A month ago shackspace hacker hadez gave a short talk at TEDxStuttgart on how community-driven education and learning at Hackerspaces works. The talk is now available on YouTube and slides can be found on GitHub.
The talk is also featuring projects by fellow shackspace hacker Jocki (TinyMega SMD Soldering Workshop) and slopjong of syn2cat (PCB Manufacturin Workshop) .
Am Montag den 4. März um 20 Uhr lädt shackspace zum zweiten Teil des Workshops “Let’s build a compiler” ein.
Fall ihr den ersten Teil verpasst hat, könnt ihr noch immer einsteigen, sofern grundlegende Vorkenntnisse zum Thema Compilerbau vorhanden sind.
In diesem Workshop geht es um die Anwendung des im vorherigen Workshop gewonnenen Wissens.
Die Slides zu Teil #1 des Vortrags finden sich hier: cipher-code.de/letsBuildACompiler/
Zum Event:
Teilnahmegebühr: Teilnehmer an Teil #1 frei, Neuteilnehmer: 5 EUR (3 EUR für Mitglieder des shack e.V.)
Anmeldung: Doodle
Datum: Montag, 4. März 2013, 20:00** **Uhr
Anfahrt: U4/U9 Haltestelle “Im Degen”, Ulmer Straße 255, Stuttgart Wangen (gegenüber Kulturhaus Arena)
Our resident administrator Chris was quite busy over the last couple of months with meticulous planning and preparations and then finally executing the migration of our internet services to a new machine. Check below report for a quick update on what happend.
On Friday March 1 we’ve migrated our internet server from a VServer hosted in The Netherlands to our very own root server.
The former VServer with 1 GiB of RAM was fine until our blog software “decided” to use up even more memory, crashing the system every now and then.
So we rent a server with 16 GiB RAM, QCore CPU and 2x3 TB Storage. The System runs a Linux VServer Kernel on Debian GNU/Linux. It is equipped with Software RAID and LVM2 logical volume manager.
This gives us maximum control and flexibility for now and the future.
The operational concept arranges for isolating each application into a separate VServer reducing dependencies, easing updates and enhancing security.
After two months of preparation the services and contents were migrated to the new server yesterday. As it turned out one more time those computer things are sometimes not as easy as it seems.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Am Samstag den 2. März 2013 lädt shackspace um 18 Uhr zu einem Workshop über statische Webseitengenerierung mit DocPad ein. Referent ist diesmal shackspace Hacker rashfael.
Statische Webseitengenerierung ist oft eine Alternative zu dynamischen Websiteframeworks wie Wordpress oder Drupal. Es wird weder eine Datenbank noch ein komplexes Webserversetup benötigt,
vor allem der Workflow ist ähnlich der Entwicklung von Software, was für viele angenehmer ist das Rumklicken in Webfrontends und WYSIWYG-Editoren.
DocPad ist ein neuer Generator in einer langen Reihe von Static Website Generators.
Implementiert ist DocPad in JavaScript und node.js, die Dokumentensprache ist aber völlig frei wählbar.
Im Workshop werden als Sprachen CoffeeScript, Markdown, Jade und Stylus benutzt.
Vorraussetzungen:
Here at the shackspace we love pointing our 50W lazor towards all kinds of materials for fun, more benefit and no profit … yet! The only slight downside is that the laser can (at the moment) only be controlled through a quirky Windows software - the reverse engineering job is still pending. Also there’s a lot of people around which just had to buy “a few” Raspberry Pies when it came out as new - ultra-affordable mini-PC last year.
While looking for use cases for the new toy we discovered that it makes an awesome (literally) thin client. It has a very low power consumption ~2W and manages to handle remote desktop applications reasonably fast.
To combine both pain (Windows Krepelsoftware) and pleasure (RasPI) the motivation for this project is to provide a means to control the laser cutter - and since the software for controlling it only runs on Windows - without requiring a native Windows computer (which concerns most people around here).
The first thing we did was to set up a Windows 7 OS in a KVM instance on one of the servers of shackspace’s data center.
Next we had to find a way to boot directly to that machine which lead us to using xtightvncviewer - which gives the impression of running Windows 7 natively (fullscreen with the resolution of the TFT Screen). For setup instructions please check the shackspace wiki.
Now we were faced with the challenge to forward the USB port of the Raspberry Pi - to which we were planning to connect the laser cutter to - to our virtual Windows machine. This creates the ‘physical link from the laser cutter to the virtual host.
The solution we stumbled across was the USBIP project.
Since the USBIP modules are only in available in staging we needed to build a whole new Linux kernel for the Raspberry Pi as the module is not natively included into the current baseline kernel. It took about two days to make it work - mainly because we didn’t have much experience building kernels beforehand. You can find detailed instructions on USBIP on the shackspace wiki. The result is a clean Raspberry Pi image with the loadable USBIP module included. We started out building only the required modules and such mischiefs - instructions for building a kernel that lets you actually load the modules you built (as usip-host in our case) will follow shortly.
In addition to that there is at the moment a mismatch of the USB packet headers sent between the USBIP Linux server and Windows client. This caused far more head-ache than expected - partly because of our combined lack of knowledge of the Windows platform. Fortunately our Google-Fu was strong and we were able to find a Windows client which is working with the current USBIP release somewhere on the internet.
After quite a few non-booting Linux images, tons of blue screens and kernel panics the results were satisfying and we remotely lazored the no-fucking sign:
We were asked to make some pictures or a video - and since we don’t take ourselves too serious - we came up with the idea of doing it with one of the mascots hanging out in our hackerspace (next up shaqueline?!).
So here we go: Pedro the bear explains how he got Windows 7 running on an Raspberry Pi to control the 50W Lazor of shackspace:
Software used:
Thanks to Sabrina Winter who was very busy filming and interviewing the participants of this year’s Global Game Jam at shackspace there’s now a video documentation showcasing some of the games and folks behind them.
After watching the video make sure to check out the flickr set and play the games as well!
We’ve had a great time hosting this year’s Global Game Jam at shackspace.
Turns out that with 33 game developers, students, designers and musicians working on building games the Stuttgart Jam was one of the largest in Germany!
This years topic was “Heartbeat” and the Stuttgart event resulted in seven games being developed in two days. Make sure to check them out, most of them are implemented so you can play them right from your browser.
Photo: CC BY-NC-ND Region Stuttgart
As some of you might know already, shackspace does have a piano for everyone to play.
Of course we also have quite a few members who can use this instrument virtuously and do so on a regular basis.
However, our piano was suffering from a few notes which were slightly out of tune.
Lucky for us we also have members who have both the equipment and skill to do day to day tuning jobs. Now, without further ado, we shall present you shackspace resident musician and piano virtuoso flyx tuning the shackspace piano. The suspense! It’s unbearable!
Klavierstimmen from shack e.V. Hackerspace Stuttgart on Vimeo.
shackspace hacker @4RM4 was looking for something to hack when he visited 29c3. He found someone who was selling RGB-LED stripes with individually addressable LEDs which was (understandably) irresistible and he already had a RaspberryPi to control it with. Controlling the stripe is done via one of the Pi’s SPI ports. However there was nothing to mount the stripe to… except for a trash bin. Luckily the trash bin had a circumference of exactly 1 meter resulting in a 10 row high tubular display when he wrapped the 10 meters of LED stripe around it.
One of the first hacks was a text scroller which was nice but not quite there yet. But soon after that was done 4RM4 was off to the land of classic games and quickly hacked together a snake) clone. Playing snake on a tubular display was quite a challenge and since the trash bin had to stay at the congress center once 29c3 was over he opted to go for a more familiar and usable form factor by cutting the 10 meter LED stripe into smaller pieces to build a rectangular display.
He improved his snake clone by adding a high-score feature, auto-play bot, support for free dot placement for debugging, and a clock display in idle mode.
Playing it got even more fun with a Wii-Nunchuck hooked up to the RasPi which was quite easy since he could use the Pi’s GPIO port to talk to the Nunchuck’s I2C interface.
Of course the full code is available on GitHub and there’s some documentation (in German) on the shackspace wiki.
Samstag den 9. Februar 2012 lädt shackspace zum Synthesizer Workshop.
Michael von stromraum erklärt allen Interessierten die Prinzipien und Funktionsweise von Synthesizern. Behandelt werden unter anderem die Kernfragen
Die Erfahrung zeigt, viele arbeiten mit digitalen Synths und benutzen dabei nur die Presets, weil sie nicht wirklich wissen wie man einen Synthesizer einstellt. In diesem Workshop wird das Grundwissen der Klanggestaltung und welche Komponenten einem dabei zur Verfügung stehen vermittelt werden. Egal ob digital oder analog.
Geschehen wird dies Anhand eines analogen Modularsynthesizers, an dem man haptisch sehr gut deutlich machen kann, wie die unterschiedlichen Wellenformen klingen, wie man eine Hüllkurve unterschiedlich einsetzt und wie z.B. die verschiedenen Filterflanken klingen.
Ein modularer Synthesizer ist durch seine Schaltungsfreiheit auch ein idealer akustischer Experimentierbaukasten für ungewöhnliche Klangstrukturen und Sounddesign.
Zufalls-Trigger, schwankende LFO-Modulationen und chaotische Frequenzmodulationen als Inspirationsquelle für eigene Klangkreationen.
_Zum Event:
_Teilnahmegebühr: 5 EUR (3 EUR für Mitglieder des shack e.V.)
Anmeldung: Doodle
Datum: Samstag, 9. Februar 2013, 20:00 bis 22:00 **Uhr
**Anfahrt: U4/U9 Haltestelle “Im Degen”, Ulmer Straße 255, Stuttgart Wangen (gegenüber Kulturhaus Arena)