Tickets are on sale at eventbright: Hacklab Arduino Workshop II. Tickets are $20, there are only 10 spaces available. Text from the event (copied here for your reference):

We’ll be using Arduino to do an edge-lit acrylic lighting project. This will involve:
– bread-boarding, placing a number of circuit elements unto a solderless breadboard and connecting the bread-board to your Arduino pins.
– attaching a super bright RGB (Red Green Blue) LED (Light Emitting Diode) to the acrylic and wiring it into the bread-board.
– writing code to make the RGB LED do pretty things. A momentary switch on the breadboard will allow the use of multiple modes without changing the program. Your imagination will be the only limit to how colorful or complicated it will be. Properly controlled an RBG LED can make any color that the human eye can perceive – and it can fade between them!

I will prepare small kits for each attendee, consisting of a small bread-board, the RGB LED, a bunch of wires, the mom-switch, and a laser-cut, laser-rastered piece of acrylic. The $20 charge is for these materials, you’ll get to keep them all at the end of the night (repurpose and use them for your next project!). Bring your own Arduino – any Arduino will do, including clones. Arduino’s can be purchased at Creatron.

This class is a follow up to the previous Arduino workshop, but is still suitable for near-beginners. You should have your Arduino working, software installed, and understand the Examples->Basics->Blink example.

I’ll be hosting a follow-up to the previous Arduino workshop, since it was so popular. I’ve scheduled it for Monday Feb 21st at 7pm, which is two weeks from tomorrow.

This workshop will be a little more advanced than the last one, and there will be a materials fee, so that we can have a little more to work with than some surplus LEDs, and you’ll get to take stuff home with you. I’m not sure exactly what that cost will be (gotta go to Creatron and see how much the stuff I am thinking of will cost), but we’ll be learning some bread boarding skills (laying out a more complicated circuit), and writing a moderate sized program. I expect the class to take about 2 hours total. It will be helpful if you’ve already done at least the Blink tutorial (as we did the last time), but total beginners are welcome as always. Hacklab-membership not required, but RSVP will be – attendance will be capped so that I know how many kits of stuff to buy, and we have room to work. Watch this blog for RSVP link to follow sometime in the next week.

Also, quick reminder: this Monday’s workshop is LaTeX, the widely used text markup language, it’s open to beginners and non-members, hope to see you there! Note also that there will be no workshop on Feb 14th – rumors of “kissing for geeks” are just that, rumors!

I’m happy to announce that I’ll be running an introduction to LaTeX workshop on February 7th. What is LaTeX? LaTeX is a text markup language; instead of typing in word processor like MS Word or Open Office, you type in plain text and then compile it to a format of you choice, such as PDF. Unlike HTML, LaTeX is not terribly cumbersome to type by hand.

LaTeX is the industry standard for math and science publication. Look at a random math paper or book, at you can be very confident it was written in LaTeX. But LaTeX is also capable of doing many things other than writing papers, including slideshows and posters. Here’s an example, a sideshow I made in grade 11. As another example, I made this image in LaTeX for digimer.

This workshop is only an introduction. By the end you will be able to create simple documents and typeset equations. If there is time and interest, I will go into how to make slideshows and the basics of diagrams.

This workshop is open to everyone — that includes non-members. It will start at 7pm.

Hacklab’s second Monday Workshop is coming up in just a few days! It’ll be on arduino, the open source microcontroller platform that anyone can use to make their projects more interactive and fun! The workshop is open to the public, anyone is welcome to attend. January 17th, starting at 7pm, I will lead a brief tutorial for beginners, including how to set up the software, how to make an LED blink, and some very basic electronics stuff. I will demo some more advanced uses of Arduino. Then, at 8pm, we’ll open it up to people’s projects – if you’ve got one, bring it and I or some other knowledgeable hacklabber will be glad to help you out. If you don’t have a project yet, come get inspired and maybe you can learn something by helping someone else with theirs.

Note: if you’re planning to attend, bring your laptop and an arduino. Arduino’s are sold by the most excellent Creatron Electronics, only a few blocks away from hacklab on College street. If you set out a bit early, you can swing by Creatron on your way here!

This monday at 7pm at the hacklab (170a baldwin st.) Hacklab.to is kicking off monday night workshops with the first Toronto RepRap User Group Meetup. We want to bring the 3d printing community together here so really any and all robot apocalypse enthusiasts are welcome.

The plan is to meet up, do a bit of 3d printer show and tell and then have a free-for-all of 3d printing stuff; we’ll print some stuff and build some stuff and fix some printers that don’t print so well. Oh yeah and your welcome to BYOB + Bring your own printer.

If you just want to see these things in action we should have at least 1 working machine and a whole lot of problematic ones (yeah, they glitch up allot). Right now it’s looking like 2 Mendels, 1 Darwin, 1 Makerbot, 3 Prusa prototypes (in progress), 1 Deltabot prototype (in progress)

Cheers,

Rob

PS. oh right, what are 3d printers/repraps/any of this crap? well to put it quickly: machines that grow objects out of plastic and can print their own parts (sort of early precursors to star treck replicators). Lots more infos at reprap.org.

Global Hackerspace Cupcake Challenge! Objective: to mail a cupcake to another hackerspace in pristine condition. Cupcake must travel at least 1600 km. We are participating! Practice session number one at hacklab was a success, free cupcakes available! We’re gonna send to Noisebridge, and also to at least one Canadian hackerspace, such as VHS in Vancouver, ENTS in Edmonton or Protospace in Calgary. Join us and enjoy more awesome hackcakes!

I’ve been busy ordering kits and getting ready for the upcoming workshops.  Due to the limited amount of desk space and soldering irons at Hacklab, and the awesome number of people who have sent me an email about the workshops, I have decided that we need to take RSVPs for the Circuit Hacking workshop (Monday January 24th).   Please RSVP here: http://circuithacking.eventbrite.com.  Currently RSVPs are limited to 10 people.  We might be able to handle a few more if some people can agree to come later, we will cross that bridge if we get there.

Kits we will have available:

– learn to solder merit badge kit ($3)
– bliplace sound reactive pendant kit ($10)
– Trippy RGB Wave kit, responds to movement ($10)
– TV-be-Gone remote control kit ($20)
– Truth Kit galvanic skin response bracelet ($50)
– North Paw compass anklet kit ($149)

Also, quick reminder – Rob’s MakerBot workshop is less than a week away! See you all soon!

Some hacklabbers and I had discussions about having regular workshops at hacklab.  Rob’s recent call for a makerbot night really got the ball rolling.  I came from noisebridge, where one of the most cool events is Circuit Hacking Mondays, every Monday a half a dozen or more people come to noisebridge to learn how to solder.  It’s one of the big ways that noisebridge gets new members and keeps things interesting and focused on hacking.  Monday nights are a great time for such events because very few people make plans for Monday night and so lots of people are available.

In that spirit, I hereby announce the beginning of a series of workshops at hacklab.  We will not be narrowly focusing on soldering or circuits, but instead covering a wide variety of topics.  The first four such workshops are as follows:

January 10th: RepRap & MakerBot
January 17th: Arduino
January 24th: Circuit Hacking
January 31st: Wearables / Cyborg

Each event is suitable for both total beginners (come learn the basics!) and more knowledgeable people seeking a good hacking session.  Events start at 7pm, come for as little or as long as you like.  Rob will be leading the RepRap session, and I’ll be leading the other three.  We will send out more specific details about each event as the dates draw closer.

If you know anyone who you think would like to attend one of these sessions, please let them know!

Also, if you’re interested in helping with any of these, or in having other workshops, please contact me (mrericboyd at yahoo dot com).  I would especially love it if someone stepped forward to lead a “how to use the laser cutter” workshop.  If the workshops are popular we will be repeating them as opportunity allows.

This Saturday (October 16th) Fumon, Rob, and I are going to hack on Plover at the lab from noon until around 5PM. Plover is the just-released Open Source steno program, which (with much practice) lets you type 300 WPM!

We’ll be focusing on two things:

• brainstorming about open hardware ideas for chording keyboards including a soft-circuit one. Have sewing machine, laser, and Makerbot, will prototype!
• working on the GUI portion of the app – adding the ability to switch between custom steno dictionaries and edit them

Skills that will be useful and put to use:

• hardware hacking
• sewing
• python (the code is BEAUTIFUL, incidentally)
• gnome universal access
• GTK GUIs
• linguistics

Come on out and help build Plover!  We’ll also be posting updates in #plover on freenode, which you can access through a browser here.

-Leigh

I’ve been talking with Rob, and Rob, Frysteev, Leigh and others have been preparing for a while now to build one of these tools for Hacklab: http://builders.reprap.org/2010/06/selective-laser-sintering-part-6.html

A Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) 3d printer.

Due to this coolness, we are having a hackathon challenge on Sept 11th at Hacklab.to  starting at around 11am until we get this built (or hit a critical roadblock). Everyone who wants to help out can come in, and we’ll find work for them to get this done. Some can solder, some can help with the laser cutting, and some people just keep things moving and build one of these babies (hopefully) for Hacklab.to

Note, even if we don’t get the full laser working, we’ll be building a few of these. One to control the SLS, and perhaps a few more for other hacklab fun.

If you are a developer, hacker, or just want to have fun, come out and we’ll find something for you to do to help out.

KJR