Felix Klee

This time we had two guest for our Tuesday HackJam. Torrey came from Shenzhen and brought his Pomoduino kits, which we soldered together. The Pomoduino is a timer that helps you structure the day, concentrate on work, and take regular breaks. It also serves as an introduction into electronics and soldering.

Valentin showed us the technology behind DigitRaver, a social virtual world where you can meet friends, chat, and enjoy music together. It runs on modest hardware while supporting a…

We had a full house for Adisbladis’ presentation during our weekly open evening, the HackJam. Adisbladis gave an introduction to the Nix package manager and to NixOS. He then showed us how to make use of Nix’s powerful features in the context of doing Python development with pyproject.nix.

Adisbladis is a freelance Nix consultant & nixpkgs committer, where he mostly enjoys working on lower level plumbing such as lib & stdenv, but also maintains Emacs & it’s package ecosystem. With his…

Engineer-artist Eli Silver popped over from Shenzhen to tell us about his latest experiments with cable driven parallel robots and their use in art and tech. He had announced his talk with a question: “What happens when we use our built environment as the structure of a robot?”

We were shown examples of robots at vastly different length scales, from desktop size to sports stadium size. Challenges in implementation were discussed. Finally, Eli showed us his latest creation that had been…

For a workshop during our weekly HackJam open night, Sadale brought electronics kits that he designed and got produced. We followed the instructions and were rewarded with a circuit that can count up to three: You press a button, and the next LED will light up. There are three LEDs, and there is a reset button. One of us tried to add auto-reset as an additional feature.

Sadale originally created the kits for Toki Pona Day 2021. Toki Pona is an artificial human language. Fortunately for…

During his second workshop at Dim Sum Labs, Sam, a Berlin based creative technologist, gave an introduction into the AI image generator Eden. It gives access to the features of Stable Diffusion. We learned the basic creation of images, including how to use ChatGPT as a prompt generator. Then we moved on to train our own concepts. Finally we played with ControlNet, and Sam showed us how to turn simple geometric shapes into sophisticated looking renderings.

Sam, a Berlin based creative technologist, gave an introduction to printed circuit boards (PCBs) as a creative medium for doing art and all kinds of fun things. We learned how to do a simple PCB design in the software EasyEDA, from schematic to board layout. Finally, we ordered preassembled boards from JLCPCB and its Chinese sister site JLC. As a bonus at the end, Sam showed how to import custom graphics into EasyEDA.

See also the detailed notes shared by Jay, one of the workshop…

The very first SolidWorks user group meeting in Hong Kong was held at Dim Sum Labs! Tayseer Almattar gave an introduction into the basics of parametric modelling. He is the author of Learn SolidWorks and other books on the subject. Over free food and drink, we exchanged tips and tricks about SolidWorks and other 3D modelling software.

On our first HackJam after decluttering and cleanup, we wiped some final bits and pieces.

Alex gave an impromptu presentation about the Sunday visit to the UAS drone expo last weekend in Shenzhen.

What else happened:

• Sadale used his electronics expertise to look into a solution for a better lighting system.
• Nigel set up the label printer he brought. Now it can be reached from the network, the first step in our mission to plaster the space with QR codes.
• We got a new…

During our weekly HackJam, visitor Iulian gave an impromptu presentation showing us TouchDesigner. Its node based editor is popular to create visuals for VJing in clubs. Iulian generated Perlin noise, then used the bass frequency of a music loop to advance through the noise along the z axis. Next, he showed how to separate an animated banana into RGB channels and make it respond to the audio spectrum. In addition to visuals, TouchDesigner can be used like a modular synthesizer to create…

The presentation started with an introduction to living architecture, the practice of growing houses out of trees. For planning projects, visualization is important. During the second part of the presentation, we looked into SpeedTree, a software for designing trees in 3D. It is primarily used in the gaming and movie industries. We created a simple tree. We also looked at a commercial 3D model of a banyan tree as well as an alternative attempt with more realistic prop roots (pictured). The…