Blog

20140326
TAMI phone works once again!

20140322
tami github here

20140321
cat!! cat!!

20140315
Jonathan has invented spiegelskates!!

20140306
Kostas from ASD fame came in to show some mind-blowing pieces from the demo scene.

20140224
rgb addressable leds connected to raspi (tamipi) movie

20140224
solar charger constructed

20140224
low freq speaker driving movie

20140219
Restart_Party great success, lots of new faces. stuff that got sorted
 * stereo system
 * speakers set
 * gps module
 * laptop (70%)
 * vacaum cleaner

panorama

20140130
4th installment of Dr. Norbert's awesome hands on series - this time, surface finishing with linseed oil, shellac, and dyeing, plus some blade sharpening. Hackerspace gained a shellaced dish and silverware cabinet. Moty bought a 2.4X1.2m plywood sheet for a 2nd level over main computer table. Jeremy constructed the feminist axe

20140113
Dror Z of electric dance floor fame is at it again, this time with a solar furnace that doesn't require the user to lug around a parabolic dish and cook outside - he's taking cheap (40nis!!) vacuum tubes (double-walled long test tubes with selective radiation coating - blackbody for visible and whitebody for uv - israeli invention no less)

and running them into a house  which has an oven on the wall

the tubes are jazzed by a parabolic trough

which the metalworking guru at ademama is shaping now



The oven is classic french chef style - a big pot of water retains heat and you put pots to heat into the big pot. stay tuned for performance reports from the field

20131118
after a long hiatus here's another blentry (blog entry) I did a bit of planting in a 6" pvc tube (usually used for sewage) put in front of south windows. We cut 4cm holes every 10cm or so on the top of the tube for plants to stick their heads out while reducing evaporation as much as possible. A second smaller diameter tube was put inside the big tube, to hold a volume of water along the lines of 'self watering pot' systems. A water line connects to the inner tube to allow me to water straight to the inner tube, which also has a bunch of holes on the top to allow roots to drink from the water . Pics attached next steps - attach water line so i don't have to climb up to water.

unknown - whether water drainage is actually necessary. maybe waste products need to be removed continually? do plants produce waste that will hurt them? seems unlikely...



20130804
work done today, we (yufrair) populated the hive and moved the table to center, consolidating lots of boxes in the process http://imgur.com/a/BnLpb we also found this stash of 2011 KG45 photos! http://imgur.com/a/EOqxq

20130802
yakfir put together the 4X4 interlocking hive, which turned out a bit bigger than expected. http://imgur.com/a/3jiW9

20130731
First "Open Wednesday", mucho visitores. We went down to Yinon's place to pickup new behemoth hive shelves, to be assembled by kfir later this week. New router setup by Yuval. Daniel (friend of Yair's) stopped by and took some damn fine pictures.

20130730
Yuval A. brought in some goodies, Ofer and Jonathan are working on building a Rostok 3d printer.

20130724
The walls came tumbling down

20130720
Yuval's dad and he set up the 3phase electricity for the lathe and mill.

20130710
Yaki has been coming by a lot working on his baby-bottle-sterilizer. Yair is working on something top secret. Yonatan et al from Jerusalem/tentech finally came by!! They are first after a 3D printer, so they are doing some printed parts supplied by Moti whose ORCA IS FINALLY WORKING!!!! Hallelujah....jeez

Jeremy successfully filed a PCT patent app electornically, using one of the most user-unfriendly, incoherent, ass-backwards systems ever dreamt up by a coterie of evil programmers deep in the bowels of the World Intellectual Property Organization. Would that I am never again forced to use a 6-versions-out-of-date Firefox browser.

20130709
Alon, Yair, JR and Moti laid out the cable for the CNC and mill power (3phase). Electrician (Yuval's dad) will do the official stuff soon.

20130706
With much trepidation Frank took on the task of getting the reprap working. Filaments snapped and fingers burnt- it was a good 7 hours of playing. The extruder seems to be working a lot better (gears line up nicely and runs smoothly. Watch this space- hopefully you'll all be able to print.

20130701
The sun has set on a momentous day - Yair, Alon, Jeremy and one other fellow whose name escaped me, Alberto, the Electro-erosion owner, and another fellow ganged up on the mill and lathe - and won!!

20130629
Jeremy and ALon deconstructed the Mother of All Pallets to get about 5sqm of thick plankwood with which Jeremy and Yair built a decent section of floor above the mech room onto which was loaded a large amount of random and miscellaneous entities including but not limited to cable run cages, mystery pump, mother of all foldable chairs, 5 propane gas tanks of which 3 eventually made it to the 'on the way out' box by the door, ~10 square-section wood beams, giant sandpaper roll, about 10 bicycle tyres (outers, mostly mountain and a few road), giant fresnel lenses (from which a rather cool lampshade can be made as seen at kastiel), washing machine cylinder with heating elements, and so on. A bunch of stuff was tossed both from the mech room and over the glass room - many chairs, two fromm boxes, a zac box, etc. The cnc room was readied for bringing-on the mill and lathe by removing the brick shelves and black shelves. Yair went thru the woodpile and tossed a bunch of doubleplus ungood items.

Still to do in this direction - clean entrance area. Get bikes onto some kind of rack or otherwise stored. Get all of Moti's private stuff onto mech room 2nd floor. Get misc electronics boxes, printers, microwaves out of grey racks and onto mech room 2nd floor.

Kfir came by - your cabinet door is in cnc room under guy&guy cnc.

20130625
This actually happened a few months ago - amitai doing some unsupervised highly unconventional woodworking operations with a drillpress and angle grinder. The product is an endcap for the long 6" sewer pipe now hanging by the windows and hopefully hosting a crop of edible goods.

20130618
Alon and Jeremy went to kikar habima again to demo the magbots to ch. 10. We did a run, then the tv guys wanted more footage. In the meantime the tankbot suffered a direct hit from an enemy shell, and the metal mag plate started scraping kadishman (who was personally and honorably asked if he was ok with the statue being defaced by our bots - there is apparently a signed letter of consent floating around the iriya somewhere with our and kadishman's name on it, surely worth thousands...) so we pulled off the plate, now working again..but a motor burned out! with minutes left of daylight we dashed up to yair's place, fixy fixy and back down but the lame tv guys were already in their pajamas. video here

20130615
The funfun fanzine festival came to town, and we did some wall projection and ronen did a performance art piece involving getting run over by an army of RC cars for several hours...

20130611
Hila and Amitai conspired to figure how to get residential or other arnona instead of business. yuval got interviewed by our the TAMI biographers...Channel 10 wants to film the mag robots, will yair return in time to have them ready? stay tuned!!!

20130609
Jeremy tried to get a DHT11 going using the adafruit library - either the unit is fried or I'm doing something wrong, I got 'NaN' results despite some wrangling. I'll try the other temp sensors from yair's 37-in-one box [[File:37inone.jpg|200px] since all i really need is temp.

20130608
Vatil  came by for a monthly BenGurion control tower sim - I like Vatil because

1. they prep beforehand,

2. they do cool stuff,

3. they teardown afterwards.

Its the pilot training that does it.

Moti has encountered some probs in his orca - the hobbed bolt bites thru the filament due to extreme backpressure while attempting to print fast - solutions would apparently be

1. to print slower,

2. to print hotter,

3. to replace the extruder.

20130605
Yair, Hila, Kobi made appearances. Jeremy and Noam worked on some telephony stuff. Daniel came to sleep in Alon's bed. Upcoming event - the fun fun festival

20130603
Yair came by and got two steppers running under some OS drawbot sw. Ori came by to show off his collapsible cardboard elephants. And a battery rejuvenation project was started  - a bunch of thinkpad battery packs got ripped open and the cells are currently being charged.

20130525-27
lots of action at kikar habima, where the symphony did a shindig i honor of going to its new home and we participated - magnetic robots climbed the kadishman statue, some beads were stochastically beaded onto bracelets, addressable LEDs were addressed, TAMICOLA was not drunk, and white lab coats were distributed to the faithful.

20130505
A meeting run by yuval on some sort of linux analyzer of ham radio signals system.

bamboo drone

historical CO2 levels

20130504
Yuval and the IL ground crew from VATIL had a bengurion airport groundstation session. virtual air traffic simulation event, pics here

20130411
solid works class

20130410
Meeting - HS issues - arnona, arrangement

20130401
Amitai, Yair, Moty, Yuval, Alon, and Guy all came by for extended periods and have renoberated the entire place. panorama The electronics is now on the S. wall of main space, storage rack made into L, hydro table against kitchen table, glass aquarium room cleaned, etc. etc.

20130309
TOm's hair paid a visit, he is busy setting up XLN haifa. as soon as they are ready we will set up the haifa-tlv rapid transport 'omega' system.

Yuval's brother came and set up a hydroponic system in record time for a final design project.

20130226-27
The place is finally organized enough  (try herefor panoramic action)  that people are actually able to work on projects instead of sidequests getting things in place. For instance Kobi's awesome 3d surface-creating-thingy has been installed with only an hour sidequest to build a table for it. Check out the video. The idea is to build a surface map using the wooden dowels which are pushed by an actuator to apporximate surfaces captured for instance by kinect. No, its not done yet. Anyone who knows where to get a big thin rubber sheet let kobi know.

We got Moti's A2 file cabinet into place next to the electronics spot, and the tower of hanoi is on the way outta here making the electronics area a high-octane megalicious hyperhackzone.

Rob from england stayed a few days after his electrochemistry conference in sde boker. Some cool 3d art at the restaurant on florentine

20130220-25
Moti and Yair are promoted to the pantheon of hs heroes. A stairway to heaven and work-lights  from Yair. Combining the two shelf units yielded more shelf area therebetween. A pretty nice telescope has appeared. And the electronics area is starting to seriously shape up thanks in no small measure to a bunch of bins and boxes from Guy O.

20130217-19
In the last few days the space got a new look due to actual organizational progress, putting stuff in place, guy bringing a bunch of plastic bins, yair busting arse, and general mayhem as per not usual.

20130216
more hacking from resident hacker daniel - here with gf having x-cheek enhancement

leo put up an elephant totem in an undisclosed location

20130215
yair brought some humus a shelf got added to hold speakers that run music from the eee computer now receiving streaming audio. Some audio server details:

pax11publish -e -S meeep

PULSE_SERVER=meeep& mplayer...

20130215
Moti added a workbench to the mechlab. .

Daniel Golle came by and maxed out our wifi speed by turning down the transmit power from 500W (US standard) to 50W (more than enough for devices to see), increasing transmit speed due to lower noise apparently.

We have been given some ipv6 addresses by signing up on hurricane electric's tunnelbroker.

2001:470:7038::/48 is our /48 prefix

2001:470:7038:cOf3::/64 TAMI LAN,

2001:470:7038:cOf3::1 is the OpenWrt router, aka outsideworld.tami

To not accidentally expose insecure local services to the global IPv6 internet, the firewall of the router limits incoming connections to only some specific ICMP and TCP/UDP port 1024 or higher. It probably makes sense to specifically allow TCP port 22 for incoming SSH, so machines inside the TAMI network can securely be accessed via SSH from everywhere on the IPv6 internet.

In order to make also improve IPv4 connectivity, the TAMI LAN was moved from 192.168.1.0/24 to 10.81.2.0/24, mainly to avoid address space collisions. 10.81.2.0/24 is also part of the RFC1918 private range, however, 10.81.0.0/16 has been reserved for arig.org.il in the global DN42 overlay address space. In this way, TAMI can soon have NAT-free endpoint-to-endpoint IPv4 connectivity with the networks of other hackspaces all over the world.

I started uploading pics automatically to a google group tami, only because a panorama viewer is available  - https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/instantupload/5842292184817947058

20130101-0214
we successfully moved a few long tonnes of materiel the 200m from ba19 to kg45. David Ruzicka from cz stayed a bit after travelling to IL in the wake of falling in love with an israeli girl. never do that btw.

We are slowly getting the new place organized

We had a meeting on the 12th about what goes where, consensus was more or less reached.

20121217-23
сheck out yair's fantasy-land of robotic mystery. all @ brvrbt

humbeling robo-action from (the amazing) JMEM here

20121216
The Arig guys came over - Daniel, Yuval, Amitai, plus Moti and Alon were here, the girl Alon is teaching to program, and maybe some others I've forgotten. For some reason the Arig meeting was rather fractious. Personally I'd like to set up a link bet. current space and new space, its line of sight and down the street. There was some interest in setting up an arig at a communal farm in the south.

Some intstng stuff from our neighborhood

20121205-15
Moti has fixed a bunch of PCs over the past few days, and Gilad brought over a few LCDs and HDs - between all this we now have three or four more working systems.

Assi from Haifa came over to pay maximum respect to the hackerspace before we move to the new place.

20121205
Yesteday we had a few things happen:
 * contract for the next location was signed, in Kibbutz Galuyot 45, gush 7112, plot 144, subplot 60. This is a larger place, better facilities (2! bathrooms), moving in 1.1.2013, we will need everyone's help!


 * Lior and Elad gave two great talks about Debian and Fedora packaging respectively.NERDS1.jpgNERDS2.jpgNERDS3.jpg


 * Moti has become a confirmed nitinolcoholic. nitin1.jpgnitin2.jpg Leo and Jeremy discovered that providing the 'recovery force' of ~1kg allows consistent operation of 'flexinol', allowing the macho guys to flex muscle wire while the nerds get all kubunted. He succeeding in bending spacetime at the end:nitin3.jpgfrommwarp.jpg

Beware of devil cat!!!
 * We had a visitor from base48!dubious.jpgdubious2.jpg He shines his shoes with his toothbrush as one can discern from the shirt. They seem to be doing fine managing projects without semantic media wiki, and their wiki has create account enabled (with some captcha), and their main site is a wordpress, and they have an active irc channel, and a working reprap.. (/me goes to cry).

20121201
Cleaned the place, lets keep it clean. That means you, dirty-boy. Alon came by and spent the day programming with a hangover from doing the robot-dance till the breaka breaka dawn at an exclusive TLV discotheque. J put up another elect. outlet and a rusty steel shuriken door symbol.

20121125
Frank&Yair got a 'husqvarna' sewing machine, somewhat less macho than the gas-powered 2-meter extreme stump-logging 8hp chainsaw that husqvarna also makes, but better for darning socks.

20121123
Yair made a ckt to control a servo using the output of an LDR (light dep. resistor) to turn the servo by changing a voltage controlling the 'control' pin of a 555 ckt doing variable-duty-cycle pwm going into the servo. The servos want 20Hz and a signal bet. 1ms and 2ms 'on' to go thru the entire angular range. One question without clear answer was - whats the expected range of the servos we have? some places list 90deg, others claim 180 for the same make and model...

20121115
Finished putting in parquet floor in annex. J has discovered a hidden talent, namely the ability to cut extremely straight lines with the bandsaw. Once this was worth something...

20121117
Went to fablab Holon w. Yair and Eytan the trapeze artist - there's a giant CNC that Ohad is taming.

Apparently these are popping up all over the place - maybe one soon in tlv. The idea is you buy a bunch of mit-approved eqpt and collab with other fablabs around the globe, since everybody has same eqt everyone can share recipes. The cnc is $25000, laser cutter prob another $20 easy.

20121115
Dr. J got Moti's ups running off a 220-110 xformer running a resistor divider to hit 70V after rectification to fake the battery array - works fine at 0.5A from the UPS using a 160Ohm power resistor but on putting it to a real test using the giant potentiometer/oven shown in pic, it seems the ups takes a sec. or two to kick crank out the amps, during which the  50,000uF of caps drains low enough that the ups goes into panic/shutdown. So we need more caps.

20121113
Dr. J conjured this ckt which in practice looks like this  for a 70VDC supply. I blv the resistors will need to be beefed up since I'm over the power limit on discharge, tho the charge/discharge time constant is already ~15 minutes...1 fuse and 2 resistors released their magic smoke in the process of making this.

Alon went and got the contract from galuyot45, I think we all are intstd in moving there. Yesterday J & Y met with Yakov Gilat who mentioned the iriya may be able to donate large spaces not being used as long as we demonstrate community involvement.

Alon improved the webcam to show both depth and regular images. 10 hackerpoints to whoever makes a third image showing deltas, ideally fading with time and on a background of the current image. and/or an anim.gif of the last hr

20121110
We went over to Kibutz Galuyot 45

20121109
Frank, son of an electronics technician and hence extremely handy analog guy, came over and kickstarted the UPS stepmotor driver supply.

20121105
Leo came by and worked on a top secret project not involving gas centrifuges nor extraction of rare earth elements from seawater. An ancient plaque was discovered showing Fromm's ancestors engaged in useful labor(aka ancient yonxploitation). I managed to capture a blurry b&w photograph of the Yeti- Sasquatch- Bigfoot- The Abominable Moti, an extremely dangerous creature prone to shorting high voltage leads together and attracted to electronics benches. Searching for powersupply parts I got to 'siman tov' electronics (03-9215005 wolfson 61) where they had a selection of discrete components, electronics boxes and the like - seems pretty good.

Over the wknd we spotted the worlds smallest handicapped sign guy and a murder scene  where four rectangular aliens met their end, apparently by steamroller.

Our wattometer is now online.

20121104
jeremy's top secret lair got a floor and wall - noise considerably abated

future plans - will hs move to abulafia? will we amutize?

hacking plans in pre-execution limbo - freedom box/arig mesh networking, kinect->3d modelling

udi is gonna give an fpga masterclass

20121029
Ta Mi got a projector

new back burner project - supercap using graphite oxide electrodes w. graphene electrolyte dvd lightscribe makes supercap

20121028
Guy came over yesterday and soldered this surface mount Vishay Hbridge chip to a breakout board Yair brought - hopefully we can wangle some H bridges this week, and get Stephanie running a bit.

with the inclusion of an elderly macmini (10.04 osx) next to the reprap winXP machine. we now have all major operating system represented



20121026
Alon decided to protect himself from stray EM fields using a Chinese variant of the tinfoil hat

20121025?
Sefi came over and we got to check out his hexacopter

20121020-23
A lot of action lately at ye olde hackerspyce. Yesterday Hanan, Alon, Yair, Yair's friend Der Snappler, and Kfir were about and up to their usual nefarious ways:. Here, Der Snappler threatens Kfir with the Diarrhinga-Finga. The claw-hammer in Kfir's left hand is thankfully not visible to the easily-offended readership. Your narrator's feet in the foreground attest to his admirable 'live and let fight' attitude.

Kfir, while not occupied protecting his honor, is in the meantime forging ahead with Stephanie.

The cupcape is finally getting back into shape, as is the reprap; there was apparently a firmware switch that got by us and as soon as that's sorted the new extruder from Sefi can get to work.

20121017
Alon set up the webcam, I can't figure out how to embed that pic here so you'll have to go click the link

20121015
Kfir rigged up this ka-razy koolaid system for drilling thru a SST gear so that it will fit the 14mm diameter of our stepmotor shaft, all for the Big_CNC.

Lior came by with a board from his 1992 Roland Synthesizer from 1992 that had two problems:


 * - The power female plug is old and when connecting to electricity works only if you touch it with the finger in certain angle
 * - The power switch connects the circuit only if pressed fully to the end. If I just press it, it goes back to the middle (as it should) and does not close the circuit.

We set him in front of the soldering station and he got the bugs squashed in due time - he shorted the switch closed, and replaced the barrel connector.

I met this fellow Danzig, an industrial designer who is responsible for these awesome 8020/unit style modular streetposts. Contrary to my initial supposition these are actually an Israeli invention, not an import, and are produced by some extrusion shop in Arad. Signs/lights/etc can be atached to modular connectors that slide up and down the post and are anchored with bolts as in the 8020 extrusions we use for our cnc's and electornics workbench, on a larger scale.

20121013
A bunch of folks showed - Alon, Yair, Yair's friend Dr. Vladimir Shnellznoph (inventor of the foldable chicken souffle), Galia of the Sonic Screwdriver, etc. etc.

Shnellznoph spent an evening in entropic wilderness, using energy to deplete disorder by sorting a bag of capacitors that, like a cornucopia, contains an endless supply 2.6Kg of unsorted caps. .

Tami's Tamibar got a once-over

Kfir did some precision drilling

20121212
Kfir and J worked on Stephanie, while Kfir's Kohorts worked on the new reprap extruder kindly forked over by Sefi

20121010
We had a big ol party to the greatest hits of 1984 Alon was actually tapping his foot slightly, indicating extreme enjoyment: and we tried out my new silvered 'safety' goggles. Stephanie the CNC is growing a y stage, the reprap is getting a new extruder, and another computer is getting put into the electronics area. Alon seems to be working on the webcam or rewriting TCP/IP or something. I can never tell and somehow he manages to talk too fast for me to process, like his brother Hanan, leading me to suspect that sufficient brains for triplets wound up getting distributed to twins. Hanan meanwhile suggested theShocken computer as a continuing project. Kfir turned me onto Ben Krasnows blog. This wood sailboat is only 400,000 NIS, otoh the concrete submarine can be built for a song and a few tons of concrete. Lastly: Why doesn't our place look more like ?

20121008
Shahar Dolev and a few others came by to discuss an opensource car project. We decided to try to join wikispeed, and build their basic setup if possible. Shahar is holding out for a design for a fourseater than can be separated into two motorcycles to solve the problem of the single commuter in a big car. Jeremy thinks its possible but likely to introduce serious difficulties and so we might as well start off with the wikispeed standard model - if its a fourseater.

20121004
Yonxploitation continues with floor cleaning, reorganization, and generally moving matter from place to place while tossing the useless and wiping surfaces. Check it out:





J went to Sefi's XLN hackerspace and he set us up with excellent reprap extruder head parts and pc's if we want them.

Lev Eliezer Israel may be cranking up another hackerspace possibly in j'lem -  check it out

20121003
It finally happened...the electronics table is clean...we can declare victory over entropy at long last. Fromm gets 3000 hackerspace points

20120928-20121002
RETURN OF THE MOTI-LEVY. Dr. Fromm, Moti and Alon were discovered, upon my return from points north for the Feast of Tabernacles, having revamped, refibulated, and renoberated the entirety of our commodious quarters. Behold!

The new kitchen 2.2 - note Tami's Tami The new kitchen again The ultimate peacetime war-room command center The ultimate peacetime war-room auxiliary command center Moti's 3d printer pc nexus The refurbished and upgraded wymyn-friendly chillout zone complete with sitting accomodations, standing room, and sleeping-enabled couch-age. I have been searching for the ultimate IDE after having installed Eclipse, and ran acrost this baby {WARNING NERD JOKE AHEAD}. And finally, it appears that Jeremy has discovered the 'effects' menu item in 'irfan' his favorite image proc. prog.

20120921-20120922
Sefi came by and:
 * fixed dremel head
 * got latest software for mendel onto my laptop
 * attempted to resuscitate several computers - no single working unit seems to be cropping up and this is work that I (jeremy) can't stand - so if someone would step up to the plate...
 * did some hob-nobbing sefihob.jpg
 * 'welded' some plastic extruder bits together sefiweld.jpg with heat from soldering iron

A new form of worker oppresion called 'yonxploitation' has been implemented whereby yonatan fromm is forced to clean the bathroom until it shines with platinum splendor.

Leo has been working on a top secret project involving pressure sensors, liter bottles of water, a datalogger, and the human bladder. Here he basks in the climate controlled splendor of the hackerspace afternoon light.

20120918
Yair, Moti, Leo came by. Leo and Jeremy finished off the variable powersupply, which can blast a length of nitinol wire to its melting point. Moti fixed a 12V powersupply for the RGB LEDS Yair brought from China which are now up and look AWESOME in their epilepsy-inducing glory. Yair and Moti then cracked open the new PCs we got from Kfir's friend and started adding some necessary guts like hd's and powersupplies. We now have another good desktop, we just need to reinstall linux and/or windows of some vintage. Hannukah Harry can bring Jeremy these gloves

20120912-20120915
Leo, Kfir, and Moti came by, Leo finished off the dc powersupply after j managed to blow the ammeter which is a shame since it was a nice old-school russian one. It should take 30amp and got fried by 8 but otoh it was connected directly to voltage (i forgot the voltmeter terminals are above the vmeter and the ammeter terminals are above the ameter) and it is of course meant to drop less than 75mV. Anyway more deets at. It turns out Moti is pretty handy with a sewing machine. We went to the beach Sat. and he had these hammocks he made. We should get a sewing machine and get busy.

Kfir continues his assault on [Stephanie]

20120912
I went the XLN opening at 166 Yigal Alon - this guy Sefi seems to be expert on 3d printers, he said he'd come by sometime to get ours in shape. Their place is smaller than ours but has money from 'machon reut' which is an ngo of some sort. They had free wine, the mayor spoke, and the girls were from n. america.

Yair came by with a big bag o' loot including but not limited to:


 * grab bag of about 3000000 caps which yair amazingly sorted
 * webcam of noble vintage
 * bunch of solarpowered address lights (will emergency services be able to see YOUR address when every second counts??)
 * RGB LED strip!!!
 * box of ~50 sensors for everything under the sun
 * bunch of lm338 5amp current/voltage regulators
 * etc

20120912
Yair checked the conductivity of dirt for the [windowfarm], he wanted to do an auto-water jig maybe along these lines

20120910
Motors arrived via DHL for Stephanie the CNC. These are three NEMA34 8Nm bohonkin stepmotors that can barely be stepped by hand, about 3kg each, 8.5cmX8.5cmX15cm. Maybe overkill - but we'll have a table that can push stuff around with some serious force.

20120908
Jeremy nearly finished his floor. Alon came by after GeekCon and built a rollout shelf  for the laptop to go under the West work table and we made some [windowfarming] units  using string, plastic bottles, and wooden dowels. This is regular dirt growing highly advanced 'dirt-ponics' as opposed to hydroponic which many seem to use. More details at

20120907
Leonardo came by and we worked on Nitinol a while. It became apparent we need to control current carefully, thus we started building a basic powersupply. The from-scratch model I had about had a blown xformer so we started with a PC ATX and built the following Frankenstinian object:. All that's missing is a Jacob's ladder and organ music. Since its coming from a PC ps I was thinking to use the meters at 'user discretion', ie have inputs to the meters come out to bananas on the front and allow user to connect whatever ps output (12V, 5V, 3.3V, -5V, -12V, and one variable coming from an LM 338 connected to 12V and a pot) to whatever meters (volts, amps) he wants. Reasonable?? more at []

20120904
Pavel&co came by to work on the portable vortex generator for Geekcon 2012. IT seems to have grown an arduino and some motors which is a good sign. Leonardo and a friend came by and we worked a bit with nitinol shape memory alloy, which is a bit mysterious. The stuff is a springy metal that likes to go back to its original form, like a spring. The trick is when you heat to ~400-500C the material will assume whatever form it happens to be in - this is the new 'desired shape'. Now if you distort (at RT), the stuff will try to spring back to the new shape. If you heat to ~80C, it will do so even more - I think. So the point IIUC is you are changing the spring constant by heating a little, and changing the equilibrium shape when heating to 400. If we can master this stuff there a many interesting possibilities - see the MIT worm.

Kfir came round and got an arduino running some TIL311 led matrix displays - these are like 7 segment displays except they take a 4 digit binary number and display the number in hex, so four lines gets you a hex digit (as opposed to a 7segment display where you need the 7 lines for a digit). Anyway this is for a handmade watch. The nixie tube is a cool variant display, i wonder if you could bend optic fibers into each of the 10 or 16 digits and drive each with a dedicated LED for the same kind of effect but without the high voltage and low efficiency

20120903
Long time no update, not from lack of stuff going on. Your humble narrator has been to budapest and has seen the light. This week has seen some preparation for Geekcon 2012 Tron and the MCP worked on their tomato-picker - Guy & Co. worked on a plastic mold pressure jig

somewhere in between 0821 and 0903
Our aircon water output has been routed into a planter box on the ledge below our west windows. The box has a 2-3 liter bucket that fills, the plant drinks from the bucket by means of a bunch of wicks leading from bucket to dirt around plant. But the ac water output overflows the bucket.

20120821
Yesterday Alon returned from Yerp and installed a Tor server, which is a coincidence as I was just reading about them (assange->wikileaks->cryptome->anonymous publishing). He will be putting up the details at some point, somewhere. He donated another laptop too.

Guy^2 came and got their cnc servos going. These are serious frikkin motors, 400W each and spinning extremely fast. Long story short its a good thing they have an emergency stop button and even better thing the cnc has mechanical stops past which the x-stage cannot travel (are there similar stops on the y and z?)

Jeremy has been busy learning to code for the android, pretty fun after all the ide bugs got unkinked.

Last wk Kfir brought another desktop computer he donated and did a bunch of work on the CNC.

20120813
Guy^2 and Kfir worked on cnc's which I name percival and stephanie, respectively. stephanie got the x-axis  assembled, now need to add x-motor mounts to bothsides. Since geometry is starting to matter i began a google sketchup drawing before giving up to go use rhino or solid.

20120810
Kfir and I were getting some stuff from the toolshop around the corner and passed these guys coming into the downstairs door. Kfir went back to see wtf they were up to, which was going thru the stuff stashed on the third floor landing 'looking for our electric bike...have you seen any black dudes around here?' Anyway when confronted they 'left' (one hiding under the stairs until Kfir was like 'uhhh...i'm not blind dude'. So K came and got me from the store and I went looking for the guys and took the attached pic which they did not like so much. Don't worry, the family jewels are intact despite attempts to the contrary.  Anyway long story short we filed a police report, their car # is 8155321 with I'd say 90% certainty, there were 3 of them with either real or well faked strong arab accents and a fine vehicle , white with blacked out windows and magnesium rims.

I'm trying to obtain another copy of the key to the downstairs door and will try to get Gila to fix the door hinge (again). We could also do the key cards on the downstairs door, maybe putting up some webcams (real or fake) would do some good too.

20120808
Yonatan S. came by to work on a lanyard-weaving machine, something similar to wonderweave

20120807
Kfir attached stephanie's rails to the table. Jeremy didn't do anything except realize kosta was right abt latent heat of vaporization needing to be extracted when cooling/condensing water.

20120806
K&J attached the aluminum plate to an iron table and worked on the x-rails of the white-trash cnc.

Two Guys came over (and Udi, and a fellow whose name escapes me); the Guys worked on the deluxe cnc , moving it near the east pillar, greasing the rails w. peanut butter, setting up the cable runs and hooking up electronics, and put solidworks and other associated files on the computer by the west pillar.

Udi has an intstng plan to make a light-seeking pv equipped robot using old hard disk (or floppy?) actuators, with pv output used for feedback; the fellow whose name I ungratefully forgot (he bought cola after all) lost his arduino virginity and caused some blinkenlights to blinken.

20120803-04
Some new shelves   got put up above the mech space for holding scrap, clearing the space below for somewhat more ordered stowage.

I discovered that our water boiler operates even when the red switch is off. I turned the little knob on the doodad on the bottom of the boiler to the other side and that seemed to stop the heating (I checked voltage on the heating elements to discover unwanted heating and verify the sol'n). Anyone who understands wtf is going on pls chime in.

20120730
Kfir and Jeremy worked on the mech corner - cutting off top of right table to make it into a new shelf (with other cut part from cnc table) on which metal and wood planks can be stashed. It gives more room to drillpress, circsaw etc. which were kind of hard to work with, and also the fluor. light can be put up under the new shelf where they're more useful. Idea came up of storage hanging from ceiling too, there's cement beams suitable for it. The circular saw can cut at angles which is nice.

20120729
Kfir fixed the bandsaw! Jeremy got down with his wet, hot self (nsfw version) and Yair painted the front door...which did not stop some thoughtful citizen from actually coming in at some point, pissing on our entrance floor, and leaving. We need to put up some kind of anti-urination device like a vortex plasma cannon that vaporizes urinators.

A good article from Lifehacker on how to acheive goals. Should sound familiar to a lot of us...

20120725
Pavel S and Lior came by to work on their Geekcon project which seems to involve a vortex cannon that blew my hat off.

20120722
J put up a toolboard by the northwest table. Alon was there, we went to this [http://barkayma.co.il/ coop veg. restaurant ,ברקיימה.]

20120721
Kfir sliced up a table for big cnc#2 (stephanie) and painted this big sheet of sandwich for a blackboard. Jeremy did a bit of work on his floor finally over the wknd, and got a sheet of mirror finish sst for Solar_powered_refrigeration/dehumidification. Eviatar Tron donated a bunch of eqpt after an apt. move: big disk, welding helmet, cf lights, big pile of drills, several pieces s&m eqpt (whip, paddle, crop), bunch of mcu dev kits (sbc's, avr dev stuff), breadboards, misc tools, awesome utility belt, etc.

New visitors - Salomon Chikule from Haifa, just out of the army with money in his pocket to blow in the big city, and Guy Weiss of Ashdod, car mechanic and electric vehicle enthusiast

20120717
Kfir took the always-on laptop and in a stroke of genius put it on the computer work space, its now the dj master control panel and webcam video absorber. He also randomly organized some m0re stuff after moving swapping some tables - the place is in grave danger of becoming clean and orderly. The aircon stopped working at one point after being on a few hrs, we tried changingthe batt but to no avail so we'll try a repairman asap, its pretty miserable w no ac. jonathan fromm where is your desiccator system? Hanan and Alon were here up to no good as usual. Eviatar T is threatening to unload some GM car-of-the-future stuff on us, I will go tomorrow ~1830 if anyone wants to join.

20120716
Kfir has hatched a plan to shame Guy into action - he and I are gonna actuate our cnc before he does...He is also bldg a balckboard from a whiteboard, prefers chalk to markers...too much time in school before waiting tables

20120714
The virgin flight of the bananabird - all black parts were printed on the cupcake. Supposed to be in an art exhibit, bezalel jlem on the 17th.

20120710
I was gone the wknd in Cyprus checking out a solar car race as Kedem Levy would like to do the same in IL. so i dunno what transpired, but the place remained pretty clean. Gila called this morning asking me to clear out the remaining stuff in the hallway and sweep, which latter I somewhat resisted since the cigarrette butts for instance are not gonna be ours and in fact were here since we came; same for damaged walls (including those apparently behind the piles of wood on the 1st floor). The holes in the wall are like the holes in the theory that we're responsible - good thing I have pictures to prove it in case Gila tries to stick us as responsible by pulling our arevut check when we leave (a favorite landlord hobby which I would guess is a Gila specialty). Interesting how she knows there are holes behind that stuff since she can't see behind it without moving it and there's little chance she moved 250kg of material just to look behind it and then moved it back.

20120705
Kfir put up the message box outside our door and mopped the floor, which is a historic first for the hackerspace. Then he went crazy and wiped off all the tables! Too much waiter work I think, the place is in danger of actually being clean. Guy Alon Moti and Jeremy went and got Guy's CNC and put it in the SE corner. There's another workbench free that Jeremy cleared off.

20120627
Alon and Yair worked on the cupcake. Yair had an idea for frisbee POV, I think a standard POV strip would do it but the position sensing is a little tricky, maybe with a mems gyro. Pavel and a friend came over to suss out their geekcon vortex autocannon. Jeremy got rid of all the wood that was cluttering up the middle of the room in an attempt to tidy before the mtng thurs nite. Hand tools are going into the tower of hanoi and on the worktable to its right.

20120618-20120626
lets see, a bunch of stuff this past week. Amitai F. who gave us the awesome scope came by with some folks whose names didn't stick - one is from the Leipzig hackerspace, he and the other fellow are hacking wireless routers for local networks, using eg the pringle can antenna discussed recently on the google group.

Alon and Moti nailed the cupcake pretty well. It can be improved in a number of ways tho personally i'll put whatever time i (jeremy) have leftover from tryin to keep the place in some kind of order, into getting the reprap going since imho its got more potential - bigger bed, opto stops, no wood, heated bed.

Jeremy is finally finishing a flooring project which hopefully is done in the next few days freeing up a bunch of space i've been wasting in the hs.

kfir came by with a crew doing some startup brainstorming, i donate my 5% cut for coming up with a dumb addon to their cool idea, to the hs for beer and cola in perpetuity.

Jeremy got roped into making a bananabird for this Bezalel student, actualy i just have to do the wing movements. Moti and Alon printed up a pretty nice planetary gear, and just in case i bought a windshield wiper reciprocating motor. I'll attach it to the 'rocker' mechanism from Yair's book of mechanical movements.

Somebody removed our front downstairs door from its hinges, Gila the landlady is supposed to fix. I got some climbing plants (jasmine etc) and Sarah VanWagenen and I brought some big boxes from yafo to plant on our balcony. I dunno if compost can be incorporated, i'd need some way to lower stuff down. the most that can fit thru the bars is a 1.5liter bottle...

20120615-20120617
Moti and Alon nailed some of the cupcake bugs. Yair put up a string of festive LEDs around one of the octopus legs. Jeremy imposed a degree of order on the mechanical space and the electrical space which are beginning to look like actual workplaces.

20120610
This fellow Kenny came by randomly - he's from Connecticut/Maine where he has an offgrid house on a lake, and his kids made aliyah so he was in IL and had heard of hackerspaces on NPR so looked up the new haven hackerspace and thru that I think found us - maybe here. Anyway he is into absorption refrigeration and also knows a lot of practical machining since he is a ship mechanic with the merchant marine - he is at sea for 3 months and takes 9 months off.

Something or another occurred and there now seem to be a few trees out front.

20120608-20120609
Uri & co came by and did some welding then reprapped. Yes, we have a sparkwelder and oxy torch - whoever brought those - thanks!!! Hanan and Dror also came round and observed the proceedings, and helped put up some kitchen shelves which took Jeremy about a day to finish - 2 shelves nice and sturdy. Moti came over at night and did some reprap stuff after giving a China update. Then he and Fromm came over Sat. noon for a serious day of work with Kfir showing up at around 1700 with food and energy. Yair came by around 9. The rest of the kitchen shelves were put up, and one section of grey rack was shifted to allow the CNC table that Kfir,J and Yair built to be put into the corner which is now officially the kfir korner for reprap and cnc activity. This all involved a buttload of work. Also kfir took down the crappy-sounding speakers and installed the Marantz amp with J's speakers making a nice system. We can go hyperphonic if we want, we have a zillion speakers. Apologies to Dima if we somehow have mstreated your speakers - imho they were in a nice safe place away from dust etc - Moti said D was po'd that the speakers were on side instead of upright? Place looks a bit better, next area of attack is the mechanical corner... FYI we now have a 2nd cupcake courtesy of Yocctar and a nice fat roll of extrusia  to go with it, now someone get it extruding willya? On 11.06.12 at 20:00 there will not be any activity concerning the street and some trees. Street thickness is more than I thought: And finally the chinese restaurant down the road painted their fence -

回乡偶书 coming home

少老离家老大回 I left home young and not till old do i come back,

乡音无改鬓发衰 My accent is unchanged,my hair no longer black,

儿童相见不相识 The children don\'t know me,whom i meet on the way,

笑问客从何方来 Where d\'your come from,reverend sir they smile and say.

20120602-20120606
The coop had a mtng.

Jeremy put up a

cable run finally getting rid of an annoying power line going on the floor. Also I attached long power strips to the column of the computer island, am on the way to fixing the last fluorescent in the mech table, and got rid of extraneous power strips on computer and mech tables cluttering things up. Fromm is planning a

greywater sink (hand-washing runoff goes into niagra falls).

Tom got an interesting daisy-chained unit with 8 8's, 8 leds, 8 buttons, and the ability to be connnected with other such devices in a chain.

20120530
The algotraders killed a bug. Jeremy put away a bunch of accumulated tools floating around and built 2 shelves into the closet in jeremyland. Lots of people want dataloggers, is there some way to do this using usb sticks? The arduino seems to want sd cards.

20120529
Lisa worked late. Jeremy added a 1/8" PL extension cable so people working in the center island can run music to the stereo system.

20120526
Jeremy and Yonatan Fromm got busy cleaning the crap (figuratively) out of the bathroom. Also some boards went up in the kitchen,  Shay's_webcam got connected, J+U's qr pixel board  got a step or two further, the toilet brush got reunited with its handle

--Jeremy.rutman 14:35, 26 May 2012 (PDT)

20120524
Daniel and Uri Corin came by and went nuts. Daniel started making a bunch of lasers while Uri displayed a learning curve that was more step-function than curve.





20120523
Uri and Alon hacked cyberspace. Alon helped Jeremy setup Shay's Haifa webcam; a dos shell script runs scp every n seconds sending a file shot by yawcam.exe to telavivmakers.org/new.jpg, and a cron job switches that to pic.jpg every few seconds as long as the file is complete (thus avoiding partial pictures).

20120522
Daniel, Rivi, Guy, and Daniels friend came round. Guy & J put up a few more of the grey shelves and a new chandelier for the 50W CFL annoying light. Daniel showed off his 100mW green laser, Guy measured output w. a laser power meter, and some electric circuits got made. J continued with his whacky liquid QR-code board.

20120521
Yair came by and made a chandelier out of a ped-xing sign, he& Alon got the cupcake a few steps closer to producing cupcakes

stage and fridge

Four tables and a column

We got too much stuff!

We organized!

We cleaned!