The Geekess May 2008

Garden Hacking (or what I did instead of BarCamp)

Since March, I've been working on a tiered garden in my landlord's front lawn. It's a big project, and it's been taking up a lot of my free time. I decided to do everything myself, rather than hiring a professional landscaper. That seems counter-intuitive to the hacker spirit, but I wanted to do it myself so that I could learn how much time and money it would actually take.

I also wanted to do this project because, at heart, I am a hick, a crafter, and an engineer. I've watched my dad build fences, restore a wooden boat, and work on cars. I wanted to test myself and see if I had enough planning skills and drive to actually do a big project like build a garden.

Caveat, caveat, etc. Without further ado, I present pictures:

Before

Middle of project

Currently

If you're interested in more pictures and the technical details of my garden construction, read on.

Portland State Aerospace Society meeting notes for 2008-05-21

The Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS) builds, designs, and launches open source amateur rockets. If you haven't heard about PSAS, watch my five minute Ignite Portland 2 talk and follow along with the sides.

In this PSAS episode, we talk with some potential members, work on simulators, and stare at shiny LEDs.

Slow meeting. I was distracted because I was playing with my new eeepc 900. Some new members showed up, and Andrew attempted to explain some rocket science to them:

Sounds like the guy in the black t-shirt (Eric) is interested in communications and our open source GPS. Not sure what the guy in plaid (George) is interested in.

Jamey, Josh, and Fletcher (a high school student) are working on the software simulator this evening. We don't have the sensor nodes designed yet, but want want to feed old data into our flight computer software to test it. Then we can inject failures and see how the software reacts. It's a good idea because the hardware people *cough* Andrew *cough* haven't started laying out the sensor node schematics. They haven't even put the sensors on a bread board yet, although they did build a turntable to test the accelerometers.

On a completely unrelated note, Frank (our "Resident Artiste") brought his electronics project. He's building an art installation that includes tri-color LEDs.

Shiny!

Portland State Aerospace Society meeting notes for 2008-05-14

In this PSAS episode, Tim shows off the airframe shell he's been working on:

Tim's vacuum setup for pulling epoxy into the fiberglass airframe isn't perfect. There was a large piece near the top where epoxy didn't flow.

Tim brought a work light to demonstrate that the fiberglass shell is slightly translucent. Andrew (in his bun-bun shirt) demonstrated said translucence.

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Portland State Aerospace Society meeting notes for 2008-05-07

I have become the official blogger for the Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS). If you haven't heard about PSAS, watch my five minute Ignite Portland 2 talk and follow along with the sides.

In this PSAS weekly episode, I talk about the rocket airframe and the software for the avionics sensor nodes.

Airframe

Tim showed off pictures of his setup for creating the light-weight fiberglass shell that goes around our rocket:

Dinner by the fire

Last night we had "going away" dinner at Arabian Breeze because my friend Deepak is leaving Montavista Linux. Deepak isn't actually moving away from Portland. He'll be working from home and occasionally flying to Boston to meet with his coworkers at the "One Laptop Per Child" (OLPC) company. It sounds like OLPC still wants to work on the Sugar UI and Linux infrastructure, despite Nicholas Negroponte's recent remarks about developing Sugar for Windows.

The dinner was good, but it got off to a harrowing start. When I arrived at the restaurant, I discovered that there was a giant warehouse fire across the street. The police had the entire block (including the restaurant) roped off with caution tape. They did let us through, once we explained where we wanted to go. I guess they just didn't want a crowd of gawkers hanging near the fire.

Still, it was a little dumb of us to continue eating at the restaurant, considering there was a gas station next door.