test live blogger, (it's more fun to talk and watch than do real work anyway). Wednesday seems like the logical night, as it's always pretty busy.

What do you think?

Pete

I am all for any updated info, and think this is a great idea.

Pete, as an alternative to live blogging i know there have been a few times when someone set up a live ustream video channel. Was it Noise? Anywho, it worked with what I assumed to be a built-in laptop webcam.

It would be really cool if someone had a good mic and a slightly better camera that you could use. Then you could use it to bring around and showcase different things at the meeting. If you can record it while streaming you could also edit it later into a highlights reel.

it's be *really* cool to have an aimable webcam on a robot on a wire or one of the girders of the shop so that folks could say trundle over and look at someone welding, and then wander back over and look at someone else using another tool. probably no audio for noise and privacy things, but how nifty would it be to see what's happening in the shop and pay attention to something?

it'd also be cool to have a button/light on the website that says 'shop occupied' when you bump a big red button as you enter/exit. maybe tied to motion sensors? twitter feed that is looked at by a script to determine if it's a red or green gif for the top banner?

while we're at it, i'd like a pony.

Your on your own for the pony, We could tap into the access data to know if and who's in the shop, but again that's a privacy thing, I wouldn't mind, but, no one is stalking me at the moment, so things could change.

The cam thing would be really fun, one of the more unusual uses of EMC, the CNC control software, was something very similar to this, it was to fly a ghost around a yard at Halloween. It was basically a 3 axis motor setup, each motor had a reel of wire, and the software knows how to synchronously wind and unwind them to get the object to the location desired, and I believe it takes height into account too, so you could fly in to head height, not sure that would be good to surprise power tool and welder users.

It'd be fun to mach up, and validate for sure.

Pete

I really, really like the idea of the web controlled robo cam on a wire. It's just a super cool idea, and I think it would get a lot of attention.

It strikes me that it would be totally doable. I mean, we'd need someone who knew how to string a wire, someone who knew how to make a thing that could move back and forth along the wire, and someone who knew some of that there electronical and coding stuff to put the pieces together.

And I want a pony, too. Ponies are far too easily dismissed; they're like the off road mountain bike of the horse world.

OK once the camera is done we can build the pony mountain bike hybrid, something like this perhaps?




Pete

A homebrewed cable cam, like the nfl uses, would be epic to see.

As far as the "space is occupied/unoccupied" type thing, that's totally on my list of things to do. I was intending to hook a light switch or something up to a lighted sign, and also to a junky PC. The PC would run a simple webserver, hosting one image file. That file would be generated by a script to say either "The Hack Factory is occupied" or "The Hack Factory is unoccupied" based on the position of the switch.

Once that's done, if the networking can be figured out appropriately, it would be trivial to embed that image into the website, or wherever.


I'm all for the camera idea as well, if we can get our hands on a wi-fi camera or something. Maybe an X-10 camera and a video capture card.