One of the Power Racing Series vehicles broken an “axle” the other day (giant sized bolt). While they were repairing the axle, Alex shot a couple of pictures from a modern phone camera, these have gotten amazingly good at taking cool pictures!
Sector67 will again be hosting MadisonSOUP this cold, dark, December! We hope to have a full house so please join us for some great food and Madison area project proposals. SOUP can’t happen without your support, so please register today.
***
Madison SOUP‘s December event will be held at Sector67-2100 Winnebago St. on Sunday, December 9th from 6-8pm. Tickets are now available via Madison SOUP Eventbrite and are $10. There is also an option to donate to the event; so if you know you won’t be able to attend but would like to pitch in some money please use this option instead of reserving a ticket.
There is still time to submit your idea! Projects and ideas can be submitted until 11:59 on Tuesday, December 4th via the Project Proposal form. Past presenters who weren’t awarded the micro-grant may submit their project or idea again, and may continue to do so until you’re awarded the micro-grant. Anyone is able to submit their idea as long as it provides some sort of positive impact for the Madison community*.
Not as scary as it sounds, we started off with a test on a dead laptop panel:
Which yielded beautiful results on the first try. Next up was preparing the artwork (in this case XKCD.com comics) and test engraving a chunk of wood. After that it was squaring the laptop and shim time:
Then the scary “hit go and hope you got it lined up right”
And finally a happy Brendan and his permanently altered laptop case:
In other news, we now own a giant laser cutter/engraver, we’ve had the good fortune of having access to three laser cutters over the past year, but had a great opportunity to go in with our sister hackerspace i3Detroit on a very affordably priced machine!
If you made it by the last meeting, you heard the saga of Eric’s ZAP Xebra impossible titling process. The long story short, the vehicle was purchased years ago by another party, and was never titled. This resulted in Eric holding the Manufacturer’s Certificate of Origin (issued to a dealer), rather than a real title:
Anyway, over the past 1/2 year I have been asked to do an amazing number of things. Most requests came sequentially rather than all at once, and originally the requests would come by mail which drew the process out even longer. By the end, the DOT representative and I would communicate by email and I would physically drop things off at the DOT main office which streamlined things a bit.
The process involved:
Filling out the DMV MV-1 form
Payment of registration fees and taxes
Verbal confirmation that the vehicle had a Federal Safety Certification Label
Turning in the Manufacturers Certificate of Origin
Taking a picture of the Federal Safety Certification Label
Taking a picture of the vehicle
Weighing the vehicle at the DOT Scale on the interstate 80 miles away and witnessed by a State Trooper (This request was rescinded after I offered and alternative.)
Weighing of vehicle at the local certified scale witnessed by a police officer
Taking a picture of the above weigh-in
Having the above pictire signed by the observing officer attesting to the fact that he witnessed the weigh in. (This request was later rescinded and alternative made.)
Sending an email from the official work email address from the officer who witnessed the weigh in attesting to the fact that the weigh in phot is correct.
Returning of the refund that DMV inadvertently automatically generated because the process had taken so long.
Providing a bill of sale.
Sending in a handwritten statement from me of the odometer reading
Sacrifice of my firstborn son (Just kidding about this one.)
Whew!!!!
While the paperwork was being processed, I was pulled over by the local police several times. The first time was within 24 hours of driving it on my city’s street. The final time was about two weeks before I got the plate in the mail. I got very used to carrying around up-to-date paperwork so I was ready for these instances.
While at Sector67, slightly modified ZAP vehicles have starred in a few videos:
Jesse wanted to stand out at this year’s “Freakfest” with something better than his handmade Predator costume of past years, so work commenced 2 days before the event with pink foam flying everywhere.
And a mini chestburster alien was first born, which inspired the subsequent costume:
Sector67 member Monty spent way too much time setting up a Raspberry Pi to run Node.js (which happens to include a handy serial library to enable webserver level Arduino communications) to be overlooked:
My local hackerspace Sector67held a 24 hour build fest this weekend. Late last week in preparation for the event a few of us purchased some Raspberry Pi‘s. If you’re not familiar with the Pi, it’s a credit card sized ARM based computer with a USB port, Ethernet port, GPU, HDMI and Composite video out that runs Linux for about $35. You can read more about it at the link above but the “overall real world performance is something like a 300MHZ Pentium 2, only with much, much swankier graphics.”
I bought 2 with the plan to install nodejs on them. I figured it’d be a super cheap way to create a web based controller people could use in other projects. I’m happy to say it only took me about 3 days to make this a reality. However it was pretty much 3 days of frustration that I’d like to keep the rest of you from having to experience so here’s the scoop.
Congratulations to Snowshoe Stamp on winning the Disrupt SF 2012 Hackathon put on by TechCrunch! The Madison based company was not only out in San Francisco competing, they took home the grand prize.
Also they won a MakerBot Replicator which they are generously donating to Sector67! (You can never have enough 3D printers to play with)
We are hosting another great Build Madison Event on September 22-23. This 24 hour Create-a-thon is a great opportunity to turn project ideas into reality. In order to attend you need to sign up here.
