As some of you might already know, the Hacklab has a photographic darkroom where we do processing of many kinds of B&W and colour films. All of these processes require a series of fairly precisely-timed steps, where the film or paper is exposed to various chemical baths. A number of these processes require complete darkness (no red safelight!), so you can’t have a timer that has a readable display. Commercial timers solve this by beeping once per second, so you know they’re still timing. As you can imagine, this gets very annoying after an hour or more of working in the dark!

I set out to design a new timer that would be less annoying and more functional. My original design goals were:
(continue reading…)

We’ll be having our next Junk Independence Day at the Hacklab this coming Sunday February 21st from 2pm-7pm (or later). Bring your e-waste or other electronics you want to get rid of, root around in other people e-waste, and walk home with new treasure. On previous Junk Independence Days people have gone home with wonderful treasures like a 1TB HD, an iPod touch, a decent desktop computer, a classic Macintosh, and lots of random electronic bits for hacking on. Come with your e-waste and have some fun socializing with other hackers!
Anything left at the end will be picked up on Monday February 22nd and responsibly recycled by Revolution Recycling, who has been participating in our Junk Independence Days since the first one. Thanks Revolution!