The Story Box Build Meetup #1
March 29, 2011 by spoonfork · Leave a Comment
Tonight’s meetup was a productive one. At the end of the meetup, we were astonished as to how simple the Story Box is. But keeping things simple is not an easy task. Especially at a hackerspace. For the past one year, we’ve been a motley crew of hackers, hobbyist, engineers and coders. We operate in an agile environment, and we do stuff as we see fit, or the way we like it. There’s no time frame, no reports, no documentation – just the freedom to build, tinker, make, hack and code the way we want. But in a competition, we have to have discipline. We got to have a plan, and we have to stick to it. And the most important rule of all: keep it simple, stupid.
Kakeman explaining TWI (Twin Wire Interface)
During today’s meeting we manage to list out the features that we want to implement. We’ve set milestone and timelines. We got rid of useless features. We drew some diagram. We even have a picture of how the final product will look like.
Mind map of the Story Box component and features
Due to its simplicity, the Story Box is actually pretty simple to do. All you need is an LCD shield, and an Arduino. Or you can have an LCD and a push button, wire it all up to the Arduino, and start coding. And because of its simplicity, The Story Box will be cheap to build as well. The next thing that we will do is to customized the PCB, and make the form factor smaller – enclosed in an acrylic box.
A sketch of the final product
To track progress and making sure that we follow the plan and not go overboard in terms of design and build, we’ve created a simple milestone chart. At the end of the week, we will have a working prototype built using LCD shield.
LCD Shield
and an Arduino with battery
Seeeduino
That’s all for now. In the next post, we’ll introduce our team. (This post is cross-posted to the element-14 community site)
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The Great Global Hackerspace Challenge
March 28, 2011 by spoonfork · Leave a Comment
As some of you may have already known, HSKL is one of the thirty hackerspaces from around the world participating in the Great Global Hackerspace Challenge.
What is the Great Global Hackerspace Challenge?
Thirty hackerspaces around the world will be chosen to participate in the Great Global Hackerspace Challenge to create something cool and useful for education. Each of the thirty spaces that complete their project will receive some nice soldering setups so that they can better teach how to make cool things with electronics. These thirty hackerspaces will each get $900 and two months to finish their project. Three finalists will be chosen to show off their projects live (in person, or virtually) at the San Francisco Maker Faire May. A panel of geeks will pick the one they think is coolest, and the winning space will win a handmade trophy and bragging rights, and perhaps some other way cool stuff.
What are the prizes?
- For participating and completing the project: USD900 and a set of soldering equipment
- Semi finalists: Fluke 233 DMM (worth US$300) , Fluke 381 Clamp Meter (worth US$500), Tektronix PWS4205 Power Supply (worth US$865), Agilent HH DMM (specific model TBD)
- Winner: Tektronix MSO2024 oscilloscope (worth around US$5,600)
Who are the 30 participating hackerspaces?
We are one of the four hackerspaces from Asia. The others are: Hackerspace Singore, Tokyo Hackerspace and Xin Che Jian (Shanghai).
What are we building?
Our project for this challenge is called The Story Box. It is a simple battery-powered device that display random word, and students create sentence containing the word.
How do I participate?
Be a member!
As part of the challenge guidelines, we are required to document our journey at the element-14 community portal. So here goes:
- Our Great Global Hackerspace Challenge Entry
- A short but concise description of the Story Box. It is also documented in the wiki.
- Our make process
- The Great Global Hackerspace Challenge at element-14
- The participant packet
Initially, the were supposed to be 10 participants to be shortlisted for the challenge. In order to participate, each hackerspace had to write a short description on why they should be selected. Wearing our creative caps, we decided describe HSKL in pantun style:
Arduino, Freeduino, LEDuino, Seeeduino
But our first was a Severino
Resistors, capacitors, LEDs, and diodesAt HSKL, the blinkenlights will run riot
We got workshops, we got meetups
At one year old, HSKL is going up and up
Security, electronics, open source and tinkering
We can’t dance and sing, but we sure love lepakking