By:
On:

Makers Ethan, Satyam, and Rohan were able to go on a test flight with Bill Brown, and test out their payload for the HSIS Competition.
It turned out that the payloads had dropped into a woman’s backyard off of Donna Avenue right next to her cathouse. She has a large outbuilding and fence covering about a good portion of her yard as a cat sanctuary for two wild cats that she didn’t want roaming the neighborhood after she moved to the city from the country. Her cat “Tom” seemed particularly interested in the buzzing ozonesonde sitting right next to his fenced in sanctuary…..photo of the landing site (myself and the Makers 256 team holding the payloads). The Makers 256 club is participating in a competition called Hacker Spaces in Space to take photos in Near Space as economically as possible.

You meet some interesting people when you drop things on them from 20 miles up.
~Bill Brown

Left to Right:  Bill Brown, Ethan Chew, Rohan Rana, Satyam Nayak

By:
On:

Yesterday Ratmandu and Myself headed out on a journey to find the last remaining Parallax RFID Readers from Radio Shack.  We headed to Decatur first, where we found 5 in stock.  From there we went to Florence and picked up another 4.  According to Radio Shack’s database, north Alabama and south Tennessee no long have them in stock.

Also while looking around the Florence Radio Shack we found the Palm Pre Touchstone charger on sale for $16.  We tested the output and its 5v.  So basically for $16 I now have a wireless charging setup.  I would like to put it in my phone, but it looks to be a pretty big challenge.

Tags: ,

By:
On:

Last night Ethan Chew demonstrated the electrolysis contraption he created, using an article from Make Magazine as his inspiration.  Below are some pictures of he and Justin igniting some of the Hydrogen bubbles that were formed.

Appearing in this picture is Ratmandu, deftly defending us against the encroaching flammable bubbles.  Bokunenjin from the HacDC hackerspace was also able to join us for the experiment!

Fun With Hydrogen 1 of 2

Fun with Hydrogen 2 of 2

By:
On:

Raymond, Tim, Justin, and I decided to go to St. Louis for the grand opening of Arch Reactor the local Hackerspace up there. They had made a post to the hackerspaces.org mail list inviting everyone out to there space.  I asked a few members if they would like to go, and we made a weekend trip out of it.

I had spoken with a few of the Arch Reactor members beforehand and made arrangements to crash at a members apartment.   We left Friday night in the middle of a snow storm.  Lucky Tim is from upside down Vermont and thus knows how to drive in bad weather.  A 6 hour drive took us 10.5, but thanks to my Droid we never missed a beat with Pandora.

Once in St. Louis we found a McDonald’s to get food and then napped in the parking lot.  Then we traveled over to the Arch and did the touristy things.  We walked around the museum and rode up in the Arch.  Being about lunchtime we headed over to Arch Reactor were we hung out for the rest of the night.

The open house was tons of fun.  They probably had 50 or more people show up.  They had a Maker Bot and a CNC, along with a bunch of old and new computers.  There was some cool art, and a few talks.  Tim and I even showed off the photobooth and gave a short talk about it.  OH! and they had life sized Jenga!

As expected after only a few hours of sleep and parting all day with only caffeine to keep us awake, we crashed hard Saturday night.  Sunday morning we had lunch with a member of their space and headed home.  The drive home way way easier than the one going up.   On the way through Illinois we saw a sign for Metropolis, IL aka Superman’s Home.  Naturally we stopped and saw a giant Superman at the courthouse.

Here are the picture I took, I’ll update it later if anyone else has posted their pictures.


Tags: , ,