The Hacklab.TO Monday Workshop series is starting again! Each Monday we will be offering a way to get started hacking. Learn some basic skills, meet some friends, and see what hacklab is all about!

Monday Sept 12th: Arduino Beginners Workshop. For total beginners. All are welcome, no RSVP required. Eric will show you how to get started with Arduino, the super-friendly microcontroller platform that even artists love. We’ll cover getting the software installed and going, hooking up the Arduino, and a little bit of basic programming, via explanation of the Examples. You too can cut and paste your way to a working project!

Monday Sept 19th: Learn how to Solder. For total beginners, or those with some experience. Learn how to solder, which is one method of assembling an electronic circuit. Instruction by Eric is free, and we’ll have a variety of interesting kits on hand for you to purchase as learning templates. You’ll take your kit home at the end of the night, working, guaranteed! RSVP here: http://hacklab-soldering.eventbrite.com/.

Monday Sept 26th: 3D Printing. For hacklab members only. Come learn how to use the makerbot from Christopher. Note: this is not a modeling workshop, you will not learn how to design 3D parts. You’ll learn how to use the Makerbot to actually print them. RSVP here: http://hacklab-3d-printing.eventbrite.com/.

Hope to see you at a workshop soon!

A short clip of  the recent Train Overlord hackaton:

Haskell is an awesome purely functional language that I’ve been becoming more and more obsessed with in recent months. I consider it to be the most elegant language I’ve ever worked in and want to introduce more people to it!

So, on Monday, August the 8th, 7pm/19:00 I’ll be teaching an introduction to Haskell workshop! Come and learn about laziness, type classes and (the awesome power of) monads!

Please note: This is not an introduction to programming class. You will not be able to follow along if you don’t have experience programming. I am planning to do a day long weekend Introduction to

Programming/Python workshop sometime in the near future that would be much more appropriate for you.

(Sorry about the late notice. I posted to discuss and then forgot to put up a blog post.)

Update: And it went awesome! There was a much bigger turn out than I expected. Here are some notes:

(continue reading…)

Hacklab.to member Byron Sonne who was arrested June 22, 2010 on charges related to the G20 summit in Toronto was released on bail today. Byron is innocent until proven guilty and continues to be recognized as a full member of Hacklab Toronto. His trial will begin in November 2011.

Full information about the case, including links to media articles and other information can be found at: http://www.freebyron.org

Hacklab.to had one of the best booths at the Toronto Mini Maker Faire and our member aonomus made a great video about it! Join us at our open house every Tuesday night at 170A Baldwin Street in Toronto to see some of the projects that were on display at the faire.

Hacklab is going to have an awesome booth at the Toronto Mini Maker Faire, a celebration of maker culture:

Toronto Mini Maker Faire is the ultimate celebration of making, crafting, DIY-ing, tinkering, hacking and sharing. It’s a weekend where makers of all kinds will show off their projects and hold how-to workshops, with hands-on activities for all ages. Exhibits on display will include robots, laser cutting, letterpress printing, a 3D print gallery and kinetic sculptures.

At hacklab’s booth, you’ll be able to meet our members, and see some of our various projects including:

• 3D printers: Maker Bot, RepRap, Hacklab RepRap, lots of printed objects
• Soldering workshop! We have blinky LED kits available, learn how to solder!
• Train Overlord, our robot on rails (now with laser!)
• Buttons, stickers, fliers: get your Hacklab swag!
• Laser poster – information about our laser cutter
• Sensebridge: North Paw compass anklet, Heart Spark pendant, conductive thread
• HUGE Capacitor bank, good for making HDD platters jump (can crushing demo!)
• Slide show of Hacklab activities
• Some members have their own booths: GoodRobot (Alan) and Strich Labs (Sarah & Lisa)

Come visit us and support making stuff in Toronto!  The Mini Maker Faire is Saturday and Sunday this weekend, 10am-6pm, at the Evergreen Brick Works, 550 Bayview Ave, Toronto.

This weekend’s robot hackathon was a huge success. Not only did everyone who participated have a blast, but we actually ended up with a nifty little robot too. You can also check out Eric’s blog post on the event as well as this fantastic set of flickr photos. Here’s a clip of the robot in action in one of our early tests:

The robot in the video runs on a set of powered train track rails. Power is drawn from the rails into the Arduino and the motor shield atop the carriage (photo: motorizing the carriage). The arduino is our robot “brain” (photo: coding the brain) that issues all the movement and LED blink commands (yes, any robot worth its salt MUST have blinking LEDs). While we now have several feet of track installed, this turned out to be a difficult job since hacklab apparently has  a 4″ thick concrete ceiling. But thanks to a lot of hard work (photo: drilling the ceiling) it’s now rock solid and looks awesome. The idea is to lay additional track that will eventually allow the robot to drive along the ceiling all over the lab. Our “use case” is a robot that can be commanded to head over to the desks, pick up empty pop cans and ferry them over to the recycling bin (more about that in a moment).

After the above video was taken, we started to outfit the robot with additional capabilities and sensors. The first was a Sharp IR distance sensor that we’d like to use for robot positioning along the track. The second was this little contraption (see if you can guess what it is before scrolling further):

This little gadget is actually a winch that can raise or lower a bucket from the robot. In our proposed  pop can pickup “use case” the winch is what will enable the robot to pick up and deliver pop cans to the recycling bin. …what? “ugly” you say?  Not to us. What it lacks in sleek lines and striking curves is overshadowed by character and performance. As an example, if you look carefully, on the left side of the spool we have a heart shaped piece of acrylic that serves as our motor hub (yes, every self respecting robot needs a heart)! And equally cool is that just above it we have a limit switch with a roller on it that tracks along the edges of the heart as the spool turns, sending our robot three electronic “clicks” each rotation (two at the top of the heart and one at the bottom) that help us encode/track the position of the winch. It also has a homing switch at the top to allow the robot to figure out where the bucket is after a reboot.  So will it lift a pop can? You bet!  The heaviest object we tested with it was the fire extinguisher …which it lifted without a problem!

And of course, this is just the beginning. We have lots of code left to write, track to lay, and sensors to add. We also plan to give the robot a xbee wireless connection so we can issue it commands from within the lab as well. Adding a pan/tilt laser pointer atop the robot is also on our to-do list.

Thanks to everyone for an awesomely fun weekend, and feel free to roll up your sleeves and join us on this project as Hacklab’s Train Overlord continues to evolve!

Eight people met tonight and we decided on a plan for hacklab’s new robot overlord. Some of us will be meeting at 9am to start the shopping expedition (first stop: George’s Trains). We’ll be reconvening at or before 1pm tomorrow (Saturday) in order to start construction.

The robot will be a gondola robot, hanging from train track suspended from the ceiling. It’ll have a winch, enabling it to raise and lower a load up and down. We envision an ultimate application being to carry empty pop cans from the desk to the recycling bins :-)

At least four different teams will work in parallel:
– suspended track construction
– gondola train mechanism
– motor control electronics & programming
– winch mechanism

Once the robot is moving, we have a super long list of cool features to add such as responding to light & sound, wireless control via ZigBee, pan & tilt laser “eye”, eyebrows for expression, R2D2 sound effects, etc. Hopefully we will get to some of that fun stuff tomorrow!

If you’re keen to learn about robotics or get put to work in any way on a robot, please show, we can totally find something for you to do! 1pm tomorrow, Saturday April 8th, 2011.

On April 25th, at 7pm/1900, I will be doing an integral transform workshop. This workshop will introduce ideas like convolution and the Fourier Transform (and possibly L² Spaces, the Laplace transforms or Fourier Series). Examples of applications will include solving PDEs.

Integral Transforms and the Fourier transform in particular are very powerful ideas. The Fourier transform changes from looking at functions in terms of amplitudes at points in time to amplitudes at frequencies. It has applications to audio and image processing; see examples of what it does to these images (though note that the author is using discrete 2D Fourier transforms, which are a little different from what I’ll be showing).

They’re also very useful in ODEs and PDEs, making them invaluable in physics, including electronics.

NOTE: You should know what derivatives and integrals are if you intend to come to this workshop. I’m really sorry, but I simply won’t have time to teach introductory calculus and cover this material. And it isn’t nice for people who do know calculus if I try to do so.

Check out our new Hacklab Toronto video! See inside the lab, meet a few of our members and check out some of the cool stuff we do. Hacklab Toronto is open to the public every Tuesday night starting at 1800h. Come down and meet us sometime!