The 2017 Denver Maker Faire was held this past weekend and was a huge success. Solid State Depot showed off the new logo as well as personal projects from members. Dan’s “retro computer” was a big hit playing hi-lo written in Basic.

John M. brought his bare bones $2 Doppler radar sensor made of two transistors and an oscillator, hooked up to an oscilloscope to produce velocity data about objects at a distance. Andrew brought his inverted pendulum.  Using a linear rail, a pendulum is balanced and maintains stability via a PID control loop. This is a classical example of non-linear control theory and requires a combination of mechatronics and control.

Brandon displayed video of the collaborative SSD eclipse balloon launch with VR goggles.

The Maker Faire also hosted the Sparkfun AVC and Combat Bot Division with weight classes from 1 to 30 lbs.

Carter built a 3 lbs “beetle” weight class robot named “Captain Hook” which managed to stay relatively intact while up against Poison Arrow, a 250 lbs BattleBot.

Maker Faire Denver is produced by Colorado Maker Hub, a nonprofit organization that celebrates the Maker Movement and fosters the maker ecosystem.

Introducing the new logo for Solid State Depot!  With Denver Maker Faire coming this weekend, we decided that it was time to roll out our new logo.  Our first use of it was etching a new LED sign for our door, using our laser cutter.

New stickers and new business cards.

The first sticker went to join the world’s largest sticker ball over at StickerGiant.

A handful and a half of our hackers collaborated over the past several weeks to design and launch a high altitude helium-filled balloon during the recent total solar eclipse on August 21, 2017.

The balloon was kitted out with cameras, sensors and way-finding equipment. After being aloft for about 3.5 hours, the increasing altitude contributed to the balloon’s anticipated popping and rapid fall back to earth. It traveled around 100 miles, capturing video and photos before, during and after the eclipse.

This project page from our Wiki, prepared pre-launch, contains a wealth of details about the endeavor, including specs of the equipment, testing needs, and compliance considerations leading up to the launch. Member Dan Julio also posted about the project on Hackaday.

The balloon crew included SSD members Brandon Skari, Dan Julio, Tim Pegg, Andrew Bigoney, Specter, Rob Bryan, Sarah Gjestvang, along with additional crewmembers Kate, Bob, Tessa, Jason, and Sarah’s family.

A remote launch site surrounded by land with considerable public access to make recovery easier was carefully researched prior to the launch, though modified after reviewing different wind forecasts. The crew gradually assembled starting Friday night through Sunday, traveling from Boulder to an area about 10 miles ESE of Shoshoni Wyoming. The group split into three teams: a launch team, a recovery team and a remote telemetry receiver in Casper.

Most team members were on the launch team, who released the balloon at about 10:30 am. The initial climb rate of 2.5 m/s was a bit slower than expected and meant that the balloon was ultimately aloft for longer than initially anticipated.

The balloon traveled almost due east, eventually succumbing to the effects of partial vacuum about 20 miles north of Casper after reaching a maximum altitude of over 90,000 feet! At that point the balloon burst, and it and its payload quickly fell to earth. The recovery team, consisting of Kate, Bob, Sarah and her family, found out that the payload had landed on a private ranch. The balloon was found in about 5 hours near the last LoRa telemetry message.

In 360-degree video footage captured aloft during the event, a noticeable shadow can be seen visibly encroaching from the west over the land below. A few minutes later, totality arrived at approximately 11:39 AM. The darkened sky showed stars and the solar corona. The balloon’s cameras continued filming along its eastward trek for almost another hour before the balloon burst.

This endeavor generated a lot of interest and activity at SSD, and many thanks for helping go to: Todd LaWall, Chrobi, John West, and John Maushammer!

An introduction to the arduino, the development software, and interfacing with basic hardware. The class will be broken up into two days, split one week apart. The first session will be an introduction to the arduino, and coding, and simple examples

The second session will be a deeper dive into the world of arduino using examples

No experience with arduino is necessary.

What to bring: 1 laptop
Cost:$100 for non-members, $90 for members

What you ge for $100 :

Instruction – we are going to be working through  from Sparkfun

•  (This is the Arduino)
• SparkFun Inventor’s Kit Guidebook
•  (with headers)
• Red, Blue, Yellow, and Green Tactile Buttons
•  and  Resistors

When: Wednesday 2/15 7:30 to 9:30pm, and Wednesday 2/22 7:30 to 9:30pm

Where: 

Total Students: 8 (to see ammount of seats remaining see the eventbrite page)

Teachers: Paul Sobczak and Chris Davidoff

Sign up: EventBrite

 is located right here on the Front Range, but our class will be held at Solid State Depot, Boulder’s Local 

An Arduino, a bit of ws2812 LED strip, and some sanded acrylic tube make the perfect light for a jack-o-lantern.  If you’ve ever wanted to play with the intelligent LEDs like the ws2812, I highly recommend using FastLED to drive them.  The library has a good set of examples bundled with it, one of which is the Fire2012 example.  You can see that in action in the embedded video below.  For these two pumpkins, I used some very simple code that cycles them through the HSV color wheel at 100% saturation and 100% value.  See the code at the end of the post.

And now for the code:

#include "FastLED.h"
#define NUM_LEDS 20
#define LED_PIN 5

// Define the array of leds
CRGB leds[NUM_LEDS];

void setup() { 
   FastLED.addLeds(leds, NUM_LEDS);
}

#define HUE_DELTA 1
#define TIMEOUT 200

void loop() {
   static uint8_t hue = 0;
   // Turn the LED on, then pause
   for( int idx = 0; idx < NUM_LEDS; idx++)
   {
      leds[idx].setHSV( hue, 0xff, 0xff);
   }
   FastLED.show();
   delay(TIMEOUT);
   hue += HUE_DELTA;
}

Thursday night’s CNC Basics class went well, and will likely be a recurring class.  Be sure to keep looking on our Meetup page for the next one if you missed it.

10/27/2016 – CNC Basics, Phase 1: drawing