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Electromagnetic Wave 2013

widget — Wed, 01 May 2013 21:25:29 +0000

There’s only 30 tickets remaining for this festival of talks on a ship – the MS Stubnitz – on the Thames in London this weekend. See the talk list! Then come with us! Mat and I will be driving to Bedford to dodge engineering work on the West Coast Main Line.

Happy Birthday, and variations thereupon

widget — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:37:52 +0000

Northackton is 3 years old this month. The exact week can be derived from reading the first few posts in the archives, and/or by looking at flickr, but I won’t spoil it for you. To celebrate, Andy had suggested an informal competition to produce devices that play the Happy Birthday tune.

A number of entries were made, and here they are for your enjoyment:

Andy’s recreation of our first attempt to play music bottles with servos. He authentically captured our discovery that servos aren’t very good at this

Andy’s second entry was an Arduino piezoplayer:

Adrian made a xylophone using old pinball chime solenoids. It only had three notes, but it played them really well!

Mine was another Arduino player, but with a mini speaker in a little box. I don’t have any video of it yet, it’ll have to go up in a second post.

However the show was stolen by newcomers Mike and James who came for help making their ring modulator work. Happily they’d got it almost entirely right, and some slight tweaking and a lot of soldering produced a very special song.

Bits of SDR

widget — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 22:27:12 +0000

The hackspace is a bit quiet at the moment, we’re waiting for some room to set up our laser cutter. NSME are kindly giving us some space and have even provided some fire extinguishers, optimistic that they are. Hopefully by the beginning of April we will have space for it.

In the meantime, I did some tooling around with the RTL SDR dongle, the software support for which has come on marvellously, and after some fun following some guides on the ‘net, we were able to pick up the ADS-B location broadcasts of airplanes overhead – albeit in a very small range, due to the antenna in use that isn’t designed for 1.09GHz.

For the curious, I originally started with the rtl_adsb library that comes with rtlsdr these days (also worth investigating the rtl_tcp server if you want to leave your dongle in an RPi…). This puts out the decoded broadcasts to an almost human-readable level. I then installed the VirtualRadar software (which is cross platform) . . . which didn’t decode the messages at all (linked together via netcat). It confirmed it received messages, and that they were not badly formatted, but couldn’t decode them either.

I then tried using this guide and used the gr-air-modes application instead. The uhd_modes.py script it recommends has been replaced with rx_modes instead but the syntax is the same. This wasn’t too painful for me as I already had gnuradio installed. For those that don’t though, the latest in Ubuntu 12.10 is compatible with the osmocom extra sources.

Mechanised marble machine

widget — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 21:46:02 +0000

Andy wasn’t content with Martin’s original marble machine design, so after our workshop, he has electrified it, to save doing his own cranking. Perfect for the lazy!

Site refresh

widget — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 21:41:12 +0000

Those not following this site by RSS will have noticed the website has become a bit more stripped back recently. The latest version of WordPress doesn’t work so well with the old theme, so it’s had to leave us. Any … Continue reading →

Regular pub meets

widget — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 22:54:25 +0000

We’re going to start having regular pub meets to chat outside the clubhouse, where food and alcoholic drink are both available. They will be every other month, starting Wednesday 13th February, at the Charles Bradlaugh pub. See our Calendar or Facebook for details.

Invite your friends!

Workshop: Marble Madness – 21st Jan

widget — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 21:46:05 +0000

The next workshop to run at NortHACKton will be another session run by Martin Raynsford, based on his previous success with his useless machine workshop last year. This time you can build your own marble machine! Turn a crank to run marbles down a con

e, again and again and again. The workshop costs £12, which includes the complete kit. Ball bearings included.

This is a slightly more simple build than the useless machine – no soldering required. Here’s my own attempt at building one of Martin’s prototypes. This will run on Monday 21st January. The space will be open from 7pm as usual and we’ll aim to start at 8pm, although if enough people arrive earlier we’ll start, and then start people as they arrive, as this worked well last time so that not everyone needs the same tool at the same time.

If you wish to bring your own tools, the following may be useful:

Wood glue
Small pliers
Craft knife
Needle file

They will however all be provided if you don’t have them. If you’re coming, feel free to comment on here, or on the mailing list, or via our Facebook page, so we’re expecting you.

Curry Baubles

widget — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 22:59:53 +0000

Well we had some delicious curry last week, and started a debate which will continue for some time; should we buy a laser cutter or a 3D printer? Opinions in the comments below or on the mailing list.

I was also going to write about the laser-cut Christmas baubles Martin made, but he’s already done it himself. Admire them on his website.

GeekSanta writeup

widget — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 22:55:06 +0000

A surprisingly successful set of workshops were run over the last month, on soap-making, useless machines, and knitting decorations for christmas trees from chainmail. The useless machines workshop was run by Martin and was very successful. Those who missed out on buying a kit on the day may buy direct from him on his website. For those who don’t know what a useless machine is, participant ntoll wrote it up, including a video.

The soap-making workshop started with some serious demonstrations of melt and pour soap and how to add dyes and pigments, but got very rapidly experimental. Unfortunately there are no picture’s of Mat’s mustard-dyed “soap”, which is probably all for the better.

Pat ran the chainmail workshop, and taught how to make simple European 4-in-1 and European 6-in-1 with coloured rings to make trees. This went well and the chainmail forest is shown below.

On the success of these workshops, we shall definitely organise more, although not quite so many together. Any suggestions for workshops to be made via comments, Twitter, Facebook, the mailing list. And roll on GeekSanta 2013!

Christmas meal 2012

widget — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 20:13:39 +0000

We’re going to have a Christmas curry this year, on the 10th December. The current plan is meet in the Malt Shovel on Bridge Street at 7pm onwards, and then move to Aladdin’s Balti Hut for 7.30pm. Comment on the … Continue reading →