HacDC

Last month HacDC participated in the Global Hackerspace Cupcake Challenge by sending a specially-packaged cupcake through the mail to SkullSpace in Winnipeg. On Sunday, 16 January 2011, a group of us gathered at HacDC to choose, decorate, and package the cupcake. Hasufin provided home-baked cupcakes in various combinations of {ginger | chocolate | honey} cake and {chocolate | vanilla | "7-minute"} frosting/icing. We were compelled to taste these combinations to choose the best in terms of flavor and expected durability. It was a grueling task, but we persevered, and eventually we chose the ginger cake with vanilla frosting as the cupcake we would send. Our next task was decoration, since the contest rules require "at least one sugar based topper/decoration" in addition to the frosting. We experimented with tubes of cake decorating gel to see how finely we could write and draw on the cupcake's frosting. The notion of drawing a QR code on the frosting tickled our fancy for a while. We couldn't achieve sufficiently high resolution using dots of gel, given the limited surface area on the top of the cupcake, so we thought of using a stencil and aerosol food color. But the hour was growing late, and we lacked a clearly-working printer—never mind the island problem with making a stencil for a QR code—so we abandoned that idea. In the end, we chose a simple appeal to patriotism, in the form of a Canadian flag with a maple leaf drawn from red food gel and red fields formed from cinnamon imperials. For packaging, we suspended the cupcake inside a plastic tub with two bamboo skewers. We placed the plastic tub inside a styrofoam cooler along with a couple of freezer packs, a handful of vinyl HacDC stickers, and small packets of Swedish Fish as padding. A postal holiday, icy weather, and minor illness combined to delay shipping until Wednesday the 19th, on which date we shipped the package to Winnipeg via USPS Express Mail International. It arrived at International Dispatch in New York on the 20th and crossed into Canada on the 24th; Canada Post attempted delivery for a few days before succeeding on the 28th. The SkullSpace folks wrote a blog post describing the unboxing and judging and posted this video as well:The upshot: the cupcake tasted great but arrived far from intact. As a result, our overall score is not among the top contenders, but we did have a good time and learn how not to ship a cupcake. And we can certainly recommend the ginger cake recipe we used.

Here’s a status update on that Unicorn Build we undertook a couple of Sundays ago. We started by opening up this Chicago Tool soldering iron, which wasn’t trivial! Armed with a Dremel rotary tool and a succession of cutting wheels, we tore into the plastic handle to reveal these innards. Having separated the core from the handle, we went on to test the thermal insulating adequacy of some mica tape with a thermal conductivity of 0.173 BTU that we thought we might use to buffer the plastic My Little Pony from the heat of the soldering iron. When we wrapped the lower end of the soldering iron core in several layers of the tape and turned it on, though, the tape was quite hot to the touch. Time to try something else for insulation; we’ll be trying wool felt next.

In the course of fiddling with the soldering iron’s core, we inadvertently jiggled loose a wire that’s meant to connect somewhere inside the core that’s pretty much inaccessible without cutting into some solid-looking metal and potentially rupturing some more connections. Fortunately, we had a second cheap soldering iron on hand for just such an eventuality. This Weller model was far easier to open and—unlike the Chicago Tool one—sports a metal flange that presents an obvious way to connect to the Pony’s forehead.

Meanwhile, the Pony underwent the first of what will probably be several surgeries. 🙂

In case you haven’t been around the space in the last few weeks, you may have missed the 3-D printing work that’s been going on. Both machines are now running with (improved) extruder designs that they’ve printed out themselves. Que recursivo!

Elliot, Xaq, Will, TC, Eric, Tommy, and (ages ago now) Redbeard have been playing around on the Cupcake and the RepRap. We’ve been making fun toys as well as making progress on getting the machines more reliable and robust.

If you’re interested in helping out, get in touch. Also, have a look at the wiki pages: https://wiki.hacdc.org/index.php/3D_Printing or https://wiki.hacdc.org/index.php/Makerbot or have a gander at https://www.thingiverse.com/ for inspiration.

Workshops will follow, probably in January: proposed topics include 3D modelling, converting a model to a printable object, and the nitty-gritty of operating the machines.