Made good progress on the speaker cabinet at the Hacklab last night, ably assisted by @tinyblob. Unfortunately, the screws I bought for the back panel are a few mm too short so I need to do some shopping. Getting close now, though.
I still need to chisel out pockets for handles on the accompanying 4U rack box but that shouldn’t take long.
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
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
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
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:
Dallas Makerspace have some blog coverage of Gareth’s visit to their space:
Gareth Edwards of Edinburgh Hacklab and Dorkbot Alba in Scotland is our latest international visiting hacker. He dropped by the Dallas Makerspace on Sunday (7 Nov) to check out our newly painted warehouse area and help us pull the plastic tarps off all our gear. Edinburgh Hacklab and Dorkbot have done projects similar to some of our own including a really cool computer controlled pipe organ that puts our puny vacuum reed organ to shame.
Michael McLeod has given us another mention on the Guardian Edinburgh blog:
The StartupCafe blog reports that Friday’s Edinburgh Hacklab opening was packed with people and ideas, including a homemade quadrocopter, an LED top hat and robot cupcakes.
Thanks, Michael!
StartupCafe have reviewed our Grand Opening on Friday:
We checked out the Hacklab opening on Friday. The place was so packed at 19:30 that we could hardly get in the door—quite a feat for a co-working venue that’s only been a month in the making.
The Guardian Edinburgh blog has a short piece on the opening of the Hacklab:
Hackers have been known to be anything from journalists to computer crackers in recent years. But a new bunch of self-proclaimed ‘geeks with a dream’ in Edinburgh are looking to give the term a more positive and creative reputation.