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:

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Come one, come all, to the 3rd Train Overlord Hackathon. Saturday August 6th, 1pm onwards.

The plan for the Hackathon is to put up way more track. With super awesome acrylic base. But if you’ve got passion to hack on the engine, the software, or whatever, come and hack! The more the merrier.

What is Train Overlord? It’s hacklab’s robotic denizen, our friendly robot overlord, who rules with an iron rail. (well, actually, the rails are aluminum, but the overlord doesn’t let that stop him). The Train Overlord is controlled wirelessly, there is a web interface, and you can download an app on your smart phone to control him directly from your phone. Our goal for the Train Overlord is to have him able to ferry empty cans from the desk to the recycle bins, on command. To that end, the Train Overlord is equipped with a winch mechanism. He also sports a laser, because what self-respecting robot doesn’t have a laser?!?

Anyway, come join us and hack on robots, no experience necessary! Saturday August 6th, 1pm onward.

Come visit hacklab this Sunday, 3pm onwards as we revive the “gamfternoon” gaming sessions of hacklab lore. There will be a copy of Settlers of Catan and Dominion on hand, or bring your games to share with others for the afternoon. The more the merrier, invite all your friends! Non-members totally welcome, the door will be unlocked. We’ll probably repeat gaming sessions on a regular basis, though dates and times may change.

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.

On Monday May 16th, 19-21:00, I’ll be doing an introduction to transfinite numbers. Topics will include:

• Cardinals and Ordinals
• Cantor’s Diagonalization Argument
• The Continuum Hypothesis
• Transfinite Induction

Transfinite numbers are really cool, since, well they deal with infinity, don’t match your intuition’s about infinity, and have a tendency to drive people insane!

Unlike previous math workshops, there is no prerequisite knowledge for this workshop. It should be lots of fun! I hope to see you there.

WE ARE HAVING A PARTY!

Come on out! Meet your fellow hackers! Check out the space! Enjoy a tasty beverage!

Things get started at 7pm. Feel free to bring a project to show off, something to drink, or some snacks.

We’ll have some snacks and some beer to share.

Our robot has a frickin’ laser beam attached to it.

On April 8-9, hacklab.to members held a hackathon to build a lab robot. At the end of that day we christened our project Train Overlord.

The robot’s brain is an Arduino with an that lets it move bi-directionally on its track and raise and lower its winch basket. That–plus some IR end sensors that tell Train Overlord when it has reached the end of its track–was where we were at the end of the hackathon.

Oh, how Train Overlord has grown.

In the two weeks since the creation of Train Overlord, we have made some significant improvements and added lots of cool features.

The first problem we saw was that Train Overlord moved much too slowly for our tastes. After a trip to Creatron, we acquired a few parts and got to work on building a new engine.

The new engine gives a bigger electric motor and solid drivetrain than before. The previous setup was just a rubber wheel which used friction to move the train’s wheel. The new engine is essentially a gearmotor kit with a pair of train wheels axles mounted to it. One set of train wheels and axle roll freely (these are standard off-the-shelf wheels), while the other axle is mounted to our gearmotor and and has custom wheels that were printed with the lab’s MakerBot. Printing these custom wheels gave us the proper inner-diameter hole for mounting them to the gearmotor’s axle, and a larger outside diameter for a higher top speed.

The second problem was that the only way we could talk to Train Overlord was to connect its Arduino brain to a computer and upload new code. “This is nonsense,” we thought. “We’re living in the future and should be able to do this wirelessly. We dug around in our bins of parts for an XBee shield, a couple of XBee modules, and an XBee explorer to connect it to a Linux box that acts as a controller. XBee modules use the Zigbee technology to pass serial data over RF, which is a flexible and relatively low-tech solution to the issue. We then whipped up some Arduino code to accept simple one-letter commands, and a basic Ajax-ified web interface that you can use to build and execute a queue of these commands. More recently, we added an iPhone interface–either using an app Abtin wrote to communicate with Processing over Bluetooth, or another Ajax web app to send commands (go forward; go back; raise winch; lower winch; stop) to the robot.

Using the servo technology we learned about in this past Monday’s Arduino servo workshop, we constructed a pan and tilt laser mechanism. Our test program moves the robot back and forth, and then draws an infinity symbol with the laser. That’s right: Train Overlord now has a laser targeting mechanism. WIN.

Finally, we’ve made several improvements that help us collaborate on the project, including a public git repository and extensive documentation on Hacklab’s internal wiki.

Train Overlord is very much still in the development phase, but over the next few weeks and months we should have interesting and exciting stuff to share with the world.