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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Posted 2011.11.18@14:33:05
Ohm Base was recently interviewed by CBQ Radio, and the audio linked highlights some of the fun discussions we had with Amy Hadley when she came to visit our space. Members Chris Riley, Ryan Skanes, Greg Toombs, and Cory Koski talked about their projects and what they believe Ohm Base Hackerspace means for our local community. Thanks to CBQ and our members for putting on a great interview!
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Community Open House This Saturday 10am-5pm!
Just a reminder that we’re hosting an open house at our new location on Saturday, November 19th, 2011 at the Thunder Bay Centre of Change (old Hillcrest Highschool). We’ll have lots of neat activities and demos to see, as well as refreshments and DIY paper toys to make! Come check out our new space, and meet the members that make it all possible!
Posted 2011.11.17@20:26:44 -
Posted 2011.11.17@20:24:39
A gamepad-controlled Nerf gun turret, constructed by one of our members!
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Ohm Base’s free night each Tuesday at 5:30pm
Tuesdays are Ohm Base’s designated “free” night, where you can come and check out the space and meet some of the other members. Come to the Thunder Bay Centre of Change at 5:30pm, and see our lab located here. We usually meet between 5:30pm-7pm, and there’s always a cool discussion going on. We welcome visitors, potential members, old members, family of members, and anyone else that is just plain old curious about the lab space and what we do to come and check it out.
See you there!
— Cory
Posted 2011.10.11@16:05:18 -
You can now "Like" us on Facebook!
Posted 2011.10.04@20:00:44
We’ve created a fan page on Facebook so people can keep up-to-date with the latest activities of Ohm Base. If you like cool community projects, like our page so we can keep you in the loop.
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We’ve moved in!
Just to let everyone know, we’ve finally moved into the Thunder Bay Centre of Change! Weekly meetings are still 5:30pm on Tuesdays, and newcomers are welcome. Come in and check out our new space!
— Cory
Posted 2011.10.04@19:36:00 -
Move In Progress! People needed to fill extra space.
So we’re into September now, and we’re making the transfer to the new space (Hillcrest Highschool) as we speak. It’s an ongoing process, but we hope to be complete in ~2 weeks. In the meantime, give us a visit at our Balmoral location. We’re still busy at work there, building gadgets and geeking out with the best of them.
We’ve decided to be generous and give referral discounts! That’s half off your first month’s membership to the referrer and referred. If you’re back to school this week, that’s a membership of $12.50 for the first month ($25 if you’re not a student.. Lucky working class).
And the big news I’m excited about: We’re getting PCB etching equipment! Fancy stuff too! Hurrah for PCB fabrication! Surface mount stuff is so much easier to find than through-hole, and now we can do both! We bought a drill press a few weeks ago for those who don’t know. Exclamation! (we’ll know the details of it all on Friday)
Welcome to those new guys who showed up this week. Glad to have some fresh faces aboard!
-Taylor
Posted 2011.09.15@16:54:23 -
Welcome to July! We still haven’t moved!
Hello everyone, time for another blog update. June has been very exciting for Ohm Base. We welcomed a few new members in this month, bringing us up to 17. We’re getting extremely close to a 20 member milestone! We’ve been working on our community-building skills, getting introduced to several companies and groups in town. Whenever we get into our new location (it has to be soon, right?) we’re planning a big open house fundraiser event to make a big equipment purchase, so stay tuned for more news on that front. We have a few members imminently close to completing RepRap 3d printers, so soon we will be able to print wonderful little plastic whatevers. Jon’s (nearly?) finished his kegbot, and a test of it (for members) is planned for next weekend, along with our member BBQ. Jordan and a few other members are still hunting kijiji for Power Wheels toys to turn into racing machines for upcoming Power Racing Series events, which we intend on competing in. This and a bunch more individual member projects are being worked on at Ohm Base right now.
We are also looking for ideas for some upcoming competitions and DIY events. The summer will be the perfect time to do some exciting competitions, so at our meetings and online we’re keeping our minds open for some event ideas. Let us know.
We still don’t have a theme for Thursday Night Workshops for July, but we’ll come up with something on Tuesday.
The logo competition is in full effect on facebook right now. Members and friends of Ohm Base are invited to submit logos until Tuesday, July 5th, so get your ideas together. For 1 week after the deadline, we’ll be voting on the logos that we like, and finally picking one so we have something to represent ourselves. After we get the logo nailed down we can start spreading more physical information around to potential members and keep the community growing.
Finally, welcome to all the Lakehead University Summer Transition students! A few of our members, myself included, went out with you on the orientation activities today and we met a few people interested in joining. We’ll love to have you, and we encourage anyone interested in checking the place out to come during our weekly member meetings, Tuesdays at 4:30. We’re currently camping out on the second floor of the 1294 Balmoral Building, which is immediately south east of the university (in the same block of land). Come by on Tuesday and make yourself known. If you can’t make it on Tuesday, you’re welcome to come by anytime. There are usually a few members in there hacking away on projects on weekdays. Give the lab a call at our temporary number (807.768.6684) before showing up to see if someone’s in, and they’ll let you up and show you around. Also be sure to join our facebook group, that’s where a lot of communication takes place (for now, anyway…)
That’s all for now. With any luck, in the next week we’ll know more about our move-in to the new hackerspace location. Until then, stay tuned and keep hacking the good hack.
~Kris
Posted 2011.07.03@23:27:00 -
June Schedule Updates!
We have a new workshop series starting this week. The basic electronics workshops in May went off well enough that we’re going to continue. We’re trying to mix it up, hardware and software, so for June we’re doing Linux. Anyone interested in setting up, maintaining, and doing anything useful with a Linux machine is welcome to join us. Even Mac OS X users could learn some terminal skills, as many things will apply for the Mac as well. Workshops are, just like last time, Thursdays 17:00-19:00. Free for members, of course, and $10 for the month for our non-member friends.
This Friday, June 3 12:00-14:00, we have a tour/information capture session at the new location in the Thunder Bay Centre of Change. Members are invited to come and check it out and help us take measurements, notes, pictures, and gather all the info we need to know for our move in. Contact Ben Lucyk on facebook, or via email [benl at ohmbase.org] for more information if you need it, or just show up at noon on Friday.
Finally, speaking of the Centre of Change, the new quoted move-in date is July 1st (Ed. This never happened). If all goes according to plan, we’ll be in our new permanent location around then. Fingers crossed!
~Kris
Posted 2011.05.31@12:49:00 -
Posted 2011.05.20@16:36:08
Hi everyone, Kris here. I just wanted to share with our faithful readers what’s been going on in the past week at Ohm Base. Here’s what I’ve been working on recently.
The first picture is a bench supply, made from a scrapped ATX power supply. The leads are: -12V, -5V, Gnd, +3.3V, +5V, and +12V. There’s a nice switch on the back of that power supply (rare these days!) so you can turn it off and on.
Next is an arduino driving display on a television. This one isn’t really our work, it’s just the sample code for the TV-Out library, but we’ve got plans for some cool uses for it in the future. It runs from the arduino itself, and only 2 resistors. Monochrome NTSC video from a MCU with no special hardware!
Finally, today I had a friend of mine bring in a broken iMac. It’s one of the first Intel machines. It wouldn’t respond to the power button: the power supply was dead. I figured out how to tear the whole thing apart. That as a first for me, and a useful skill since I have the same iMac. With permission from the owner, I figured out a free solution. After determining the voltages required for the board (only 12V, actually) I snipped the power supply wires and fed them through the air vent on the back of the machine. A molex connector from an old hard drive and some quick soldering, and the whole iMac now plugs in just like a drive to any normal PC power supply. I cut the rest of the wires from the supply and tidied it up for delivery. Not exactly Apple-chic, but it boots!
Another thing a few of us have been working on is our arduino RFID door access system for our new location. We don’t want to cut keys for every member, so we’re building up a custom entry system using RFID tags. It’s not quite ready for show-off yet, but when we finish it it will have ethernet access to notify the server of activity, USB-based configuration, and all kinds of fun custom features.
That’s it for now, thanks for reading!
Kris
