Join us on Friday, June 4th at 8pm for our second Hackathon! We will be going until everyone leaves, so bring some energy drinks and be prepared to hack all night!
Projects planned thus far:
Robotic Beer Cooler
If you have ideas please let us know!
The Facebook event page is here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=125837687443565
The hackerspace wall was awash with the faces of Eric Raymond, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman and others last night as we viewed Revolution OS. This film chronicles the rise of the Open Source and Free Software movements complete with some of their best successes and largest failures.
If you missed out, Revolution OS can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube.
Discussion remains to be had, particularly regarding the end, which may have been an end to the film but certainly was not an end to the story. We’re living the story, with things like Google Summer of Code and the ability to join or promote and endorse projects in creative and unique ways, we keep this story going.
Don’t hesitate, innovate! And check out Revolution OS; a groovy perspective on an interesting movement.
Join us on Saturday, April 3rd at 8pm for our first Hackathon! We will be going until everyone leaves, so bring some energy drinks and be prepared to hack all night!
Projects that HackRVA is sponsoring:
-RFID Access System
-Adventure-O-Matic by Clint Titsworth
-Luke Libraro will be working on the MakerBot
If you have any projects that you’re working on please bring them! We will be more than happy to assist you!
hack.rva held a class on the Arduino microcontroller on Saturday, February 27th. Almost 30 people came, and lots of learning occurred. Designed for complete beginners to programming and circuit construction, participants learned about wiring the Arduino, the basics of an Arduino sketch, digital input/outputs, Analog inputs/ outputs(PWM), conditional statements, functions, and much more. It was a jam packed 4 hour class, and one that we hope to do again soon.
Course materials are provided on the class page, found here, and are provided under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. Go nuts on them!
Also in the works is a more advanced class where we’ll teach servo control, taking input from sensors, DC motors and more, so be on the lookout. If you have any suggestions for the class, send us an e-mail or facebook message.
The powerpoint used for the class can be found here: Class Powerpoint
Sorry for the delay on this post but we had a couple people come on out for a remix manifesto. It was a very insightful movie and brought to light many problems with our copyright system in the US. I must say it was a very convincing argument for the open source movement and illustrated what hardships artists like Girl Talk face now and in the future. It’s hard to know exactly where to draw the line with copyrighting because the original purpose of a copyright was to promote innovation and ideas; however, with powerhouses like the RIAA taking advantage it seems like we may be outgrowing this system. Seeing as we are a collaboration of inventors and innovators I open this discussion both here and in person–I would love to get more input!
Also, anybody should feel free to come out to movie nights–with a couch, projector, and naturally some PBR its hard to go wrong!
Thanks to all who came out yesterday! I hope you learned something and am happy that a couple of you decided to become members.
We had a few hiccups with sharing the space and getting some things to work later on, but I feel like we did a great job of covering a lot of topics in a short amount of time.
In the future, look for more specific classes. Some ideas are to have a pure hacking class where we completely own a machine, and then follow that up with a class purely on incident response and forensics, so we can dissect exactly what happened to that poor machine.
Thanks again!
In RiP: A remix manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.
The film’s central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy? Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, Brazil’s Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow are also along for the ride.
A participatory media experiment, from day one, Brett shares his raw footage at opensourcecinema.org, for anyone to remix. This movie-as-mash-up method allows these remixes to become an integral part of the film. With RiP: A remix manifesto, Gaylor and Girl Talk sound an urgent alarm and draw the lines of battle.
Which side of the ideas war are you on?
Come on down to hack.rva on Thusday to check out this film for just $5!
This past Saturday, November 14th, hack.rva hosted it’s first Electronics Recycling Swap Meet. By 9AM members of the River City’s first hacker space gathered at their (not so) secret lair to serve as a receiving station for unwanted computers, peripheral devices, and other electronics. Thanks go out to all those who attended and those who brought equipment in for recycling. As a result of the awesome participation in this event hack.rva was able to take in numerous desktop and laptop computers, loaded and empty rack mount server cases, ink jet printers, monitors, and even cameras and cordless phones; all in various stages of functionality ranging from working to dismembered bits and pieces. These devices will miss the landfill and instead be reassembled / reconditioned and put to use by the geeks who love them. Stay tuned for the next hack.rva event!
Hey all, Luke from hack.rva. The guys are really busy with filming and traveling all over the world, so they’ve asked me to write a quick update for them about the portion of their adventure that I shared with them.
They were staying in Washington, D.C. with Nick Farr, and he was generous enough to lend them his car so they could go to some hackerspaces in the area. They started off by meeting us at hack.rva around 3:00 PM or so. We gave them a tour, they filmed us and the space, we talked about what we thought the hackerspace movement was about, shared some projects, etc. Because neither Skylar or I had ever seen another hackerspace in person, they asked us if we wanted to tag along with them to Baltimore and D.C. to see a few. After some deliberations about school work that needed to be worked on, we said sure, and were on our way around 5:30 PM.
We arrived at our first stop, Harford Hackerspace in Baltimore, around 9:15. It’s run out of a member’s (huge) garage. They were great guys, and had some really fun projects. My favorites would have to be the non-Newtonian fluid machine and the pneumatic low-rider car. We couldn’t stay for long there because we had two more spaces to visit that night, and by the time we left Harford, it was close to 11 PM already.
Baltimore Node was about a 10 minute drive away. We got there, and we were starved, so we met the guys at a great pizza place across the street. We walked in, and there was a full fledged break dance floor going on, with the actual restaurant portion in the back. We got an Irish Pizza (caramelized onions, potatoes, mozzarella, swiss, and corned beef) and it was amazing. After we finished eating, Bilal challenged Mark from Node to a dance battle, and craziness ensued (pictures forthcoming).
We hung out at Node for a while, got the interview, the tour, checked out the awesome graffiti alley in the back of the space, and had a ton of fun. Around 2:00 AM or so, it was time to leave. We had to head back to D.C., then back to Richmond. We all hopped in the cars, got to HacDC, got to see the space for about 5 minutes, but not talk to anyone from the space because it was so late. We got our bumper stickers that they’ve been hauling around to all the other spaces, said our goodbyes, and headed back to Richmond.
The crew are great guys, lots of fun, extremely busy, and very hardworking. Hopefully you enjoyed this post. Also, you now know they exist, they aren’t dead, and they’re just all over the country.
