🇳🇴 · Omega Verksted · Robotkrigansvarlig
På grunn av Robotkrigen neste uke vil OV ha begrenset funksjonalitet og arbeidsplass hele uka. Vi beklager ulempene dette medfører, men håper Robotkrigen gjør opp for det!
🇬🇧 · York Hackspace · Lissa
Today marks the Hackspace’s birthday. Fourteen years ago on an Autumn Wednesday evening, following online discussions and a few meetings in the Black Swan, members met up in Guppy’s Enterprise Club – a space we would inhabit weekly for the next three years and ten months, to the day. In recent years, we’ve held birthday celebrations for members and friends, and this year was no exception; we had a little party in the space. There were friends, there were snacks, there was drinking. No power tools were operated (and people were only metaphorically on fire). Later on there was even dancing. Oh yes, and there was SpaceHack – our starship disaster simulator – which hasn’t been out at an event for about six years. I can’t remember quite when the notion hit me, but I decided that if we were having a party in the space (as seems to be traditional at this point), since I’m currently having my turn at being Keeper of the Starship, it would be really fun to roll it out in all its glory* and let our newer members meet it. * its glory is declared “Good Enough for Government Work” Working on SpaceHack occupied a good number of my evenings recently, but I got enough of what I wanted done to be satisfied. The original 5V power distribution had some issues; voltage drop in the cables, and a general lack of power quality, caused some unreliability with the boot process on some consoles, flickering in most of the LEDs, and the power warning indicator to show permanently on the server display. By replacing the 5V distribution with 7-23V (so it can run equally easily off a laptop PSU or a car battery without swapping any internals), and using some absolutely teeny 5V buck regulator modules in each console and the server, each console gets its own clean supply. All the regulators are tweaked to 5.24V, which is towards the upper allowable limit, to allow some extra headroom to avoid anything dropping out under load. I tired of the molex connectors and leads we’d made up for power distribution. These would be perfectly adequate electrically for the conversion, but the cables were always tangled in the box, and the cable ties placed at intervals along the length were very effective barbed wire for the hands. Not to mention the right-angle connectors bending through use. Our past selves had elected to replace them with speaker wire and phoenix connectors (pluggable terminal blocks often used on industrial control gear) – we’d even made up the leads. With plenty of spare PCBs, I adapted enough to accept the phoenix connectors and got some more ethernet jacks to mount. I routed and filed the acrylic casing carefully by hand to fit the new power connectors. I used a rotary tool with drum sanding bits and diamond burrs. They’re very effective so long as there’s enough speed to just start softening the acrylic by friction. Typical medium hand files will cut the acrylic well, so long as they’re run quickly and firmly through it. 240G emery boards are good to polish out the file marks. It all makes a hell of a mess – new jeans be damned – but that’s what vacuum cleaners are for. Working inside the server box has always been a bit of a chore; every disassembly meant removing nuts and washers, and inevitably losing some inside. So, I got some smooth flange nuts – these look great and distribute load as if a washer were installed, but since they’re one piece, there’s less to drop! One of the cool little fountain speakers had ceased to squirt water at some point, and one of the LEDs was out in its partner, so I had them apart carefully for servicing. The motors are powered by a couple of power amp chips – each has two amplifiers. One IC seems to mix the stereo signal down to mono and filter it – its other channel is unused – while the other one powers both motors as needed. The latter chip seemed to have a failed channel. As a quick fix, and not having spare chips, I identified that the dead channel corresponded to the unused channel on the other IC, and swapped the two over on the board. The unlit LED was just down to a bad solder joint and was easily repaired. I was quite surprised by the engineering in these little speakers – the wet part is a totally sealed enclosure, and the impellers that drive the fountain are magnetically coupled to the motors outside the tank. I’d intended to do some proper work replacing and repairing consoles 2-4 (C1 is still empty awaiting its refit that never happened – the contents are crammed carefully in a box), but time didn’t allow for more than tying up all the PCBs to stop things touching, and making the power distribution mods. I did print off some new board mounts to hold the power/network couplers. Needless to say, I was really pleased with how well SpaceHack went down at the party. New players got right into the spirit of the game, playing even on the more faulty of the consoles (C2, despite being the most recently fitted out, seems to have the greatest quantity of ghosts in it). I think people managed round 5 (and no cheating!) which is pretty good for fresh cadets. We were a little down on numbers as several people have been hit by various lurgy and injuries (not at the hackspace!) but fear not – there will be an appearance again soon so you can meet and experience the utter chaos that is SpaceHack . On reflection, the maintenance of SpaceHack is very representative of the quality of the starship it aims to simulate…
Hackspace eventsSpaceHack