Skip to main content

My Shmoocon

<- Pictured: Duckie and Adam.


Well another year, another Shmoocon. For those who are unfamiliar with Shmoocon, it's a medium sized hacker convention in Washington DC that is held at the beginning of the year. The big change this year is that DC had a record breaking snowfall of around 3 ft. This certainty made getting around for food a challenge. While many people didn't make it, the other new cool thing is that they streamed all the live talks to UStream. This year, one of the best talks was Freesides and DC404's own Taylor Banks and Adam Bregenzers "Becoming Jack Flack: Real Life Cloak & Dagger" The room was quite packed from front to back at 10:00am Sunday presentation. This was especially amazing as the previous night was the open bar party.












Another talk I really enjoyed was:


Most of this talk was based off of things you can learn on DIYdrones.com . However it was really nice to hear someone talk about it in person and show footage recorded from a Drone they flew over the hotel in bad weather the day before. I was quite impressed. I am convinced now that this is going to be my project. UAV's flying around the Atlanta Metropolitan Warehouses just seems like a fun idea.


Here are some more pics from Shmoocon:

To the left is one of the famous competitions at Shmoocon, the Shmooball launcher. This puppy here used an RD feed with video and targeting system and launched a Shmooball faster than an eye can see. While Shmooballs are very soft this thing will leave a bruise.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Capacitive-Touch Janko Keyboard: What I Did at the 2017 Georgia Tech Moog Hackathon

Last weekend (February 10-12, 2017) I made a Janko-layout capacitive-touch keyboard for the Moog Werkstatt at the Georgia Tech Moog Hackathon. The day after (Monday the 13th), I made this short video of the keyboard being played: "Capacitive Touch Janko Keyboard for Moog Werkstatt" (Text from the video doobly doo) This is a Janko-layout touch keyboard I made at the 2017 Moog Hackathon at Georgia Tech, February 10-12. I'm playing a few classic bass and melody lines from popular and classic tunes. I only have one octave (13 notes) connected so far. The capacitive touch sensors use MPR121 capacitive-touch chips, on breakout boards from Adafruit (Moog Hackathon sponsor Sparkfun makes a similar board for the same chip). The example code from Adafruit was modified to read four boards (using the Adafruit library and making four sensor objects and initializing each to one of the four I2C addresses is remarkably easy for anyone with moderate familiarity with C++), and

Freesiders Hackers Collaborate in Medical / Surgical Research

Published in the May issue of the Journal of Foot and Ankle Surgery : " A Novel Combination of Printed 3-Dimensional Anatomic Templates and Computer-assisted Surgical Simulation for Virtual Preoperative Planning in Charcot Foot Reconstruction ." This collaboration of specialties represents an undertaking by members of Freeside Atlanta , Southern Arizona Limb Salvage Alliance , and The Podiatry Institute .  Charcot foot reconstruction remains on of the most challenging procedures in foot and ankle surgery.  These procedures are often lengthy procedures which can be riddled with complications. With the help of Freeside Atlanta Members, institutional researchers used open source Osirix Image viewer and 3D Software such as Newtek's Lightwave or Blender to create simulated surgical reductions as well as 3D printed templates.  Freeside Atlanta members assisted in providing 3D printing solutions and know-how to the project. Experimental test prints were done on a M

Onboard Firmware of the Human Brain

Freesiders are continually tinkering with robotics and other such machinery .  Many of these embedded processors and firmware are becoming open source and every-more diversified in the wake of the modern Maker movement . One notable boost to the hackerspace arsenal is the Arduino (an like platforms).  This offers designers an incredible power to devise not just individual devices but even the emergence of complex, integrated systems . This evolutionary pace of modern technological systems may be significantly faster the biologic system development, but there may be a few well learned tricks yet to be mastered.  It seems that studying how nature has managed to solve many development challenges will aid in designing robotics, where efficiently counts just as much. One  challenge, that is particularly interesting, is data processing.  Artificial intelligence is labored with processing data and producing a meaningful and useful output.  When considering the increase in sensory