Some of you may be aware that I've been shopping around a hackerspace book proposal. Well, good news, I have a bite. The proposal is a book of collaborative projects that have been undertaken by hackerspace members.

While the Operation game and Spoonapault are awesome, I'd like for us to kick it up a notch. Between now and the end of the year, can we come up with a cool idea for a project for the book? Let's come up with an amazing project that will elevate the HF to the top ten of U.S. hackerspaces!

(This reminds, me, DUDE -- no love for the HF! Have you noticed that we've been overlooked lately? First, the Midwest Hackerspace Tour visits every MW hackerspace but this one, then, nary a phone call on the Psion show. Just like Joey from "Hackers" needs a righteous hack to earn his handle, we need a righteous project!)

The weather balloon near-space craft idea has some merit. Personally, I'm seriously considering building a small "claw game" type thing. I've heard some mutterings about building some kind of electric vehicle, which would be neat. I think we oughta have a big group brainstorming session.

I haven't seen this get posted elsewhere, and I think it may fit the bill. Some of us were standing around watching the router cut stuff Weds evening and we started talking about a sign for over the door, which got me looking at the glass block windows, which made me think of a grid array of lights, a la a really low res jumbo tron. We talked about a grid of individually addressable "pixels" for each window. I love the idea personally.

My thought is to make multiple modules something like this that have the elements the size of the windows. I'd like them to be semi-mobile, as we may reconfigure our space and, they could be a good stand alone attraction for community events outside of HF that way.
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Making an in window tetris that could be played either locally, or potentially via the network, and from anywhere was also mentioned.

Does anyone know if message board code for an arduino exists?
I see some youtube videos, but haven't found the code, haven't look for too long yet.

This looks like it would be a good local reference display for testing. (It's 24 x 16)



Tell me your thoughts!

It probably wouldn't be too hard to implement on the Arduino. We could simply have it read a bitmap of the appropriate size (one pixel per physical LED), and toggle the appropriate LEDs on and off. Updating of the message could be done easily from an attached PC.

I like it! No matter what, we definitely need a hackable sign.

Adam Wolf came up with a couple other neat ideas as well:

1) A Mold-a-Rama machine

2) A personal hovercraft!

I have 4 of 24 nailed projects down. Still hoping for a HackFack project to be the book's centerpiece. Let's talk about it Weds!

I'm guessing quoting yourself is karmicly bad or something, but I wanted to let everyone know that I did get an Arduino for Christmas, but was too slow to pick up the awesome GE Color Effects Lights when they went on clearance locally. I found some left on Sears Online, I ordered one set only 36 light, to verify that it will work, if anyone else is interested, you may want to buy now, they had only 7 sets left.

http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_1260 ... _productpg

This guy built an cool big Tetris as we've discussed, sadly it takes 200 LEDs and I'll have 36, (full color) but still only 36.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/52476066@N ... 33614@N25/

Look's like Mike's Electronics class will be very timely.

Pete

I don't know if there's any easily adaptable code out there for an Arduino-driven message board, but I think I have some idea of how to write it.

otto

theo was talking about doing just that long before we had a space. i think it'd be a great project, but i'd like to see it as a standard video out on something custom rather than an arduino.



personally i'm a BIG fan of moving forward on the twin cities siege engine project. the foshay-buchet and the ballistica of st. mary have directions that'll require metal and wood, and will probably come at a cheaper price point than a big electronics project, as well as being regionally appropriate. i'd *love* to see a trebuchet with computer controlled window lights going up the tower of a faux sky scraper.

I'm not sure where the specific reference to these lights came from, but it's not in this thread. The interesting point of these lights are that each bulb is full color and has a unique address that you can simply tell each address what to do per cycle. That's the value in the light strings, and there are several "sketches" for Arduino to control them, it's possible to get them up to video rates as well 25 Hz to update all 60 addresses.

To do a similar amount of control with regular LEDs would take a lot more buffering and a hell of a lot more wires, or the creation of a similar addressable solution.

There's a great thread on hacking them here.
http://doityourselfchristmas.com/forums ... e-Hackable

Once they are and running under control we can plan what's next.

Pete