Freeside Atlanta

A bunch of great stuff got done at the build-out yesterday. A huge thanks to everyone that came out to pitch in! Here are some pictures to recap the projects... Randy's team hung the curtain to the workshop to create more of a barrier between the front of the house and back of the house and to control dust levels a bit more. We'll be finishing the top of the wall soon, but the hard part's already done. Karen, Donald, Tom, Violet, and James framed the doorway to the Media Lab and Bio Lab and hung the door for that area. Next step is AC! Michelle and Mary's team cleaned out project storage and moved the shelves over so that Neils could put the flammability cabinets in that area. That allowed all of us with the help of Adam and Nathan to clean up the workshop and really tidy up. They also sorted out all of the laser cutter raw materials and cut them down to a usable size on the table saw.  For the portal clouds, JW, Nathan, and Kat rolled an aw

I've had a problem with the way Motobrain calculated current flows for quite some time. Basically it always read a little higher than I expected it to if the textbooks are to be believed. Furthermore, one half the board always read a about 10% higher than the other half. It is not very unexpected that the "textbook" calculation and real life are a bit out of sync. Still, I wanted to know why the error was inconsistent between the two halves of the unit. That part was a bit unusual. Normally, the way you go about solving an issue like this is to exclude stuff until the problem is gone. First, I excluded the Power board, the PCB with all the high current flow, heavy copper, and power transistors (shown right). I did this using the test jig (right, below) I designed to test all the Motobrains that come out of the factory. The MCU board (the board with the sensors, microcontroller, and Bluetooth radio) plugs into the jig and is given a series of test signals to confi

Hello, Freeside readers, and welcome to my first blog post! My name is Michelle Sleeper, I am a prop and costume builder in Atlanta, working primarily out of Freeside's space. I have been building costumes and plastic space guns since 2001, and have been a member of Freeside since 2013. My most recent major project was to upgrade a costume I built last year of the Marvel comic's character, Ultron. The costume owner wanted a new and improved helmet, made of cast resin and full of all sorts of lights. It was a big and ambitious project, and I was very excited to get started. Here's how we got there. From the outset we decided that we wanted the master sculpt to be 3D printed - but for those of you familiar with 3D printing, you know that extremely large prints are difficult if not impossible to produce. Most often, you will have to break your model up into many different segments, which you then assemble like a 3D jigsaw puzzle. We opted not to do that, and ins

Background :  The JAM (Joy's Art Machine) is a machine that distributes art. This project was fully funded by the  Alchemy  community. We are on track to collect somewhere between 200-300 pieces of art to distribute, including works by Catlanta and Evereman. We are actively collecting works of art, so if you're interested in contributing, you can email  Joy  at  joyogozelec@gmail.com . The JAM explores two of the 10 core Burning Man principles: Decommodification and Gifting. We express Gifting by distributing art through the machine. Gifting trees are a familiar sight at Burns, but suffer from accumulating trash or trinkets. By gifting art (a gift in itself) we create a sort of on-demand gifting tree. We express Decommodification by not allowing the JAM to accept money. Instead, art is distributed by the machine on a timer. The machine lights up, and you push a button to receive art. If you're interested in learning more about the project or want to get involved, check out

Background :  The JAM (Joy's Art Machine) is a machine that distributes art. This project was fully funded by the Alchemy community. We are on track to collect somewhere between 200-300 pieces of art to distribute, including works by Catlanta and Evereman. We are actively collecting works of art, so if you're interested in contributing, you can email Joy at  joyogozelec@gmail.com . The JAM explores two of the 10 core Burning Man principles: Decommodification and Gifting. We express Gifting by distributing art through the machine. Gifting trees are a familiar sight at Burns, but suffer from accumulating trash or trinkets. By gifting art (a gift in itself) we create a sort of on-demand gifting tree. We express Decommodification by not allowing the JAM to accept money. Instead, art is distributed by the machine on a timer. The machine lights up, and you push a button to receive art. If you're interested in learning more about the project or want to get involved, check out

Disclaimer : This is a blog post about a CryptoParty presentation, the contents of which should not be construed as official Freeside statements.  Any opinions presented in this blog post by the author do not in any way represent an official endorsement of these opinions by Freeside Technology Spaces, Inc., nor is intended to reflect the views of Freeside and its membership. Recently, Freeside hosted a CryptoParty where I gave an introductory presentation on steganography .  Like all my CryptoParty presentations, this wasn't very technical, but I did introduce some (very) basic techniques. The first tool that everyone should know about is exiftool .  exiftool reads and writes to the metadata section of a variety of image formats.  I showed an excellent illustrated example of Exif metadata in the JPEG format, which has some great diagrams which show how a JPEG file's bytes are laid out.  There's also C# .NET code included to extract and modify this data, if perl'

Motobrain began when I decided my options for a vehicle fuse panel where too limited. I wanted something better. A buddy and I started chatting about what we might want from a fuse block and I started drawing schematics and making prototypes. My first idea was an actual fuse panel that could measure system voltage and total current draw and had fused circuits. It's "killer" feature was that all the outputs were interchangeable so you could select the type of output you wanted. It had card slots and the card slots and the cards I developed with for high side switching, low side switching, USB charging, and analog inputs. It was cool, but not really durable enough for an automotive environment.   It was going to be controlled from a dedicated unit wired to the gizmo above. The more I thought that through, the more that was foolish since we all have computers in our pockets already, our smart phones. So I did a full reboot and decided to do a Bluetooth 4 gizmo, that