Lab Occupancy Switch, Successfully Stress Tested
The switch by the lab door is now back in working order (for the time being) and tweeting at @EdinHacklabOpen 
20110330: Software Night
Software night is on again tonight from 7pm – check out the previous projects list and the Edinburgh software projects spreadsheet, and bring any other ideas/discussions/code.
Software News: No-one else seems to have cared, but I’ve been ecstatic since Google finally made the Maps API accessible over HTTPS for free (previously a £10k yearly subscription).. woot!
Hopefully catch some of you down at the lab
Cheers,
Jay
Laser Ham
A rather amusing way of preparing ham by one of our regulars John Alexander
Mill->CNC project
Martin and I worked more on the Mill->CNC project.
“We tried to get the Linux-based CNC software EMC2 running with the mill. The initial idea had been to use Jay’s ITX machine for this, but it turns out this won’t run the necessary realtime kernel due to not having a working local APIC. We had a dig through the cupboard for other machines but didn’t find anything usable.
Does anyone have something spare that could fill this role? It needs a parallel port (a real one, not USB), a working local APIC under Linux, and ability to run a recent distribution.
Alternatively there’s an older release of EMC2 based on Ubuntu 8.04 that might work on the ITX, I’ll try tomorrow night.” – Martin
Software Night 20110323
Software night is rolling around again – the lab will be open from 7pm onwards tomorrow evening (Wed 23rd March).
I’ve been doing some work integrating Janrain’s social sign-on into one of my websites and will be happy to talk about the upsides and downsides of that.
Meanwhile, Markos/@qnoid has posted a good summary of what software hacking is going on in Edinburgh at the moment to the TechMeetup mailing list – and linked to a neat Google spreadsheet project list. Some food for thought/discussion/finding work!
Cheers,
Jay
20110316: Software Night – business as usual
Software night will be back as usual this evening – feel free to post any ideas for stuff you might be working on, and come along with laptops, drinks and/or nibbles.
The project list from last time is available here.
There should be some tinkering with the ‘pattern’ NLP library for Python going on as well if anyone’s interested.
I’ll aim to open the lab for 7pm – in practice may be there a little earlier.
Cheers!
Jay
Safety Socket finished
Last night we completed a vital new piece of equipment, the safety socket.
The safety socket is a design by Kevin O’Connor of London Power that has been published in his book “Tonnes Of Tone”. It uses domestic light bulbs as a power soak to protect equipment-under-test in the event of a potentially catastrophic failure. It’s a simple design that can save hundreds of pounds worth of gear from destruction.
Now it’s completed, it becomes part of the growing library of test equipment available to builders and experimenters in the Edinburgh Hacklab.
Here are some images showing the construction process:
Robomotic’s Logic Analyser
Robomotic of Glasgow have had their new hobby logic analyzer put through their paces, with positive results. Great value at £25.
Congrats Paulo
Read the review at Maarten Damen‘s blog.
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Hacklab status: Closed :(
