Code Year Celebration Day

One of our members is learning programming from scratch by participating in codecademy's Code Year. This teaches a series of lessons, a new one each week for one year, that you can do in your web browser. Currently, it uses JavaScript, something heavily used to automate websites such as this one, to go through the basics of programming in a high-level language.

So when Code Year announced they were declaring Feb 7th, Code Year Celebration Day, which would be observed by having code year participants host meetups in their local community, we decided to host one for the Winston-Salem area. For those interested, they have their own meetup page for finding a meetup in your local area. Likewise, you can just go straight to the one for Winston-Salem.

We had such a good turn out and positive response from the first class, including a few people who are not ...

Community Interest Survey

At Fablocker we are always looking for ways to best serve the local community as well as our membership base. To help us decide where to allocate resources in the best possible way, please fill out a quick survey we have put together:
Fablocker Community Interest Survey
Thanks!

RSVP for the ioXchange Premiere

We will be having our first ioXchange presentation, be sure to RSVP w/your e-mail address for the presentation!

gzipped FabLocker

With a 50% compression ratio. In layman's terms, we are going back to using half the space we use currently by the end of January. This required a bit of planning and a lot of considerations on how to best optimize the available room if we are going from 4 rooms to 2. Any repeat visitors who haven't been by in a while may be surprised to see the new look, but so far the general reaction has been positive.

Originally, when we expanded we thought going to 4 rooms would give us more space, but in many ways we weren't really gaining much other then extra storage space. That is one good thing about having 4 rooms is we learned how we actually would use the space if we had it, which meant we learned what we did and did not need. We learned that we ...

Quad copter class status

I've gotten all the parts in as of today (well the last ones should be delivered today, a higher capacity battery and an assortment of propeller sizes) so I need to finish up the frame design so we can print one out for flight testing.

This week I will be going ahead and burning the firmware on the controller board, and prepping all the electronics (the esc's and motors) and doing some static tests to make sure everything is working.

Then mounting the components on the frame and doing some flight testing.

Once I'm satisfied with the design I will be posting a BOM in preparation for the build classes.

This Thursday I will be reviewing the design and our goals for the quad copter, including some really nice software I've found that we might be able to use for some of our auto-pilot and ground ...

The Hippie is alive!!!

Got a lot accomplished this weekend, but not without a few struggles. 

Friday night I started working on wiring up the controller. I have to say that I don't think I've had so many problems trying to assemble connectors than I had Friday night. One minute (actually more like 60 minutes) I think I've got one of the cables installed in the connector and I move on to the next one. Then all of a sudden the first one pops out of the connector. 

I finally decided after a very long night to use a different method to connect things to my Sanguinololu. I first was going to try deans micro connectors but the offset was going to be an issue. My next option was to use another micro connector that is pre-terminated with wire leads. I bought enough to wire up all the stepper motors Saturday ...

Neckbeard Rodeo was in town

One of our members just recently did a quick class titled "Neckbeard Rodeo - Basic Python HTTP Communication" which as the title mentions the topic focused on HTTP communication using Python and some tricks that may help with sending http headers in an order the server expects from a normal web browser, using SSL, etc. A code example was used for the main part of the presentation. Attendance required a offering of beer which was shared by all (over 21). Beer and code go well together or many people must think so because we had quite the turn out for our first class. 10 people were in our meeting area at one time, many had to stand although they didn't seem to mind.

The example code used can be found on the events and activities section of our wiki.

This was an exciting milestone for FabLocker as this was our ...

SOPA/PIPA equals bad things

At hackerspaces, we like to share things, we share space, we like to share tools. Most of all, we like to share knowledge and ideas. We like to do things that take something's originally intended purpose and perhaps find a cool new useful or unexpected use for it. Essentially, we take a bunch of ideas or an idea and improve upon it, that's what breeds innovation and progress. To do that you have to share the ideas to begin with. The sharing of ideas with a large audience that has trouble finding each other is what makes the Internet the Internet, its what gives it its allure, its power, its what makes it so revolutionary compared to past forms of communication that were much easier to control and channel through gatekeepers.

That freedom frightens some people, and yes, that freedom is sometimes abused ...