A while back we discovered we had a problem with our roof leaking and this, in turn, made the roof space more welcoming to the Common Furniture Beetle, or rather it’s larval stage, known as woodworm.

We have had the roof repaired and it is leak free. Now we have to get the woodworm treated. In order for the contractor to spray the whole of the inside of the loft space to clear the infestation we have had to do quite a lot of preparatory work. This involved clearing the loft of all the stored equipment and materials and then lifting and stacking all of the wooden flooring we had put down to allow us access to that loft space.

You can see some pictures of the state of the loft before we started on our wiki page “What’s In The Loft?” page.

Here are some photos of what the Hackspace looks like now everything is out of the loft and what the loft looks like with everything removed and all the boards lifted.

It has taken a while but we now have a range of Hitchin Hackspace branded garments available to members.

The available options currently are:

• T- Shirts – 100% Cotton T-shirts with iron on vinyl logo. Logo can be on front back or both.
• Polo Shirts – 100% Cotton or Poly Cotton Polo Shirts with embroidered logo on front breast.
• Sweatshirts – 100% Cotton Sweatshirt with embroidered logo on front breast optional large vinyl logo on back.
• Hoodie – 100% Cotton Hoodie, Plain or Zip front with embroidered logo on front breast optional large vinyl logo on back.
• Lab Coat – White Cotton Laboratory Coat with Logo embroidered above left breast pocket.
• Soft Shell Jacket – Showerproof fleece lined jacket with Logo embroidered above left breast pocket.
• Your own garment not otherwise available, e.g. a long or short sleeved shirt or blouse, embroidered with the hackspace logo
• Option to have your name embroidered above or below the Hackspace Logo
• Baseball Cap, Bucket Hat or Beanie Hat Embroidered with the Hackspace logo

If you are interested in a garment and you are a member post a message in our Slack #merchendise channel.

We are also hoping to offer coffee mugs soon. Watch this space!

What they look like

Examples

T-Shirts

Polo Shirts

Sweatshirts

Hoodies

Labcoat

Soft Shell Jacket

Image coming soon

Your own garment

Baseball Cap and other hats

The Presentation

On Sunday Hitchin Hackspace hosted Leon Xavier from Anyvate who gave a presentation on 3D Scanning technology, processes and techniques. From DIY Xbox Kinetc scanning, through iPad LIDAR to his Creaform Metrascan Professional system.

iPad Scanning

Using a member’s 3D printed glazed clay pot as a target Leon demonstrated the iPad LIDAR scanner to generate a digital mesh of the pot. The results were really impressive.

Scanning a big screw

Next a 3D printed screw model was scanned to demonstrate how deep features needed to be handled and how software, like Meshlab, can be used to stitch together separate scans of the same object to create a complete model.

Scanning a Dalek

Leon finished the demo session by scanning Derek, the Dalek we are restoring, using his Creaform Metrascan system.
This showed the amazing level of detail, precision and accuracy it can capture across an array of challenging surfaces and textures.

The Creaform Metrascan is an incredible piece of kit. A tracking head locates the scanning head in space while you scan. It can be used to scan anything from the inside of a Transit van to something as small as a 30mm cube. Down to a resolution of 50um and accuracy of 40um.

A short 20second video shows Leon stood to the right of the Dalek “painting” the skirt and hemispheres of the Dalek with the handheld scanning unit. He slowly wafts the scanning head back and forth. The red crosshatch grid of the lasers can be seen moving across the surface of the Dalek. His movements are very similar to those of a spray painter painting a car body shell. Leon isn’t looking at where his hand is moving. He is looking at a monitor which is out of shot. The camera then pans left to a monitor on which you can see the scanned data appearing and the model building. It moves and rotates in relation to the movements of the scanning head and controls on it which Leon controls as he scans.

This session was the first of two sessions. The second is a few weeks later and will enable members to bring in objects they would like to get scanned, with the full capacity of the Creaform Metrascan scanner, for free. They will receive a mesh file for their item in return.

The monitor on a desk shows a view of the Dalek scan in progress. A section of the side of the Dalek skirt with hemispheres can be seen.

Anyvate offer professional high precision 3D scanning and workflows to individuals and Hackspaces at an affordable cost. If you are interested in Leon providing a demo session for your group or organisation give Anyvate a shout via their website www.anyvate.com.

Getting to look at the results

A week or so later Leon sent the in the scanned data of the whole Dalek. It is quite the data file, an STL of some 440MB. Here are some screen grabs of that data set:

General Views

Detail Views

Next zoomed in a bit closer. You may notice that the gun is missing the detail of the rods, collars and spacing hexagons you can see in the picture of Derek above. as these are all clear acrylic it makes it really hard for the laser reflections to be picked up. This is one of the shortcomings, although a minor one when you consider wat is going on with other very reflective surfaces like the gazing globes, the aluminium and the metal flake paint used on the body and hemis.

The Mid Section

In the next two pictures you can see that the mesh detail is picked up and details of the screw heads holding the slats in place. You can see some small round artefacts on the lower band. These are stickers applied to the lower band and are registration / datum position indicators (you can seem them in the video) that get scanned by the main tracking head. Once these are registered in the software it allows you to rotate the Dalek on its wheeled base to make it easier to scan all sides. The tracking head needs to be able to see the hand unit to successfully scan. This means you cannot scan the back of the Dalek if the hand unit disappears from view. The dots make it possible to move your target and pick up where the Dalek has been moved to.

The Neck and Dome

Some close ups of the neck and dome. As the neck rings aren’t fixed in place yet there is masking tape to show where they should go. You can see in the scans the masking tape and some detail of the neck bin mesh. You can also see on the bottom right edge of the dome that the scanner has picked up on the damage to the fibreglass of the dome. The striations across the dome on the left are artefacts of the scanned data where not enough data has been captured yet.

On the front facing view of the dome another patch of damaged fibreglass can be picked out just above the change in dome profile and to the right of the eyestalk.

Close up of Datums

Leon very generously scanned Derek and provided the STL file for free. The scan data isn’t as complete as it could be. We ran out of time! The data you see here is probably the result of a couple of hours of scanning and then several more to post process the data in to an STL file. Additionally the data is just a mesh. Not a solid model. As part of his business Leon can take the scanned mesh and turn it in to real CAD solid model data. However that can be many hours work and doesn’t come cheap.

One last point is that this is only the outside surfaces. With more time it is possible to scan the inside. It would be more complicated and you have to be able to get the hand unit inside.

The next step plan is to load in the CAD models from the measurements taken of Derek when we first started and see how far off the model is from actual Derek Dalek Data.

Hitchin Hackspace would like say a very big Thank you to Leon and Anyvate for taking time to come to the space and show us this amazing technology.

Aviva Community Fund

Previously, we had been announced in the top 8 of our category/funding level thanks to the kind votes of hundreds of people. The results have been announced, and… (if this was a TV show, there’d be a very long pause here) sadly, we didn’t make the winning two.

Congratulations to Northumbria Coalition Against Crime and Cantley and Horning Primary Schools Federation. Two extremely worthy winners, amongst the many others from all categories and funding levels within the competition.

Thank you again to everyone who voted for us, and to Aviva for considering our application.

But it’s not all bad…

As a runner-up in the top eight, we have been awarded £500.

While we’ve been waiting for Aviva to announce the winners, we’ve not been idle on the fundraising front. A successful application to London Luton Airport’s Community Trust Fund for a grant to assist with the renovation of the building has meant an award of £3750 has been made by Bedfordshire and Luton Community Fund on behalf of the airport’s fund.

North Hertfordshire District Council’s Hitchin Area Committee awarded us £5000 on the strength of our application to them for funding, and Mark’s successful presentation of our case to the committee in person.

Councillor Judi Billing, who has supported us for many years, has given us £1000 from her locality budget to fund the purchasing of new doors for the building.

This brings our fundraising total up to £10,250 in the last few months. Considering that we entered the Aviva competition because an extra 200 quid (awarded to any entry submitted by an Aviva customer) would be nice, to have over ten thousand pounds to build and fit out the Hackspace is a real privilege, and will make an enormous difference to the sort of space we can build and operate.

In the meantime, in between games of Fantasy “What Could We Spend £25,000 On?”, we’ve been beavering away in the Bancroft building, mostly knocking down the old ceiling and preparing to put a new one up. Look for some big progress updates coming soon.

Previously, we had done a bit of internal number crunching and reckoned we’d made 6th place in our grouping. Now, the official results are in. Announced at 2pm on 28th November, we’re in the top eight in the Skills for Life category at the £10,000-£25,000 funding level; the results page doesn’t list a position.

The results are here

We didn’t do it on our own, though: Thank you again for all your support. Now we have lots of forms to fill in for the judges, and the final result will be announced on 16th January 2017.

The vote has closed

Back in early October, we spotted the Aviva Community Fund competition, and that if you were entered by an Aviva customer, you would automatically be awarded £200. On our tiny shoestring budget, £200 is a nice little pot of cash, so we submitted an entry.

From looking at the previous year we knew that winning entries had to have several thousand votes, which seemed like an impossibly large amount. But we went for it anyway, and now, just over a month later, the voting has finished.

And our final total is an amazing 4791.

A huge thank you to…

Everybody! It’s impossible to know exactly how many people took the time to vote for us, but based on the final total, we’d estimate something like six hundred people made the effort, sometimes in the face of difficulties with the voting site, to give us their vote. That’s an astonishing amount of support for our tiny Hackspace, and we’re extremely thankful for it.

We know that not everyone was able to give us 10 votes; there are a lot of very worthwhile projects out there and some people would have wanted to share their ten between two or more, but we really are grateful for every vote.

As well as friends, family and colleagues who suffered our increasingly frequent requests for support with good grace, and a good crop of clicks, we also reached out across the internet to ask for help.

We had help from (I hope they’ll forgive the term) geek royalty with Robot Wars’ Dr Lucy Rogers and Raspberry Pi creator Eben Upton retweeting our request to their thousands of followers on more than one occasion. The official Raspberry Pi twitter account also did the same. As big Raspberry Pi fans, we were very excited by this.

Hackaday covered the Aviva vote in an article, with Hitchin top of the list of contenders (a couple of other hacker/maker spaces also had entered). Many other spaces across the country were only too willing to allow us to promote our cause to their members via membership mailing lists or web forums.

Mike Horne, organiser of CamJam and the annual PiWars competition, took the time to write a whole blog post explaining in his own words how we should win.

The local newspaper, The Hitchin Comet, gave us some very welcome coverage. We’d been told that the article would feature “prominently” in the print edition, but no-one expected it to be the main headline on the front page.

We’ve had lots of support from local businesses, both online and good old fashioned posters in shop windows.

Far more people and organisations than we could possibly mention individually helped promote our entry, and we’re incredible grateful to every one of them.

So thank you again, everyone who tweeted, retweeted, Facebooked, wrote about us, commented on us, replied to say they’d voted for us, and most especially to everyone who voted for us.

And the winner is…?

The Aviva competition is partly public vote, and partly judged (insert your own comparison to Saturday night entertainment shows here). There are four categories, and four funding levels. We’re in the Skills for life category and the £10,000-£25,000 level.

In our category and funding level, the top 8 entries by number of votes go through to the final judging round, from which two are awarded the funding. The other six receive £500.

The official results aren’t emailed to us until November 28th, but by our own unofficial reckoning, checking against the other entries, we came in 6th place.

We’re eagerly awaiting official confirmation, but as we seem to be in the top 8, it appears that we will be awarded at least £500. And, of course, there’s the possibility of winning an award of between £10,000 and £25,000. The difference that would make to the Hackspace is incredible.

Thank you again, and hopefully we’ll be able to announce early next year that we’ve won the full funding. But more than anything else, we’re amazed and delighted by the support and goodwill our little project has, and we look forward to bringing you our refurbished toilet block Hackspace, whatever the final result.

 

 

We’ve applied for a grant from the Aviva Community Fund. Organisations are invited to submit a request for funding. There is then a public vote, and the projects which get the most votes are put forward to a judging panel for approval.

The applications have closed and the voting is under way.

We need your help

Please vote for our application here: Hitchin Hackspace Community Workshop

Voting is open to anyone who registers with the Aviva Community Fund website. Each registered voter gets 10 votes, and you can use all ten to vote for Hitchin Hackspace. Obviously we’d like it if you did that, but of course there may be other projects you’d like to support too. Please give us as many votes as you can. The more votes we get, the better our chance of securing funding to carry on developing Hitchin Hackspace’s new permanent home.

Just a quick update this time.

Our build nights for May will be on the:
1st
8th
15th
22nd
29th
As usual, these will be held from 7:30pm in the pavilion on Ransom’s Rec, off Nightingale Road.

The social night is going to be on the 9th. This will be in The Vic, at the end of Bancroft, from 7:30pm.

Progress with the Bancroft toilet block is slow and steady. There is a fair amount of grunt work, as well as more specialised jobs to get done. If you’d like to get involved with the renovation process and think you have skills we could utilise, please get in touch. The sooner we can make this our permanent home, the better.

The last couple of months have been very busy for the members of Hitchin Hackspace. Not only were members meeting twice weekly to finish our robot for Pi Wars, but we have also (after an arduous 2.5 years) been given access to the abandoned toilet block on Bancroft.

 

We’ve already spent many weekends there, tidying, repairing and planning what will be our very own bricks and mortar Hackspace and though we’re still a way off being ready to move in permanently, we’re eager to get there. These are exciting times.

 

 
 
On the 14th of March we celebrated our 5th Birthday. What started as three strangers meeting in The Vic for the first time has turned into a most excellent community with many members who love to make and have fun doing it as a group. We had a good turn out of members old and new, and there was even the traditional Hackspace birthday cheesecake.

 

 

 

The Pi Wars team have spent today at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory for the first day of competition – school teams. They’ve been having a lot of fun meeting the other teams and even had a VIP guest bighak commander – Dr Lucy Rogers, a judge on BBC Robot Wars and the head judge for Pi Wars.

Our team will be competing tomorrow and we are all keen to find out how well they they do.

 

Dates for your diary

Our weekly Build Nights for April:

• 3rd
• 10th
• 17th
• 24th

These events will be held in the pavilion on Ransom’s Rec between 7:30pm-10:00pm. Everyone is welcome to come along and see what our group get up to. You can bring a project along if you’d like, or just pop in for a chat. New people are always welcome and we enjoy seeing what projects they may bring.

Our social is on the 11th. This will be held, as always, in The Victoria at the end of Bancroft. This is an informal event and again, everybody is welcome. We start arriving from 7:30pm and it usually goes on until 11:00pm.

We hope you can make it to some of these events and if you know anyone that might be interested, bring them along. The more the merrier!