Welcome

Posted on November 6, 2010 by Waterppk

Sector67 is a non-profit collaborative space in Madison, WI dedicated to providing an environment to learn, teach, work-on, build, and create next generation technology; including software, hardware, electronics, art, sewing, pottery, glass, metalwork, iPhone/Android applications, games, etc.

Zero experience necessary, only enthusiasm to learn required.

If you’re in southern Wisconsin feel free to get involved on the forum, sign up for meeting announcements, or check the calendar for upcoming events.

Holiday Shopping?

Sector67 can provide gift certificates for membership, classes, or products we sell like solder kits from Adafruit and Arduino Inventors Kits (in stock today – $100) from Sparkfun

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Thermal Camera and Firewood Rack

Posted on January 8, 2012 by Chris Petit

Thermal Camera

This is a thermal camera project that was designed from www.cheap-thermocam.tk and www.centralnexus.com/thermal/

Thermal cameras normally cost $5,000 or more. They use an array of sensors to make an image. This thermal camera costs a lot less by using one sensor and sweeping it over an area using servo motors. The data is then aggregated by a computer to make the image. The first image produced by this thermal camera is measuring the temperature difference of a soldering iron. The pictures are not aligned in the image because the camera is not yet calibrated.

Firewood Rack

This is a firewood rack that was inspired by AK47 studio. It is a Christmas present for my brother.

It uses a minimal amount of material and utilizes space efficiently to store firewood. It is a dynamic sculpture. As the round rods bend and flex under the load of the stored wood, it gives a sense of continual change. The round rods are gently splayed giving a sense of ever expanding possibilities.

Luckily, he liked how it turned out. Here it is in its final resting place at my brother’s house.

Thanks to all the members of Sector67 whose assistance made these projects possible.

Chris Petit is a member of Sector67 and the owner of the local design firm Regenerative Design, LLC. Website is www.regenerativedesign.com.

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Japanese Ice Sphere Mold

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Brendan O'Connor

A few months ago, I found a video of an awesome “Japanese Ice Mold” online. The idea is simple:

  • People like drinks cold.
  • Ice makes things cold.
  • Ice melts.
  • People don’t like water in their drinks.
  • To prevent melting, you should have the maximum volume (making things cold) with the minimum surface area (melting).
  • The shape that does this is called a sphere.
  • It’s hard to take water and make spheres that don’t have ugly seams in them.
  • Through the magic of thermodynamics, you can use a metal to melt some parts of a block of ice, while freezing the resulting water, and get a beautiful sphere.

At this last bit, the physics student in me is screaming “but that makes no sense!” Admittedly, I didn’t do very well in physics, so it wasn’t screaming very loudly. I really thought that my brother, Quinlan (who’s a liquor snob and has more parties than I) needed this for a party. However, the fact that it costs freaking $1400 put it well out of my range; Quinlan didn’t need it that badly. As I looked at it, though, I realized that it wasn’t a hard concept: just get a big block of aluminum with a spherical hole, heat it, and you’re done. Surely, I could make this. If only I was a member of a hackerspace with milling tools… but wait! I am!

For more, check out Making the Mold at Times and Measures.

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A Kalahari Christmas

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Bob Baddeley

After Erin took me on a ski trip to Salt Lake City for Christmas 2010, I was far behind in the Christmas Karma. For 2011 I planned to take her to a resort in Wisconsin Dells, which is sort of like the Las Vegas of Wisconsin, except with water parks instead of casinos.  Of the many resorts, I decided on Kalahari based on recommendations of others and some research on the web. But just telling her wasn’t a great way to do the presentation. I wanted her to unwrap something.

I’ve been working for a while on a portable electronic scoreboard, so I had all the materials to make a good LED sign with the name. The day before we were to leave for Kansas, I started the project. The idea was to make a big LED sign that said Kalahari on it. It would be battery powered, and a switch would turn it on when the box was opened so that it wasn’t on the entire time and running out of battery. That was as far as I got in planning before I started building.

I borrowed a rechargeable battery from Sector67 to use as the power supply, then laid out the LEDs on a prototyping perf board covered with sticky black nylon paper. It took a couple tries to get it all to fit on the available board with legible letters and decent spacing. Then I found a switch that would work. The circuit was simple. The switch connected the + voltage to the board and the ground went directly to the board. The LEDs were connected with a resistor and two LEDs in series, and all those strings were in parallel. This meant a huge current drain, but I was limited to a power supply with only 6 volts, so I didn’t have much choice. This also meant a LOT of soldering and a lot of current limiting resistors. There was an odd number of LEDs, so I put an extra one on the back side so that the circuits were all the same.

With all these LEDs packed into a small space, it was very bright, so I struggled with a few different ways to do the presentation. I ended up taping the board behind a piece of paper so that the paper would diffuse the light a little. It ended up working great. The paper covered everything, including the switch. When the box was closed it was off, and when it was opened the switch was triggered, turning on the sign.

The girlfriend was happy, so the project was a success.

The next time I do something like this I’ll use less LEDs and instead of doing a sign of LEDs I think it would be better to have a piece that had letters cut out and was backlit by only a few LEDs. I also would have spent a lot more time on what was surrounding the sign. Using regular paper and crayon to draw was the best I could do with the limited time and resources I had, but it wasn’t enough for me. Construction took far longer than I expected, and I was a little disappointed with the results. I was working late into the night to solder it all together, and I barely had any time to work on the rest of the package. I can do better.

Check out my website for more projects.

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Zmodo 16 Channel DVR

Posted on December 26, 2011 by Waterppk

After seeing Pumping Station One’s implementation of a space utilization monitor and the cheap listing on Woot.com, we decided to invest in a 16 channel DVR camera system. The system is advertised as having a Linux based OS with a whole host of features including a pile of alarms, interfaces, support for up to 2 TB of storage, etc. Surprisingly, they delivered above and beyond on features! The system has a surprising array of functionality and relatively few spelling errors/outright bugs – that is once you get past IE only (after disabling ActiveX signing verification) or installing a scary DMG for Safari.

Of course, you’re wondering at this point wth this is Sector67 blog worthy, as we avoid posting crap on our blog! Out of the box, there were a couple of bad cameras. One was repaired by reseating the connectors, but another was truly DOA. The good news about these cameras, is they have M12 x 0.5mm standard lens, so you can easily jump on eBay and purchase replacements for the narrow 6mm provided lens, we ended up with the 3.6mm lens for wider field of view. The IR illumination really does go about 20ft, it’s pretty narrow but works well, and the overall image is acceptable for the cost.

Onwards to helping others out there. If you also have a defective camera (and you don’t want to wait a month for an RMA), you should:

  • Start by plugging in the camera to different cables (preferably a known working cable) and see if it starts working, if so you may have a bad cable or jack on the DVR/power supply
  • Assuming that didn’t fix things, put your finger over the photocell on the front, it’s the striped sensor in the ring of LEDs.  With your finger firmly planted on top of the sensor, the ring of LEDs should light up.  If they are then you’re getting power to the camera and your cables (external and internal to the IR illuminator) are working.
  • If you don’t have power, then you probably have a bad jack.  The issue is they have a chrome plated terminal they’re attempting to solder to, which is then injection molded as a strain relief.  The problem is that chrome doesn’t wick solder, but is very good at resisting rust and oxidation when it’s sitting in a Chinese factory waiting to be built into a product. . .
  • You can check for a bad connection by pressing hard at the backside of the female DC plug, if things suddenly turn on you’re in good shape for this repair:
Chew away at the injection molded plug carefully with a razor blade.  In this case there are two wires you’re trying to avoid cutting through, one goes to the center of the plug, the other to the side of the barrel:
You can see in the center of the jack, the red wire has a giant blob of gray solder that’s broken away from the terminal at the center.  At top leftish you can see a few loops of copper I caught with the razor blade on the ground connection.  In this case, I resoldered the center terminal and used hot glue (or epoxy) to repair the torn up plastic.
Of course, after fixing this, the IR illumination was still not working correctly but the camera was working.  I opened up the front of the camera and discovered the wires had been pinched badly on assembly at the factory.
You can see the pinch on the red cable near the threads at left, and the black cable at right:
Black cable here:
The red cable at the left runs to the IR illumination, the set of three at right powers the camera and returns video (yellow).  I ended up having to cut off the wires at the left and solder them onto the camera main board.
All in all, not a bad set of cameras, workmanship isn’t great and I definitely wouldn’t trust these things outside directly in the rain without some sealant on the screwed in cable set (o-ring front cover is good, cables are not well sealed).  There’s a cosmetic hood to keep rain off the camera, but it’s not going to do much against blowing rain.
YMMV, but we’re looking next to implementing PS1′s utilization monitor!
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Laser Display

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Bob Baddeley

For the past few weeks I’ve been working in spare time on a project that I originally did in high school. I wanted to resurrect it so that I could possibly take it to schools and give demonstrations. However, another opportunity has presented itself which offers much more visibility. I’ll be demonstrating this project to the Madison Children’s Museum, with the hope of turning it into an exhibit there.

The idea behind the project is to turn sound into light and see the sound waves. To accomplish this, a mirror is attached to a speaker. When a laser shines on the mirror, the speaker vibrates it and changes the angle of the mirror slightly, but enough to see. This alone is enough to see the effects of sound waves. The next step in my machine is to shine the reflected beam onto a laser attached at an angle to a motor. As the motor spins, the mirror rotates, and since it is at an angle it makes the reflected beam spin in a circle. This spreads out the wave over a circle, so you can see the waveform as actual waves. See the video for a demonstration.

The picture below is easier to understand. On the right side is a green laser. It shines onto the speaker. The mirror is a front-faced mirror to prevent double images, and it’s attached using hot glue to the center and also to the edge. This allows the mirror to pivot when the speaker vibrates. If the mirror were just attached to the speaker, it would only move forward and back without changing the angle.

After bouncing off the speaker, it is directed at a motor with a mirror attached at an angle. The angle is important because if it were flat it wouldn’t do anything to spin. Having the mirror at an angle makes the laser spin in a circle. When the speaker is making sound and the motor is turning, the laser shows the sound waves using persistence of vision.

The laser shines on a mirror attached to the speaker, then to a rotating mirror. Controls turn on the motor and system, and knobs control frequency and volume.

The tone generated is a simple square wave from an Arduino, which manages the input knobs for the frequency, the switch for the motor, the laser, and has a timer that automatically turns everything off after 30 seconds (to prevent it from continuing to run after the children leave).

For more information check out my website.

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Art and the Arduino

Posted on December 14, 2011 by John Williams

It is a strange sight, like a snapshot of an Olympic swimming competition taken from below. Five swimmers, frozen in position, pulse with life. A light from each swimmer’s heart beats and illuminates the swimmer briefly. As the heart’s light diminishes, a glow remains in the swimmer. Then you notice something odd. The swimmer’s hearts start to drift into sync until their hearts beat as one. And then slowly but surely, the beating of the hearts drifts apart.

A Swimmer

A Swimmer

If you were at the HopCat in Grand Rapids, MI earlier this fall, taking time to quaff your favorite brew while taking in the sights of ArtPrize, you would have seen this amazing sight. The exhibit “Swimmers” was created by Chris Murphy with a bit of help from Sector 67’s own Larry Walker. It is a fusion of art and technology that creates a memorable experience.

For “Swimmers”, Chris used the same medium he used in his exhibits “Girl On A Ledge” and “Hide and Seek” (http://www.myowndevices.org/). The form of each swimmer is crafted with a fiberglass casting tape that glows in the dark. To achieve natural shapes, Chris needed a laborious process, in which each cast took 30 minutes to set and several hours of trimming and gluing.

The glow of the swimmers is accomplished with beating electronic hearts studded with 30 LEDs each. As the LEDs are turned off, the swimmer’s form continues to glow. The beating of all hearts is controlled by a single Borduino (Arduino compatible) microcontroller. The Borduino directly drives a set of relays which in turn provide power to the LEDs of each heart. Part of the electronics challenge was finding relays that could be driven by the Borduino. According to Larry, the key software challenge was in creating the heartbeats. Since this is a work of art, it was not sufficient to just turn them on and off. Part of the effect is the way the hearts beat independently, then sync their beating, and drift apart again. A final part of the project’s challenge was putting it altogether, which was done for the first time when it was put on display at HopCat.

Swimming

Swimming

Though it didn’t win the grand prize, the reaction to “Swimmers” was very positive. If you would like to see the exhibit for yourself, it will be installed at the House of Brews on Helgesen Dr. in Madison in the near future.

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Machine Shop Panorama

Posted on November 19, 2011 by Waterppk

Todd was testing out his 3D printed panorama tripod mount for his camera and came up with this awesome shot of our machine shop:

Machine Shop

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Rosetta@Home Reaches 1,000,000 Credits!

Posted on November 18, 2011 by Dougal Walker

Sector67′s Rosetta@Home Effort Update

A milestone was reached on Tuesday, November 15, as Sector67 member Dougal processed enough Rosetta@Home work units to achieve one million earned credits in the BOINC distributed computing system. The goal was to reach 1M by 1/1/12. It took just over a year of constant processing by numerous CPUs (including some cloud computing resources) to reach this somewhat arbitrary benchmark. On Tuesday, a small pizza party was held to commemorate this achievement. Sector67 has been host to a number of participating computers over the year, which has been keeping the loft nice and toasty. Computers in the back lab also participate when they are powered on but idle. This is the strange looking screen saver you might have noticed before. This was also how we unexpectedly encountered the limit of our computer lab’s circuit breaker.

Rosetta@Home is a distributed computing project for protein structure prediction, run by the Baker Laboratory at the University of Washington. The project aims to predict protein–protein docking and design new proteins with the help of about sixty thousand active volunteered computers processing at 62 teraFLOPS on average as of October 18, 2011. Rosetta@Home consistently ranks among the foremost docking predictors, and is one of the best tertiary protein structure predictors available.

Rosetta uses idle computer processing resources from volunteers’ computers to perform calculations on individual workunits. Completed results are sent to a central project server where they are validated and assimilated into project databases. The project is cross-platform, and runs on a wide variety of hardware configurations.

In addition to basic research in predicting human protein structure, docking, and design, Rosetta@Home is also used in immediate disease-related research. Understanding protein structures will facilitate the creation of smart drugs to combat ailments such as Alzheimer’s disease, Anthrax, Herpes, HIV, and Malaria. Participants who predict protein structures are acknowledged in scientific publications regarding their results.

Users can join “teams,” which tally the total credits earned by all the team members. I am presently a member of the UW-Madison team, but if there is interest from other members in participating in the project, we would love to create a Sector67 team and crunch with you. You can get started by downloading BOINC and attaching Rosetta@home as your project.

Contact Dougal at dougal [at] uwalumni.com if you’re interested in organizing a team.

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Seat Belt Bicycle Tire Upgrade

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Dave Cornell

I was sick of getting flat bicycle tires, so on reading a few seat belt bike tire liner tricks online, I was ready to give it a shot. Having a few donor seat belts (that also found their way onto the 7cees bus) laying around certainly helped!

The trick is pretty straightforward, get a seat belt:

Chop to appropriate length:

Deflate and debead half of the tire to insert the seat belt:

Reinsert the tube:

Find someone with small hands to help reseat the tire and get things ready to go:

Test!

(Just kidding, I don’t think this would survive the bandsaw for long. . . although no flats to report in several months!)

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Music in Space

Posted on November 11, 2011 by John Williams

She climbs into the fuselage and takes her seat in front of the brightly lit control panel. A tune starts to play as she slides the first lever into position.  She presses a button and a rhythm glides in behind the tune.  Is this the start of a new science fiction film?  No, it’s what happens when makers, a supportive company and a non-profit work together.  The result is “Rock-it!”, an Arduino powered interactive music creation exhibit.   The project started when Dennis Adams heard the Madison Children’s Museum was moving to a new location.  Wondering how he might get involved, Dennis and fellow makers Mark Siegenthaler and Matt Logan approached their employer, Sony Creative Software, about funding a music creation exhibit.  With Sony’s support, the makers pitched the idea to the Children’s Museum.  The proposal was accepted in early 2010 and the work began.  The artists at the Children’s Museum decided they would build the enclosure, while the makers would create the consoles and supporting electronics.  The museum decided to build a retro rocket ship built from the front of an old, repurposed airplane.  This gave the makers a framework for designing and building their consoles.

Melody Levers

Melody Levers for "Rock-it!"

The key goal of the project was to make the exhibit fun and interactive.  The makers wanted to be sure it made good music regardless of the levers and buttons used.  They also wanted to make sure it was interesting regardless of how many kids were using it, so unused panels automatically change settings over the course of the song.  The melody levers proved to be a design challenge.  Their positioning and calibration was critical. The electronics also proved challenging with noise problems creating further complications.  The end design uses an Arduino Mega to communicate with three control panels for button and position inputs and LED outputs, and it generates MIDI messages to the music synthesizer.  It also holds the three songs used in the exhibit.  A SM Pro V-Machine is the synthesizer which turns the MIDI into rich, layered stereo audio.  It is a full x86 computer that runs the same VST synthesizers and filters you’d use on a PC.  This configuration allowed Mark to compose the music on his full synth keyboard while Matt shoehorned the music into the Arduino along with the rest of the programming.  On the surface, children see control panels with LED lit levers to control the melody, buttons controlling rhythm and an effects pad overhead for additional options.

The project took over a year of on and off effort, with the exhibit finally being installed this past September in the Possible-opolis section of the museum.  The museum says “Rock-it!” is a hit.  If you want to see it in action but can’t visit in person, check out the video:

Thanks to some special makers in Madison, children who visit the museum learn anyone can make music.

To learn more about this and other interesting maker projects, join us at one of our Sector67 open meetings or visit us on the web at http://www.sector67.org.

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