HacDC Joins the Mt Pleasant Mesh Network

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You can learn more about Project Byzantium and mesh betworking by attending the HARC (HacDC Amateur Radio Club) meeting Wednesday, June 13 at 7:30pm. More details here.

We are excited to announce that HacDC joined Mount Pleasant’s neighborhood mesh network! HacDC member Haxwithaxe put the finishing touches on the mast he designed and built for the router, and Preston Rhea and other OTI engineers upgraded our router to the latest copy of their Commotion firmware. Then we all went up to roof where we mounted the router and strung the Cat-5 to power it.

Photo via Preston Rhea.

Unfortunately, we are not in range of any of the other nodes (yet). We just don’t have a good line-of-sight to any of the other nodes in the network (yet). However there’s a good chance that one of the intermediate buildings will install a node which will serve to bridge us over to the rest of the Mt Pleasant network.

Thanks to the HacDC members, friends in the community, OTI engineers, and everyone else who helped make this happen!

CarolinaCon: Cool Antenna, Even Cooler Costumes

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Recently, HacDC members The Doctor, Ben the Pyrate, and Haxwithaxe went to CarolinaCon in Raleigh, NC to present on Project Byzantium. The guys had a great time. “CarolinaCon is freaking awesome,” said Haxwithaxe, noting that Raleigh has a local computer chain store that sells 1m wide parabolic antennas for around $50.

In the below pictures you can see two different combinations of the Project Byzantium speakers holding their parabolic antenna.

(It should be noted that Ben the Pyrate and The Doctor won CarolinaCon’s non-existant costume contest.)

Curious about the parabolic antenna? That is a four foot wide parabolic reflector designed for use with 802.11 wi-fi.  The speakers picked it up to mess around with at the con, and
possibly apply to the Broadband Bridge mesh node project at HacDC.

Scheming, Dreaming, and Programming with SICP

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Schemers is a study group for those interested in exploring Structure and Interpretations of Computer Programming (SICP), an introductory Computer Science textbook used by MIT. Not only is the entire textbook available online for free, but it has some rather zealous fanboys and fangirls.

From Stack Overflow:

SICP, however, is in a different league. It is a book that will enlighten you. It will evoke in you a passion for writing beautiful programs. Moreover, it will teach you to recognize and appreciate that very beauty. It will leave you with a state of awe and an unquenchable thirst to learn more. Other books may make you a better programmer; this book will make you a programmer.

Our study group will be going through the book and meeting every other Tuesday at 7:30pm starting next week Tuesday, May 22. For the first meeting, we will be setting up testing environments and discussing Section 1.1. You should read the section and take a stab at the exercises before the meeting. Check out the Meetup event for more details and to sign up!

Become an Original Member of HARC May 9

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Next week Wednesday, May 9 is your chance to become an original member of HacDC’s Amateur Radio Club (HARC)! The club-within-a-club will be getting their ARRL paperwork signed, voting for club officers, and affirming their constitution and bylaws.

If that’s not enticing enough for you, HARC will also include Frank Hunleth and Bill Babson presenting on their Nerves project, which they host using a BeagleBone. What is Nerves, you ask? Nerves is an embedded Linux based environment for running Erlang, a programming language highly suited for communications applications requiring high availability. Their talk will explore uses in ham radio applications.

The meeting will begin at 7:30pm at HacDC. HARC encourages you to RSVP to the event on Meetup if you know you’re going to attend.

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