Triple Cities Makerspace

Members of the Triple Cities Makerspace recently completed the largest group project undertaken at the Space in quite some time, in collaboration with the Magic Wheelchair organization and an independent artist in Cortland, NY named Crystal Lyon. This project was the creation of a Halloween costume for a child afflicted with cerebral palsy, who lives with his family in Cortland. The child, Jacob Eldred, has never been able to take part in any Halloween festivities due to his condition, although…

Erik Leonard has been a proud Binghamton homeowner for a couple of years now, and in that time has substantially remodeled many different portions of his house. One recent project of his was reworking the closet in his bedroom, which was large but not easily accessible and had a lot of unusable space. Erik wanted to make better use of this space within a reasonable budget, and as a Maker decided that he would try to make his own built-in closet organizer based on his specific needs and…

Access Control Systems (ACSs) are used by many organizations, whether commercial or non-profit, as a means of providing scalable access to facilities or systems with finer degrees of control and fewer physical management problems than keys. When Triple Cities Makerspace (TCMS) moved into the old Spool Manufacturing building in Johnson City, NY back in 2013, the board wanted to provide members with 24/7 access to the new facilities using RFID tags and a computerized tag…

On June 29th., 2019, four members of Triple Cities Makerspace launched, tracked, and recovered a high-altitude balloon.

The balloon used was a 600-gram weather balloon filled with around 100 cubic feet of helium.

The payload consisted of: an HD video camera, an APRS radio transmitter to transmit GPS and altitude data, and a Slow Scan TV transmitter.

Rasa Spa in Ithaca recently opened a new location in Watkins Glen, and they asked Makers in the general area for help in making a custom sign, which would have their name and logo made out of sheet metal with a warm copper finish. I reached out to them, and they were happy to work with me.

My original approach was to cut out the logo and letters out of 24 gauge aluminum with a nibbler, but the marketing director at Rasa wanted to have a sturdy, long lasting sign. So I asked Cliff…

Triple Cities Makerspace is one of many organizations in the Binghamton area which – among other things – aims to provide one or more kinds of public service; in the case of the Makerspace, its public service is typically educational, but we also have taken on the creation of a variety of specific projects for other such organizations. One of these organizations is The Binghamton Philharmonic, a local professional symphony orchestra which puts on performances of a variety of classical and…

A few months ago I had the opportunity to participate in something called a “fox hunt” – or a hidden transmitter hunt – with the Binghamton Amateur Radio Association (BARA). This activity brings together a group of people to find a radio transmitter which has been hidden and is broadcasting on a specific frequency; they are tasked with finding the transmitter based on radio signal strength, which is usually accomplished by using a directional antenna, such as a yagi antenna. The term…

I’ve recently acquired my amateur radio license (technical level) and joined the Binghamton Amateur Radio Association (BARA). BARA is based out of the Kopernik Observatory and Science Center, and among their fairly extensive collection of equipment is a 2 Meter Band Yaesu radio connected to a computer with a Terminal Node Controller (TNC), which performs digital repeating for their instance of APRS (Automatic Packet Reporting System). I worked on a project to migrate their current setup to a Ras…

To celebrate Cosmonautics Day on April 12th, the International Space Station began transmitting slow scan tv images related to the Interkosmos project from April 11th-14th, using a Kenwood TM-D710 transceiver located in the Russian ISS Service module which broadcasted on the frequency 145.800 MHz. I found out about this event from an amateur satellite radio organization called amsat; and with my new interest in radio image reception, I planned to attempt to make contact with the ISS and decode…

I’ve always been a space geek, interested in astronomy and cosmic travel.  Recently I’ve become obsessed with a new space-related hobby – downloading images of the Earth as signals from weather satellites! I call this hobby “selfies from space” because the images are created in real-time; if the images’ resolution were greater and you had the ability to zoom in sufficiently, then you could see me standing outside with my antenna capturing the images.

I first became interested in this hobby…