So Runesketch was the game we tried to get ready for Make Game Month in November. Sesh! That seems like a long time ago. We tried alpha testing it a bit Feb, but there were not many biters. Its hard to judge what the problem was, was it too hard to find someone to play Read more about Runesketch, now with sketch[…]
Following on from the previous Candle Making workshop, we are happy to announce the workshop will be running again. Covering the basics of candle making participants should leave with enough knowledge to try some candle-making of their own. No previous experience is required just come along and have fun. Areas covered will include: Different types Read more about Workshop: Candle Making Basics[…]
Someone at work broke my favourite mug. Well, the freebie mug I was using. Clearly I needed a new one, and the only logical solution was to build a machine to draw the image of my choice onto a blank mug.
Evil Mad Scientist sell an egg bot kit – it draws a design onto an egg (or other broadly spherical object) using a couple of stepper motors, controlled through an Inkscape plugin. The control board is available separately (the whole project is open source), and is a fairly neat 2-stepper and single-servo controller, connecting to the host PC as a serial port over a USB cable. Hence most of the electronics and software were already taken care of, and I could concentrate on the hardware.
The partially assembled machine
The loins of #makgammon (make a game month) are bearing fruit. Runesketch the collectable card game is ready for alpha testers. When Runesketch was aired for #makgammon, common feedback was that the rules were incomprehensible, the multi player was hugely buggy to the point of being unplayable and generally it looked like a game that Read more about Runesketch Alpha ready![…]
A nice Thursday evening was spent in our new Machine / Dirty room creating a very solid workbench for our antique metalworking lathe. We should have taken more photo’s along the way but suffice to say we now have a solid platform to mount the Lathe and bring is back into full working order. Watch Read more about A new home for the Lathe![…]
Some exciting news.. After around a year of searching and quite a bit of persistence Edinburgh Hacklab is moving to a new much bigger space at Summerhall. The former site of University of Edinburgh Vet School, Summerhall is on the corner of The Meadows. Used extensively as a Festival venue in August, there is a Read more about The Lab is Moving![…]
So 1st of December was the conclusion of make a game month, an idea that was created by Edinburgh Hacklab. Was it a success? Yes, but maybe not how we initially expected it to be. Of the 5 initial developers who said they would build a game, only one turned up. However, we had some Read more about That was that month that was #Makgammon[…]
I recently wrote about a free way of running version control without owning a server, by hosting a remote repository in a Dropbox folder. One concern raised about using git on Dropbox was “what happens if people push at the same time”. The fear is that the conflicts would irrecoverably corrupt the git repository and cause a headache. Of course we have the local backups of data, but there was a nagging doubt that perhaps a corrupted server could corrupt a local repository. Anyway I tested what really happens by doing it, and learn a bit about git in the process.
I wrote a script that commits random data and pushes to a bare repository hosted on Dropbox. After push blasting the Dropbox folder with 1,000 pushes from 2 machines in parallel, syncronisation with Dropbox took ages longer than usual (10 minutes)
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Janek “hand soldered BGAs” Mann has just published his extensive PCB prototyping buying experience. [Addition by Al] And Hacklab member Peter Jackson (@greenhac, not the Lord of the Rings guy) is documenting his experiences with laying out his first board and ordering prototypes from Seeed Studio on his blog.
The problem: you need to share files with people on an ad hoc basis for a project.
One choice is sharing files with Dropbox. On the plus side of Dropbox is it’s ease of use, however, there is a drawback that if you work on the same files you get “My conflicted copy of x” spawning everywhere and making a mess. If you are coding you will trip over other author’ changes.
To work around that problem you need version control. But that can come with baggage. You’ll need a server to run a git/svn/cvs (infrastructure), or a project on GitHub/sourceforge/google code (open source requirement, or pro account). Some projects don’t have these resources or freedoms, so they do without version control, but there is another way…
You can run the best version control software from inside a Dropbox folder! (or Google Drive) Running git from a Dropbox folder does not require spending money, having a server or open sourcing files. Because git compresses its repositories, it also reduces your Dropbox quota usage. Awesome! And it is easy to install. In this article I will show you how to set everything up properly, and give you a quick user guide to git incase you (or your collaborators) have not used it before. By the end you should be able to setup and use git like a true intermediate.
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