So, I’ve been slowly working on the lights in the hackerspace. I’ve rewired them using Weidmuller WDU2.5 terminals on DIN rail, as this is what I use in work. It’s a pretty great system and lets me have clean wiring, easy to read wiring and things will probably be safer. The next steps I’d like to take are to implement the Internet of Shit on our LED lamps above the main workspaces. Because these are lights and need to be used by real people, they cannot be solely internet connected, that would be ridiculous. This means I’ll need to consider per-LED-BANK physical buttons to compliment my software implementation. We’ve got 4 banks of LEDs, so 4 inputs and 4 outputs will be needed. …

Tom and I were happy to announce the first 57N Stupid Shit No One Needs Hackathon last week. I maintain he forced me to send the email, but I kind of enjoyed adding my stuff to it. It turned out to be a really cool weekend of creating for the sake of creating, which I’ve not done for aaaaaaages. I wanted to make a BBS door game to tie into my mysterious BBS project, so I made FuelSim - the dynamic, exciting game which places you into the mysterious, unexplored world of an Andorran fuel station. …

Yeah, yeah yeah I’ve been busy. I’ve been working on lots and I’ve not been blogging. My buddy yakamo tells me I’m bad because I don’t blog enough. I agree, yeah, but I can’t be bothered detailing everything I do down to an exacting level because I’ve got shit to do. So you should probably meet my wiki, who lives at foxk.it - it’s a way to keep myself a bit more organised. At the moment it’s mostly radio and notes to myself. …

Having been curious for a while, I’ve decided it’s time to start properly playing in the world of packet radio. Not just APRS, though - that’s a ‘solved problem’, and quite simple to get a quick hang of. My main station radio that lives in the hackerspace is a Yaesu FT-7900, and it’s a lovely piece of kit. I’ve got a data cable with proper, separate PTT and audio out/in. It’s got a 9600baud mode as well, so hopefully I can get faster data once all of this has been set up. …

So I’ve been playing with info-beamer lots recently, as part of my attempts to relearn how to be a clever person. Having seen it at 31c3, I was curious how I could use it and how much work it was to make it display information. After reading the documentation, I’m really impressed with how easy it is to do seemingly clever things with. The base frames for displaying data are written in lua, which seems sensible and easy enough to read to enable hacking at. It’s also, I’ve been told, quick as fuck. The software itself has a server awaiting UDP on port 4444, and a defined way of importing that into the system. This is really neat - if you want to send data directly to it, and have new things appear on screen, it’s pretty easy to do. …