mattw.fn_blog()

The weather has been awesome lately, so it’s time to start having HackNight in the park again. There’s a Rubber Duck Regata tonight too, so if you have a rubber ducky, bring it and race!

Additionally, Vivace Roasteria on Denny is closing it’s doors to make way for Sound Transit’s Broadway station, so stop in and grab some of the tastiest espresso on the hill before it turns to rubble.

This week, it *looked* sunny out, so we decided to meet in the park. None of us bothered to check the weather reports or anything, standing around in the cold got old fast, so we ended up back at the Vivace Roasting Room. Matt Wilson brought in some Zigbee gear for us to check out, Andy brought in his Fon-in-a-box, and we talked a bit about some of our random projects. Currently the big thing is getting Andy and Eric’s nodes up and running. Andy has pictures in the SeattleWireless flickr group, and I’m sure Eric will have some up soon. If you’re on Capitol Hill, and want access, right now is a pretty good time to come to a hacknight and find out what you need to do.

It’s funny, we’ve been meeting at OCC because of the fast internet and ample table space, but I’ve really missed the coffee at Vivace. Hopefully next week will be sunny AND warm, we can meet in the park and kick back with a decent cup of bean.

FieldDay is on Saturday, so HackNight was fairly straightforward in purpose. Final details are getting hashed out on #swn (efnet), but it looks like most of us know where we’re going and how we’re getting there at this point. The weather forecast shows a sun behind a cloud rather than rain, but Casey has worked out tents for alki and magnolia because it will rain just in case. My guess is Magnolia Park will be the hopping spot this time, but we won’t really know until it all goes off.
If you haven’t heard about Field Day yet, Eric sent out a nice mail to the lists, and Bryan predicts it will be the Best Saturday Ever.

Field Day is coming up, so we’ve been working on some fun electronics projects. I’ve been working on a cheap computer controlled laser show. After ditching the schematic I had been working from (it wasn’t working) we got it to make some lines and a simple box. At the heart of the project is a USB Bit Whacker, available at SparkFun. The laser is currently a 7-11 special, but I’ve got a green one on the way.

Ken and I are teaching a wireless workshop at Toorcon 8. Registration ends this week, so if you haven’t gotten your tickets, you should run, not walk and Register Now.

At this week’s HackNight we brought our own power to the park and built a temporary OLSR network. We also played with madwifi-NG’s one radio repeater mode, openWRT, and gutted a Alvarion CPE. There were no styrofoam planes.

This week’s HackNight was held in Cal Anderson Park.  We were hanging out next to some guys flying Aero Ace planes and they gave us the chance to do some piloting.  The planes are surprisingly manueverable and fun for $30 toys.  There are only 4 channels available, so it looks like we’ll either have to coordinate buying or figure out a way to move the frequency if we want to get a good dogfight going.

I took no pictures today, but it was a pretty interesting night. The Park/Vivace thing is working out pretty good, but once we have a few lattes and park ourselves in the Roasting Room, time pretty much whips by.

As usual, topics were all over the map, but we did chat a bit about how to build wireless voip mesh communication devices (think parasitic walkie talkie mesh boxes), the difference between mesh protocols for permanent and temporary infrastructure, and some TODO items for Pyramid Linux.

On the ‘pending nodes’ list, Bryan has moved into his new place over in the Central District. Rob has been talking with Brady and a few other folk over there as well. If all goes well, the CD could have a nice mesh soon.
On a completely different note, Adam Scott is eating nothing but Monkey Chow.

The rain earlier in the day kept us from meeting on top of teletubby hill, but we did find a nice dry concrete bench in the middle of the park to sit down and geek out. A battery/inverter setup was brought for portable power, but it didn’t really work out. Converting DC to AC back to DC eats a lot of juice and is best to be avoided. Portable lithium on the other hand, is pretty cool. I imagine by the end of summer we’ll all be showing up with solar rigs and windmills.
Casey, who has been missing in action for quite a while, showed up with his 3d camera and took a few pictures around the park. I got to play light meter with my digital, so it should be interesting to see how his shots turn out.

Wireless wise, Joe broke out the UMTS and added to the list of open APs. Bryan got openbsd installed on his laptop, some cable crimped and did a bit of new geek in town networking. We realized Jesika’s place could probably cover the park easily, and started murmuring about what it would take to put a park node up. Not bad for a day in the park I thought would be called on account of rain.

Tonight we met on Teletubby Hill at Cal Anderson Park, enjoying the sunshine and ripping through some Axis Digital Media Managers that Andy spotted on the way out of Vita.

We didn’t have power (I fear next week’s fixes), but we did have plenty of hardware in a pile, and once chris showed up, chips, dip and drinks. Not great for charging up gear, but great for energizing geekery.   We all had a great time out on the grass, and as long as the weather holds up, we’ll be meeting in the park.   If it’s rainy/cold/unbearable out, we fall back to Vita.

Technorati Tags: hacknight, seattle, seattlewireless