So some fellow syn2catters met last Thursday for a game night.

The chosen game was Munchkin. An monster role playing game pressed into a card deck.

After  explaining  some rules we got into play and learned the rest on the way. Interestingly, the newcomers to this game all became elves, and one won the game even though some more experienced players were there.

This experience need a repetition so who’s in next time?

Kenn gave some insights into the mathematics behind keeping an unstable system dynamically at rest. Same thing as balancing a broom on a fingertip, just that your head does not need to do a mathematical development over 27 pages to do the inverse of the 4D matrix.

No we didn’t do that either. So it was: the transform matrix is A, and to get our values, we need A^-1.
Math is cool, it proves stuff that you say is intuitively correct. Like that you need at least 4 propellers, that 2 have to run in reverse, and that those need to be on opposite sides of the same arm. Else A^-1 does not exist and your copter is impossible to fly. It’s like the division by zero in matrix. Did Neo do that in the movies?

The build was quite easy as we got several 3D printed parts in the kits Kenn provided.

These parts were printed on a refrigerator-sized 3D printer in an American university, but Guilluame thinks the Ultimaker can build the same parts.

The concept is built around the idea that weight is the biggest enemy to flight. The heavier the UAV, the more energy involved in a crash, and the higher the likelihood of breaking things. So the UAV always needs to be light as possible. Here, the arms are made of carbon fiber kite tubes, held together at a center brace. The brace does not need to be very strong, since the quadcopter only weighs ~150g, which means each arm is lifting ~38g. That’s about the weight of a chunk of baguette bread. Compare that to the tensile strength of the carbon fiber and see that the model is far stronger than it needs to be.

The middle plate is FRP, which rigidly links the carbon fiber tubes together, at the same time as providing stiffness and a handy platform for mounting equipment.

Build a cross, put the base plate on.

Strap motors on and solder the power ends together. Putting the motors on is easy: just some double-sided tape and zip ties. Remember, the goal here is to be crashable, so extra emphasis is paid to having easy to repair assemblies!

While putting motors on is easy, soldering the wiring harness never is. 4 motors have to connect to one battery, which has led to countless variation on the internet, but never one approach to rule them all. At the syn2cat, each hacker went his own way, making a wiring harness to fit the custom direction they’re going with their quads.

Place the battery. Nicolas Petit has a nice paper describing the advantages of placing the center of gravity higher instead of lower.

We use the STM32F3Discovery board, second from left. It’s big, but it’s an awesome value. For $10, each hacker gets a 3-axis magnetometer, 3-axis gyroscope, 3-axis accelerometer, and ARM Cortex M4 processor, with an integrated hardware debugger to boot. Hackers who want to upgrade to one of the smaller boards in the picture will be able to micronize, but at a cost of ~$100.

There is no mount, so it’s Styrofoam and rubber bands. This makes it easy to repair and rebuild.

Kenn also came up with a nice idea to raise funds for syn₂cat. Auctioning off bling bling stuff for the copters. There were LED strips, light fibres, better chargers, and an OSD display for putting your telemetry on a video stream.

We got a nice overview of the software by Vinz Kessler, one of Kenn’s fellow developers from Tau Labs. How to get the software, compile and start. And how to connect the controller board.

Now it only needs to get connected to the receiver, and mount propellers.

Then it should fly, if the software is OK. So flashing the autopilot onto the device.

At the end of the night, we had two quadcopters almost ready to fly. Ten more left to finish.

The first flight tests will be this week, and within a couple weeks everyone should have theirs flying. Keep watching this space for upcoming video of 12 sub-$200 quadcopters in flight.

material to build 12 quadrocopters

Last week Sunday, we started hacking our remote controls. They needed to be changed from Mode 1 to Mode 2, flashed to the open-source Open9x firmware, and configured.

This Sunday, it was the tiny little brushless motor controllers turn to be hacked, flashing them with BLHeli in order to make them fit for the needed fast reactions. The flashed firmware can make the ESCs respond an order of a magnitude faster to input commands.

Precision is the word of the day, as good connections with tiny programming pads have to be made, over and over again. To make things even harder, the pads are hidden under heat shrink plastic. This has to be done a total of 60 times, as all the controllers needed  to be flashed (4 for each quadcopter, plus some spares).

Poking at the pads with tiny sewing needles while the board is being flashed is a tricky job. Too little pressure and the connection won’t be good. Too much pressure and the needles can damage the pad. Gunstick came up with a simple contraption built out of legos.

Note that you need those little LEGO guys to supervise correct placement

Every hackerspace needs it’s box of LEGOs.

Below you see how needles are correctly placed and held in firmly by the levers.

This allowed for quick flashing and swapping of the boards. And of course the ubiquitous arduino was there to do the job.

After flashing, the controllers are soldered onto the motors. Half of them upside-down as we need half of them to run in reverse. We’re crossing our fingers on that one.

Never forget to tin the wire leads first. The connections need to be solid.

Meanwhile more flashing is going on.

Yes, it’s using windows. Ye gads!

More views of the controller flasher.

It happens again, the well-known annual Chaos Communication Congress, all about technology, society and utopia.

For 29 years already, hackers are encouraged to contribute by volunteering, setting up and hosting hands-on events with the other components of their assembly or presenting their own projects to fellow hackers.

During four days from December 27th to 30th this year’s congress Not my department offers lectures and workshops on a multitude of topics including information technology and generally a critical-creative attitude towards technology and the discussion about the effects of technological advances on society.

But what about the people who can’t go there? Some of us syn2cat hackers stay at home who are definitely not at Not my department. What about you?

We think, ehm no, we are sure that we can do our own little living room convention with some sort of original 29C3 congress ambience. With 120 square meters hackerspace we’re not as big as 29C3 but we’ll have at least as much fun for sure!

With live streams (which we’re hopefully setting up) to the congress we’ll enjoy all the lectures while we’re not in a hurry for grabbing the last free seat as our fellow hackers are. With some chances we’re also able to connect directly to the 29C3 network where you gain access to a huge knowledge base to be freely consumed.

Beside watching the lectures, sharing ideas and having geek discussions there are a couple of other activities. A former syn2cat member and now a visitor announced a food hacking workshop

There’s even more than that. The long-awaited new edition of The Famous Etching and Soldering Workshop will take place again – the only one in 2012.

If you ever wanted to learn building your own circuit board the workshop is absolutely right for you. At the end of the workshop you can switch off any TV which just sucks you, be it the one in your favourite restaurant or the hundreds in Saturn.

Not only geeks are welcome. We open the doors for everyone these days and we’ll be very glad to show you around, explain you the marble adder or just have some smalltalk with you!

Selling our well known Glühmate which is the Club Mate Winter Edition heated to a nice hot temperature.

Tastes really well. And of course, with a bit of rhum the glory beverage is best.

Also available a new edition of our cookies, this time the Geekcookies (link to our wiki).

Weather was rainy, so this was the view from our booth. People massing in the tent…

Our new “invention” is the glowpin: a LED with battery and a security pin all plastered together with power tape. Especially the kids were excited with the colorful lights.

People could also build the glowpins themselves, giving them first contact with electronic components.

See you next year!

Stickers for members’ use are hanging on the office locker.

What can be done with the stickers?

The sticker says “Property of” with the syn2cat logo. That should be clear. It’s syn2cat stuff.
If not, the member writes his pseudo on the sticker, then it’s e.g. “Property of Gunstick”.
If you bring material to the space and want that people know it’s yours, use a sticker, write your name.

The sticker also has 3 options: use, hack, private. Quite self explaining.

use: anyone can use the item, but respectfully in it’s intended fashion. Don’t break it.
hack: do whatever you want, transform into a robot, retrieve that nice LED …
private: don’t touch! This is a personal item. e.g. Your harddisk with important data.

Pretty much everything is currently getting the “use” option.

And finally the sticker has an URL on it, pointing to http://i.syn2cat.lu/
Either scan the QR code or enter the 3-letter code into the form of the website.
This is a simple URL redirector which you can make point to any URL you want (e.g. the explaining wiki page)

Basic rule:
you bring something to the space that you want to keep in healthy shape: put a sticker on it
items get taken from the space to go on an event: everything gets a sticker!

In the past couple of weeks, we have spent some effort into improving the ways we’re handling your funds, making sure they’re being invested where and when needed and also being as transparent about our transactions as possible without infringing on anyone’s privacy.

The measures we’ve put in place are the following ones:

1. clear guidelines on funding procedures
2. transparent transactions
3. etika – an ethical savings account

1. clear guidelines on funding procedures

When in the past, there have been numerous discussions about buying a certain tool or part, with decisions been taken and revoked, there’s now a clear and concise guideline that is the one and only authority on the funding procedure at syn₂cat.

The guide explains how any member can either acquire an item directly or engage the entire member-base through the process of a democratic vote, depending on the amount of money required.

The guide goes on to explain just how such a vote will be cast and gives some insight on how the optional methodology of pledging for an item can ease the acquisition process.

The page is rounded off by a series of frequently asked questions (or until now rather what we imagined might be FAQs).

2. transparent transactions

Next to being concise with the funding procedures, we have also decided to make our transactions more transparent in order to respond to a number of questions, such as

• where does our money come from?
• where does it go to?
• how much is left to be spent?
• which are our recurring fees?

However, even while we’re trying to be as transparent with our finances as we can, we’re still valuing the privacy and equality of our members much more, which is why we’re rendering anonymous a considerable deal of the data that is being published.  Naturally as we’re hackers and as such way too lazy to copy data from one tool to another one manually, we’ve devised a simply python script that parses a csv export from KMyMoney and uploads it to our mediawiki installation through the available editing API.

Which makes sending it off to the wiki tremendously easy:

The results of all this can be seen on the Finances page.

3. etika savings account

Although taken a while back already, the decision to turn our savings account into an ethical savings account managed by the etika a.s.b.l. was only put into action a couple of days ago. Even though we’re always trying to multiply them, there just always aren’t as many projects going on that we could invest in, which is why we’re regularly dumping some funds into a savings account with our bank. By turning our conventional savings account into an etika account, we’re making  sure that our funds are managed according to the following principles:

responsibility

our funds will be invested into projects that have a positive effect on our environment and community.

transparency

we will be regularly brought up to speed about what our savings are invested in and what their turnout is. etika periodically issues reports by snail-mail and as pdf-downloads

solidarity

by waiving 0.20% of the turnout on our account (compared to what we’d get with a regular account), we’re enabling the BCEE to give out alternative credits at a much more favourable rate to their etika customers

sustainability

credits funded by etika savings accounts are mostly given out to local ecological projects, thus improving the sustainability of our environments

We hope that all of these measures, and the ones that will follow – since we have some in our pipelines – will leave you with a warm and fuzzy feeling inside

So what’s new in 2012/2013:

Many talks and workshops

Some that have been confirmed:

• Geoinformatics (Wantzenrieder T.)
• Graphic design (Backendorf A.)
• Software Radio Workshop (Theisen T.)
• UAV Workshop (Sebasta K.)
• Raspberry Pi (Degeling T. & Theisen T.)
• LaTeX Workshop (Rischard G.)

and others to come, so stay tuned
The Dates of the talks and workshops are going to be published soon.
Everybody is welcome to the Talks. If you want to attend a workshop, you have to add yourself to the attendee’s page on the respective Wiki Page.
You can’t add yourself to the UAV Workshop anymore but you may come along and have a look at what we are doing

If you want to hold a workshop or a talk contact us.

New Lab room design

There are a whole bunch of workstations waiting for you with power, internet access and Screens with VGA/DVI/HDMI ports. And if you don’t bring your own Computer / Notebook to work on, we got some at the Hackerspace for you.
There are two HDMI Screens waiting for your Raspberry Pi’s to get connected too

The makerbot has more space than ever and is just waiting for your 3D elements to be printed.

Hmm… a few too many keys were awaiting me when I came back to Lux. Who remembers what keys are for where after 15 months? (Hint, it’s probably not the Roadster key. But that one was in my pocket, too.)

Free pasta?!! You guys are the greatest! Just what a hungry hacker needs to get the creative juices flowing.

Oh, no, the free pasta is a cunning trap to get someone else to wash the box!

Ahhhhhh… my iMac, how have I missed you. Have they treated you well in my absence?

What??? My mac has been turned against me! Trollchen stand forward and confess to your crimes!

Oh, wait, I just had to use my syn2cat login. Sneeeeeeeeaky.

Hey, didn’t I use to have a few hundred thousand legos in that corner?

Now, if I were a giant marble calculator, where would I hide? Ahah, it’s in here.

There really is no place like home. Glad to be back!

Um Dinge zu erlernen oder besser zu verstehen, gibt es jedoch eine angenehme Alternative zum Lesen und Podcast-Hören, nämlich das Erleben.

Ein lehrreiches Erlebnis für Jung und Alt, kann die diesjährige haxogreen werden. Das von BEE SECURE unterstützte Projekt findet vom 26. bis zum 29.Juli in Düdelingen statt. Hier bekommen die Besucher nicht nur die Möglichkeit, die Mitglieder von syn₂cat wieder aus dem Topf herausnehmen und sich selbst ein Bild davon zu machen, was ein Hacker ist, sondern man kann auch an interessanten Workshops teilnehmen oder sich Vorträge anhören. Zudem wird zusammen gekocht, sich ausgetauscht und man kann die luxemburgische Natur genießen.

Das Team von syn₂cat verlegt die sonst im Hackerspace in Strassen befindliche Kreativwerkstatt sozusagen ins Freie. In dieser Werkstatt, wird sich keineswegs nur auf Technik beschränkt, sondern sie stellt eine Plattform für Kenner, sowie Laien dar, welche sich für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Netzpolitik interessieren. Man kann sich also, sowohl einen Vortrag über beispielsweise Internetsicherheit anhören, als auch beobachten, wie elektronische Musik produziert wird.

Wie man in der oben genannten Podcastfolge erfahren kann, bedeutet Hacking unter anderem auch, dass man mithilfe von Fachwissen, eine bestimmte Technologie ausserhalb ihres normalen Kontextes benutzt, sie umfunktioniert oder zweckentfremdet. Auf der haxogreen 2012 wird zum Beispiel ein Sushi Hacking Workshop angeboten. Man darf gespannt sein, was mit dem Fisch passiert, in der Phase zwischen seinem einfachen Dasein und dem späteren Verzehr. Es lohnt sich definitiv dies rauszufinden.

Da bei den angebotenen Aktivitäten Kreativität und Freude am Experimentieren die einzigen Voraussetzungen sind, ist jeder willkommen. Jene Personen, welche das nötige Fachwissen haben, teilen es gerne. Sogar für die kleinen Tüftler und Bastler gibt es ein Zelt in dem sie sich wissenschaftlich austoben dürfen.
Wer sich bis zum 22.Juni noch auf www.haxogreen.lu registriert, profitiert von den Early Bird Tickets für 23 Euro. Danach sind Tickets mit 32 EUR nur unwesentlich teurer.

Also nix wie los!