Archives/Shop 1.0/Make Shop
From Makers Local 256
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Note that information on this page is for archival purposes only. Please check the Main Page for updated information.
Overview
A place where people can go and work on assorted projects in an environment that stimulates creativity and motivation. Most people's problem with working on projects is there are too many distractions preventing them to from completing and often even starting on a project. The make shop will provide work area, resources, and knowledge to help people with their projects.
See TechShop[1] for more details.
Status
Planning third Open House!
Current Issues
- Lack of hot water and heat due to that being gas operated.
- Something to take into account for the next place.
Building Information
Electrical
- 3 prong grounded outlets
- 12 20A breakers
- 1 30A breaker
- 1 50A breaker (labeled as a "spare")
Communication
- Building is wired with phone, cable (coax), and ethernet (RJ45?)
Supplies
Should this be a separate page at Make Shop: Supplies?
| Needed Item | Who got it and when? |
|---|---|
| Ziplock Bags | |
| Clean Hand Towels for Bathroom (so we don't waste papertowels) | |
| Lock Box for cash/checks | omegix 3/30/08 |
| cleaning chemicals for microwave, tables, etc | saratheneale 4/1/08 |
| Paper Towels | strages 4/1/08 |
| Cups for Cooler | strages 4/1/08 |
| Broom/Dustpan | opticron 4/1/08 |
| Vacuum (shop vac) | opticron 4/1/08 |
| Toilet Paper | omegix 4/1/08 |
| Plunger | opticron 4/1/08 |
| Toilet Brush | opticron 4/1/08 |
Non-Profit Status
The Makers Local 256 was established as a Non-Profit Corporation on April 29, 2008. The paperwork proving this is currently with the Treasurer (Jeff Cotten) but should likely be with a Secretary after 501c3 is attained.
Charity (501c3) Status
To be 501c3 compliant (i.e. tax deductable donations), we need to establish bylaws.
Bylaws of ABCNonprofit, and we're trying to make them fit in with Maker's Local 256.
- All charter members will sign the final draft of bylaws.
Bylaws have been signed, 501c3 paperwork was sent out on Nov. 1 2008, we are waiting for reply back.
Physical Access
There seems to be general consensus that the key system will not be a long term solution for physical access. Suggested so far: RFID Tags, I-buttons, hotel card readers. Which one's better? USB_Auth!!
Right now we have a computer script telling an microprocessor to unlock the Deadbolt.
RFID Tags
- Pros
- Requires no physical contact (swipe your wallet or keys over the reader)
- Some people already have RFID cards that could be used
- Cons
- RFID reading by passerby
iButtons
- Pros
- More secure since physical contact is required
- Cons
- May be easy to bruteforce using a computer since you only need the single exposed electrical connection.
Card Readers
- Pros
- Ubiquitous
- Cheap
- We already have cards that can be used
- Cons
- Not hard to counterfeit a card since hardware is abundant
Insurance
- Laura (landlord's suggestion): Steve Succi 533-5600 is running numbers
- Allstate, Jerry Brunson office (jeff's suggestion): Jennifer 536-5555 is running numbers
- Allstate's quote is $666. They had to subcontract it to someone else because we were too high risk for Allstate to broker directly.
- State Farm (VBAS' guy's office) Les Miller (it's a lady running the quote but it's the office he works at) 837-9760. Omegix 15:12, 17 July 2008 (CDT)
- State Farm (536-0777) said they can do renters insurance for $325/year with $300k liability insurance
Utilities
- Update: Utilities in Saratheneale's name as of 4-1-08. Once we are filed with the state as an organization, we can transfer the name to "Makers Local 256" at no extra charge. The bill is sent to Omegix's home address.
- We have our gas service "locked" which means we are not charged the minimum $2.50/mo to keep it unlocked. If we choose to unlock it in the future, there is a $50 service charge.
- Utilities does not do trash service, so we won't be charged for it by them.
- $300 Deposit. Plan to get this switched over on 3-31-08
- If we don't get Trash service, it's $18 less a month
- Even though the Shop has gas lines run, we're not getting gas.
Internet
Board is voting on : "Should we go with Comcast?" at Proposals
- Knology is ~$65/mo
- Waiting on Comcast to get back to us.
- Plan is to pursue this after utilities have been switched.
Money Flow
[Accounting via Google Docs] The above document is edited by omegix.
Future Plans
- Net accessible cameras would be setup inside and outside the shop to provide security and ability to see who's working before you head there.
- Lockers would be provided to members to have a secure place in shop to keep items.
- Open house nights would be setup to bring in possible new members.
- Volunteers would be available to ask questions and provide physical security for peoples projects etc.
- A dedicated wiki editing/project updating terminal. It should be standing-height to discourage sloth.
- Wiki/Project statistics projected? onto a wall in the Make Shop.
- A standard paper form? A list of tasks, parts, procedures, etc that can be laid near in-progress projects to help facilitate collaboration.
History
- 10/27/06: First "official" meeting. Projects were discussed and some were worked on, most notable of which is the Weeble Antenna. Two prototypes were made out of tennis ball halves with lead ballast and seem to work pretty well.
- 11/04/06: Managed to figure out how to make the PDA magic window, which turned out to be a lot easier than originally thought. Brimstone managed to make some progress on his new file server with the help of Tanstaafl. Gomez managed to fix his remote by resoldering a component. The first collaborative edit of the wiki occured in the making of the new Supplies Obtained section above.
- 11/11/06: Met Nykodemus at Stanlieo's Sub Villa around lunch time. He gave me an introduction to smalltalk and we discussed Croquet and it's future. Managed to come up with a couple of new projects while sitting there: CRML and Wall widgets.
- 11/25/06: Had a small meeting at my apartment. Nothing new really came out of it, just fleshed out some details on the wiki.
- 12/02/06: Tanstaafl, Gregabyte, and William took apart a broken convection microwave to salvage parts. Nykodemus, William, and Strages worked on Croquet some more. Then everyone played around with Second Life.
- 12/15/06: Meeting was held at Strages's apartment this time. Nykodemus showed up around lunch time but most everyone else showed between 7pm and 8pm. There was much discussion about the Strages's Photobooth and many design improvements were made as well as deciding to build not one but two because of the ingenuity of a second design made by my coworker Adrian. There was also a fair amount of discussion on Nykodemus's Arfomyta. The whiteboard was used very constructively. Meetings will most likely be held at this new location until an actual shop is found.
- 12/22/06: Went to Toroid on the corner of Wynn Dr and Bradford Dr to see about renting the second floor for the Make Shop. The owner gave a complete tour and things look very promising. No heating or air, which can be overcome with some ingenuity, but thankfully functional plumbing. LIghts work as well.
- 12/29/06: Met at Strages's apartment, mostly discussion of projects in the wiki though a shelf was constructed in the livingroom to hold a projector. Some progress was made in development of Strages's Multitouch screen, as we now know a lot more about touchscreen technology. We figured out how Jeff Han's Multitouch screen works and that existing passive resistance and capacitance type touchscreens already register multiple points. Their software just isn't written to use them all but merely average the locations to place the mouse pointer roughly in the middle. We're no so much concerned about the pointer, so it's just a matter of rewritting the software to handle the multiple points in a more natural manner.
- 01/06/07: Met at Strages's apartment. Finalized design of the Photobooth and determined the supplies needed, construction will begin and hopefully end on 1/07/06. Things left to work on with it are power consumption, platform, scripting, wifi, and gps.
- 01/07/07: Met with Fred and went over the design for the Photobooth some more with regards to the dimensions of available space in a car and refined the design to a 3'x2'x2' box that acts as a dolly for transport. Design still expands out to a 6'x5'x3' photobooth that looks like any traditional one.
- Attendees:
- Fred and Strages.
- Attendees:
- 01/13/07: Met at Strages's apartment. Strages was slightly late to the meeting because he was out purchasing the wood and supplies for the Photobooth. Largely nothing was really worked on aside from upgrading the wiki to allow for image resizing. A couple of new projects were thought up and added to the wiki once upgrades were done.
- 01/14/07: Met with Fred and began day 1 of construction of the Photobooth. Had to slim the design to be able to fit in through the backdoor to Strages's car, which overall prevented it from being built in a day.
- 01/26/07: Met at the.narro.ws, then went to Friday's for dinner. Afterwards we came up with the Hovercraft Robots and made a couple of initial prototypes(chassis only).
- 01/27/07: 09:00-12:00 Day 2 of Photobooth construction. Three sided partition that sits atop the seat is done and parts have been purchased to attach the curtains.
- Attendees:
- Fred and Strages.
- Attendees:
- 01/27/07: 12:00-whenever Met at Strages's apartment. Work on the Hovercraft Robots continued with only minor success, but a lot was learned. A few resources for making a BEAM robot were salvaged from an old hard drive.
- 01/28/07: 12:00-16:00 in 32 degree conditions, Day 3 of Photobooth construction. Everything is built with the exception of 3 more leaf sections going up one side of the camera tower.
- Attendees:
- Fred and Strages.
- Pics
- Attendees:
- 02/03/07: Met at the.narro.ws. The smallest hovercraft yet was made and attempts were made into making it into a BEAM robot but fell short due to lack of appropriate parts. Major progress was made toward getting the touchscreen working on the Ramline 510 tablets in Linux. A couple of new projects were thought up over the course of the day and added to the wiki.
- 02/10/07: Met at Strages's apartment. Continued work on smaller Hovercraft Robots was done with moderate success. An arguably more functional OS was loaded onto the tablet after much trial and error for the Photobooth. A scavenging trip to a thrift store was made with mixed results. Jim Shoe created his first project and added it to the wiki.
- 02/24/07: Met at Strages's apartment. Worked on the code for the Photobooth some more attempting to iron out some kinks and Strages added three new projects.
- 03/10/07: Met at the.narro.ws. Much time was spent going over the haul we got from dumpster diving the night before. Managed to get at least a couple of oscilloscopes working and mounted in the rack. At least one new project came out of the meeting and a lot of discussion over the name of the future shop.
- 03/24/07: Met at Strages's apartment. Took apart a few pdas in order to further progress on the wall widgets and discover at least one of the three wouldn't work due to it being a TFT instead of an LCD. There was discussion over the redesign of the photobooth, and the drive used in the tablet was cloned for safe keeping. Nykodemus volunteered to look over the paperwork for becoming a non-profit. Voting on a name will begin on Monday 04/01/2007.
- 04/07/07: Met at the.narro.ws. Gregabyte completed his Laptop IAXy project. We got the touchscreen working on the Ramline tablet in order to begin working on Gregabyte's Linux touchscreen testbed. Brimstone worked on Kraken some more and showed off the new build. Re revealed his plans for making a Bawls shake light. We also speced out pricing on thick acrylic sheets for used with the Multitouch screen project.
- 04/27/07: Met at the.narro.ws. Settled on Makers Local 256 for the group name. Korc setup a group named this on Instructables for future use. We're going to start making instructables for various projects for use in contests and generally getting our name out there. We can also now get a domain for setting up a public face for the group.
- 05/05/07: Met at strages's apartment. Discussed running linux in the Photobooth Mark II and Brimstone suggested we use mencoder to handle live video and do screen grabs for the photostrips. Linux allows us a lot more flexibility and remote access. Finally found a PDA with an actual LCD instead of a TFT for use with the wall widgets project.
- 05/19/07: Met at Bandito Burrito for lunch then continued at strages's apartment. Brimstone managed to get the OpenWRT(or equivalent) modular usage working and Opticron managed to make some decent progress on the gumstix for his Wificopter.
- 05/25/07: Met at Moe's for lunch then continued at strages's apartment. Opticron made more progress on the gumstix for his Wificopter. Nykodemus and Strages discussed upcoming talks, and projects that may be done in time for Phreaknic 11.
- 06/02/07: Met at the.narro.ws. Managed to get Linux installed on the ramline 510 that's in the Photobooth with the touch screen and webcam working. All that's left to do now is rework the scripting, ssh, and video streaming. Full desktop video playback from the cam is now working, a major improvement over the old windows setup. Also automatic upload to Flickr should work now. Opticron bought a wiimote to test out and eventually use with his Wificopter project.
- 06/09/07: Met at strages's apartment. No real highlights other than Brimstone showing off new means of lowjacking things.
- 06/23/07: Met at the.narro.ws. Lots of discussion about the latest Make Shop location candidate and how we're actually going to go about doing it. Consensus seems to be to run the CoLo etc at the location and run the Makers Local 256 group as a private club. Any money making projects either fall under services/products provided by the CoLo or become separate business ventures themselves.
- 06/30/07: Met at Steak and Shake for lunch then continued on to the.narro.ws. Discussed a possible business partnership with the gentleman that expressed interest in providing us space earlier in the week. Tore apart the rack for preparation of being used for a colo.
- 07/07/07: Met at Bandito Burrito for lunch then continued on to the.narro.ws. Made a fair amount of progress on getting the Linux version of the Photobooth working. Tanstaafl made more aluminum powder and iron oxide for Thermite Production. He also tried an experiment with electroplating magnesium to aluminum as an igniter, but wasn't very successful.
- 07/16/07: Met at Rosies for lunch then continued on to the.narro.ws. Thermite Production continues. Nykodemus worked on a nontraditional piano layout some more as well as began work on an interactive to-do list made in smalltalk. Work continued on getting the multicast video stuff working on the Photobooth tablet, but to no avail. The problem seems to lie with mplayer just not liking multicast.
- 07/28/07: Met at Casa Blanca for lunch then continued on to the.narro.ws. Tanstaafl and Gregabyte left to retrieve supplies for the WiFi_filching project. Opticron left to learn about RFIDs from the IEEE group and will return later.
- 08/04/07: Met at Moe's for lunch and continued on to strages' apartment. Tanstaafl and Strages bought parts for building some beam bots. Nykodemus and Gregabyte worked on a GUI for the Asterisk call manager in smalltalk. Brimstone and Jim Shoe worked on WEP cracking on their Macs. Opticron fixed the Photobooth stuff on the new Linux platform.
- 08/13/07: Met at Jamo's for lunch and continued on to Korc's house. Nykodemus worked on his keyboard idea some more. Strages made a little more progress on the Photobooth Mark II but not much. There was minor discussion of BEAMbot design. We called about another possible location for a Make Shop, they wanted $700-$750 a month for it.
- 08/25/07: Met at Bandito Burrito for lunch and continued on to the.narro.ws. Supplies for building a Marx generator were gathered and purchased by Tanstaafl who then began the construction of the capacitor bank. Opticron purchased a replacement Ramline 510 tablet for the Photobooth, since the old one died the week before, and got Linux and the photobooth script loaded on it. Photobooth is now operational again. Everyone contributed in a discussion of Ackis 2.0 and what could be done with it.
- 09/01/07: Met at Moe's for lunch and continued on to the.narro.ws. Tanstaafl tested his capacitor bank which didn't exactly work as planned sadly. Gregabyte did some more tests concerning his Weeble Antenna project and bought some of the materials he needed in order to start his Hydroponic Gardening project. Strages did more research concerning his Multitouch screen project and purchased a better solar cell for BEAM_bots.
- 09/08/07: Met at McAlister's for lunch and continued on to the.narro.ws. Tanstaafl worked on salvaging components from a scrapped mother board. Parts were placed in a craft box newly purchased for that express purpose. Gregabyte worked on the newest evolution of his Hydroponic Gardening project. Daylon worked on modding his Gamecube and showed off a super bright LED he bought made by Cree.
- 09/15/07: Met Korc's place to work on the Photobooth Mark II and discuss making a multitouch table. Hit a few roadblocks in the design of the mark II, but did discuss several alternate designs and plans to distribute them with the code once it's packaged up. The multitouch table is definitely doable and we still plan to have it done by Phreaknic 11.
- 09/29/07: Met for lunch at Bandito Burrito then continued to the the.narro.ws. Nykodemus and Strages scouted out a new possible location for a shop, but weren't able to find anyone to speak with about it. Nykodemus managed to wire up the solar cell obtained a few weeks ago to the hexabot Strages bought at Radioshack and got it to move around in direct sunlight. Next step is to wire a capacitor and transistor inline to try and get movement in weaker light conditions, if that fails just add another solar cell, and wire in a photocell so that it moves toward stronger light at all times. Strages purchased a 32"x48" piece of lexan for use in the Multitouch screen project and several tests were run to determine proper throw distance for the projector. A rough design was panned out based on these tests.
- 10/06/07: Met at Chic-fil-a for lunch then continued on to Korc's place to work on the multitouch screen some more. The screen is close to being finished and I'm confident we'll have it done by Phreaknic. Probably won't have the new photobooth done, so the plan is to check it structurally, add additional support as needed and replace the casters with stationary wheels.
- 10/13/07: Met at Bandito Burrito for lunch and continued on to Korc's from there. Strages brought the photobooth to have it looked over before going to Phreaknic. Setup the photobooth in the driveway and tested it a few times to make sure the new tablet was going to work as well as the old one. Noticed some odd delays that the old one didn't have as well as some other anomalies. Opticron managed to find work arounds for the time being until the code could be audited after Phreaknic. Multitouch screen: Installed the cross braces, routed slot in the mirror frame and glued it together around the mirror with clear silicone sealant in the grooves for a little shock absorption. Installed the powered rails with a jack on the underside of the rail accepting power from a 12 V wall wart korc is letting strages borrow for the project. Finalized positioning for the projector.
- Large gap of lost meeting notes due to being too busy to keep up with the wiki.
- 12/15/07: Met at Quiznos for lunch and continues on to the.narro.ws. Mostly discussion of existing projects and updates to the wiki, nothing really physically worked on.
- 12/22/07: Met at Subway for lunch and continued on to the narrows. Strages bought a Wiimote after it was determined it could be used as a project base for some rather interessting projects coming up seeing as how it's a cheap 1024x768 webcam with four point hardware blog tracking capability. The rest of the meeting was spent messing with the wiimote.
- 12/29/07: Met at the narrows. Jim Shoe and Strages discussed progress with JimBot and Zombiebot.
- 01/05/08: Met at Captain D's for lunch and continued on to the narrows from there. Opticron, Tanstaafl, and Nykyodemus finished working on Opticron's LED Lighting while others messed with various other things.
- 01/19/08: Met at McAlister's for lunch and continued on to the narrows from there. Korc brought his joule thief based flashlight in a Jones Soda mints tin to show off at the request of a couple of members. Tanstaafl and Strages put together a Joule thief in hopes of making a solar beambot work better in doors but to no avail. The joule thief itself was a success though. Tanstaafl kindly donated a bag full of wound toroids for future projects. Strages added two more projects he'd been thinking about to the wiki. Nykodemus brought up some good suggestions for a restructure of the wiki. Opticron finalized his setup for the LED Lighting.
- 01/26/08:
- 02/02/08: Met at Jason's Deli for lunch then continued on to the narrows from there.
- 02/09/08: Met at Jason's Deli for lunch then continued on to the narrows from there. Strages purchased a pirate chest for $32 to make a new fileserver, possibly to be named PortRoyal. Nykodemus purchased pieces needed to make a pvc bagpipes. Opticron worked on submitting his LED Lighting to Instructables.com to enter into their LED contest. Korc brought up that the place we were considering for a shop at 200 Jordan Lane had put up a new sign and that he was going to try calling the owner again to find out more information on the building.
- 03/29/08: Met at the Make Space at 3409 Governors. We_need_a_place#3409_Governors_Dr. Agenda and Meeting Notes at Minutes 3-29-08.
- 05/08/08: Shop has been operating for a little over a month now with no major issues and people being at the shop everyday at various times. We're making progress as far as drumming up interest in the shop via Twitter, Huntsville Livejournal Comunity, and the local 2600 meeting. We're officially a non-profit and we're working on our charity status. --strages 21:19, 8 May 2008 (CDT)
- 06/10/08: Set 06/28/2008 as the first Open House for the shop. --strages 14:52, 10 June 2008 (CDT)
