Maker's Day done, we prepare for VCF East next

Maker's Day went well, we managed to get a lot of parents and kids. In addition to what the InfoAge museums were able to offer we had a fully working Makerspace (CDL) up and running with the 3D printer going and my CNC cutting plastic. We did a nice job of cleaning up the lab so I want to thanks Matt, Pat, Joe, Keith and Dan for the help. Now we turn our minds to VCF East. There will be a lot more visitors for the 3 days of: Friday, April 17th thru Sunday, April 19th.

Our Meshtastic Tidal Project is going well. I'll document what we have and what we intend to build. Matt and Pat (CDL members) are working on the Meshtastic node at the moment. I have a few ideas there where we can get lower power and still enough CPU to make it work. On the other end I am tryig to figure out the whole VM and AI end of the project. This has led to a number of other possible projects, such as: Google Tensors, NVidia Jetsons and of course the GPUs. I intend to give a short course on using Git and Github to the members.

We intend to fly one of our Meshtastic nodes to see what type of coverage we get. We'll also be working on a Meshcore node in addition to our Seeede Solar Meshtastic node..

We're also starting to plan our radio bench. We have a good number of Hams (people with amateur radio licenses). We're planning on putting up a HF antenna on the roof of 9059 (CDL - the Lab). We have a few low powered radios (QRP) and a 100W amp. We'll see what we can make of this. :-)

This is in addition to our Home Assistant and other electronics projects. I think we'll keep very busy for the next year and more. Though I do expect it to slow down a bit during the summer. Everyone wants to enjoy the summer and we're near the Jersey Shore! :-)

Cold and Powerless

Update: Repairs have been made and InfoAge is again open for business!

Bad week at InfoAge! First a steam pipe broke in the basement of the 'Marconi Hotel'. This is the main building of the InfoAge complex. So they are without heat. And it seems the melting snow may have cause the power issues we are currently experiencing. The InfoAge campus is currently without power. Which means the the Computer Deconstruction Lab (CDL) is also without power. The InfoAge campus (formerly Camp Evans) is the home of CDL. And just before I was going to post and update, the engineers have found the problem! They're now investigating the problems and solution further. Part of the campus has power. We'll see what we've got.

In the meantime the CDL has been working on a few projects. One of them is a Meshtastic Solar Node: CDLA (compdecon.github.io A). We're running the default channel and user LF (LF20?). I'll get an additionl Linux node also running the default. That's it for now I'll post more details later.