Open Hack Recap: 02/14/13

At last Thursday’s Open Hack, we had an impromptu going-away for Brigid, who’s been teaching and organizing events at the Hacktory for the past year, including our fantastic Intro to Arduino classes. She’s leaving Philadelphia for a few months, but we look forward to her triumphant return. We also had some folks shooting footage for a video we’re making about our artist-in-residence grant, as we’re considering a Kickstarter campaign. (If you want to be part of the video, on either side of the camera, leave a comment!) Aaron, a friend from NTR who lives in South Jersey, brought news of a burgeoning shop/hacker space there; folks across the river who would appreciate a place to build closer to home, stay tuned!

Sharp brought over strings of individually-addressable LEDs, which we’re planning to cut apart and build into a 16×10 grid to display in the window. We started by stripping off the plastic covers and testing how they chain together & blink in patterns. Rainbow-flavored success! Next, we’ll design an enclosure and work out a wiring diagram. We also finished moving all the Hacktory’s stuff out of storage; now we just need to take inventory and build some shelving for it. This week more chairs arrived, and we painted over some of the spackle. There’s still plenty to do before we officially open the Department of Making and Doing next month, but we are definitely making progress.