Another exciting term we had with the DSLjuniors, a group of 4 kids aged 8 to 10 who come to DSL on Saturdays for a morning of making and learning about electronics. We wired our projects, soldered our PCBs and used hot glue to put laser cut parts together. This term we built an Arduino powered robot, with …
After making lots of laser cut boxes, i was wanted to try making a more interesting 3D shape such as a topographical map of my favourite island of Lantau. There are quite a few ways to do this, with the easiest way probably via an STL file but as i’m not familiar with any 3D printing programs …
DSL gets high electricity bills, that’s why i built an AC power monitor to log the electricity consumption. It is based on the excellent open source OpenEnergyMonitor project which i also use at home (nodes based on Arduino with RF modules). For DSL, i used an ESP8266 to be able to post the data over WiFi straight into the …
During HackJam this week, we had the visit of Ben from Toronto Mesh. He introduced us the simple and easy way to construct a mesh network based on a network of a few Raspberry Pi2 or Raspberry Pi3. They use the model 2 or 3 from Raspberry Pi because the encryption of the data transfer …
The traditional Arduino boards, with 8 bits at 16MHz are quite limited for sound processing, but the Auduino code, a ‘lo-fi granular synthesizer’, does generate an interesting sound. I combined this with a 4-step sequencer to produce some loops. Each red pot controls the pitch of its step (pentatonic scale). As the Arduino UNO only …
Inspired by the RGB LED ceiling lights at DSL, i made a lantern based on the same ESP8266 chip, but using the Arduino IDE to program it. I used the original ESP-01 package which has only a few GPIO pins available but enough for this application. The only other component is a voltage regulator that …
Tonight we had the visit of Karsten Nohl from teh German company: Security Research Labs. He presented his work, some of his latest research on a few security issues with mobile communications. Karsten informed us on the SS7 protocol which is an exchange protocol that all mobile communication providers are using to talk to each …
The Mid-Autumn Festival must be coming up when mooncakes and lantern specials are all around us. Let’s hack the traditional inspiration by re-imagining the handmade lantern with lasers and LEDs! Workshop Dates: Sunday, Sep-04 1-3pm Sunday, Sep-11 10-12pm Sunday, Sep-11 1-3pm At this workshop, the children and their parents will hack the traditional Mid-Autumn …
