jssmk

Bringing a sauna to a hacker camp #SHA2017

2017-08-14 jssmk

Photos now in Flickr album: SHA2017 pictures

The outdoor hacker camp SHA2017 is now over and we want to thank you the organizers of the awesome event. This time the Finnish Embassy came to the camp with an electric barrel sauna. Initial negotiations with different organizing teams suggested that there was enough power to choose an electric sauna and reasons not to take a wood heated model, and we gratefully received help finding one. The popularity struck us with surprise and the sauna was occasionally not enough large for the masses. For those who might be interested, the sauna was rented from NL, not far from the event site. If you plan to bring an outdoor sauna to an hacker camp in the future, it might be easier to arrange than you think! We’ve heard there are already plans elsewhere to bring a sauna to Chaos Communication Congress 34C3.

As soon as we received our event badges, we decided to make something sauna related with it. The sauna temperature app was soon prototyped and launched on camp day one. We used RuuviTags and other sensors for monitoring the heat and informing everyone when the sauna was ready to use. The app even got mentioned in badge presentation highlights.

The sauna was still going strong after 2 am when music started to fade out on the field. We only have vague hearsay that the sauna or nudity at the camp caused some disapproval, but everything we witnessed ourselves at the sauna was only positive.

See some of the sauna reactions in Twitter: Twitter search sauna and sha2017

Planning

This time everyone from Finland took a plane for this event, so to keep us properly equipped for all the flashiness and coziness, we had to think another ways to bring our stuff other than distributing it in multiple luggage bags. Tarlab and other campers from Oulu, Burner in lead, packed (video) and delivered a cargo pallet full of materials such as lights, camping equipment, Finnish salmiakki candies, power cords, a small fridge and loads of other stuff. Arranging a shipment like this to a hacker camp is doable and we managed to get it on site nicely and in time – also not too early. Just make sure with logistics and villages teams know about your plans beforehand. Our delivery had a GPS transmitter inside, so we could follow the shipment arriving to SHA camp field live.

This time the Nordic Villages area was somewhat more planned than in Chaos Communication Camp 2015, and we had some idea who were joining the cluster beforehand. For the next camp we could try to be even more coordinated and plan what equipment different groups could bring. For example, we had no sound system, but could use the Swedish one using their awesome Youtube playlist IRC bot – thanks! The Nordic Villages and hackerspaces mailing list is an attempt to collect interested people to join future planning for camps, happenings or maybe demoscene events and visits to other hackerspaces. Let’s see what use it might find. We need enough people in the list to keep us connected, so please join the group.

Keeping the spirit up

Hours after the closing ceremony, the leftover campers of Nordic Villages were still going strong continuing with completely new programme. The Norwegian Embassy took over the near emptied Swedish tent and spray painted a sign on a remains of a Kartent to make it “look official”. Lars from Malmö started inviting bypassers and asking them “are you here for the lightning talks?”. The spontaneous presentations were either recycled slides from other occasions, mixed topics, show-and-tell style talks and such. After 8 or 9 pm when the camp site went silent and power was shut down, we continued in the dark using flashlights. Almost everyone in the tent also gave a talk.

Nordic Villages is most likely happening also in Chaos Communication Camp 2019. Thank you for all those who visited the sauna, Taike for the grant, our neighbours, and the SHA organisation to let us make this happen!

(200th blog post on this website!)

Sauna arrived in SHA village

2017-08-03 jssmk

Hacklab.fi rented a sauna for SHA2017 event in Netherlands. The electric barrel sauna arrived today at 4pm and is now running hot. Come visit the sauna if you are with us in the event!

Puusorvi saapui

2017-07-19 jssmk

Puutyötila sai eilen tiistaina aiempaa raskastekoisemman sorvin. Nosto-ovellinen tila, mahdollisuus ajaa peräkärry sisälle asti, valmis taljan kiinnityspiste katossa ja pariovet huoneiden läpi tekivät siirto-operaatiosta tähän mennessä läbin helpoimman ison koneen liikkuttelutyön.

Nelileukaa tähän ei nyt ollut, joten kiinnitykset pitää tehdä laipoilla. Öljyt ja vaihteisto näyttivät hyväkuntoisilta. Konetta päästään kokeilemaan, kunhan sähkötyöt on ensin saatu valmiiksi.

New rental contract and extending our hackerspace

2017-07-03 jssmk

Helsinki Hacklab ry. has today signed a new rental contract that increases our floor area from 215 m² to around 430 m². The contract is both for our current workspace and its neighboring storage rooms, which are now combined. Some of this area is subrented for other users, which means a total of something about 360 m² area in shared use for all our members. The extension enables us to rebuild our wood workshop completely, with more room for working and handling larger workpieces.

The area that extends our hackerspace has both a lifting door and another door for exit. The right to use the loading area in the back yard, which is the ramp that leads to our main door, is now included in the contract. Starting from July, the whole basement level of the building and most of the back yard is now shared only between our organization and our subtenants. In case of large workpieces, twin doors were installed between the rooms that lead to the wood workshop in the other end of the building. Oh, and we now also have a second bathroom too.

This area will be subrented for a woodworker. The room with lifting door can be seen in the background. Viewed from our our new wood workshop direction.

When we moved in our current address the wood workshop was designed too small, with possible future extensions in mind. We couldn’t fit a proper size wood workshop back then, so we built a tiny one instead. The new extension enables us finally to have more people working at the same time, build dust collection, and to have some floorspace reserved for possible future equipment purchases.

The lifting door makes it easier to work with large items. The room immediately behind it is probably used for storage purposes for now. Other near future plans are building compressed air piping lines in most of the hackerspace and installing the compressor in its own room in our new area.

We were generously given this June free for moving in and renovating the extension before starting to pay complete rent. So far we have progressed with necessary changes quite a lot, but we still need more volunteers to help us build and renovate the area. We also have plans for more work in the old section of the hackerspace too. Improvements could also be made outside when we have time for it.

New shelves for tool storage in wood workshop

The dimensions of the extension before building new walls

Robots in Strömberg Park 2017

2017-06-16 jssmk

Small robots try to find their way in a maze and bump against walls. This is our annual robot race in nearby Strömberg Park, which was organized by hacklab.fi last Saturday! (Or actually biannual, if you count in the indoors winter races organized in Hackerspace Tampere Hacklab)

The idea is to build robots in Hackerspaces all over Finland, and many spaces have their own copy of the “hacklab.fi standard robot maze” at their location. The track is 1×2 meter wooden box with corners that turn left and right. Although it’s a speed race, usually the best show starts when a robot has no idea of its next move.

This is the second time we have made our previously closed doors competition into a public event here in Helsinki, especially for families and children. New this year was a large and sturdy pop-up tent in case of bad weather, better marketing, posters, website, stickers, sound system and more better general idea how we should handle building the event site. This year all our robots were autonomous, and in total eight took part in the race. Robots from previous years were on display in the table and some of them (working ones) took laps on the track as well.

Most bizarre robot this year was thjt‘s Höyry robot, which consisted of a Wilesco steam engine, rotten plywood, bunch of old Legos and IR sensor electronics. It managed to go about ⅔ of a lap before literally running out of steam or dropping a pulley belt. Because it had difficulties to turn right, we gave it a special permission to run the track counterclockwise.

The race was dominated by robots from Kuopio, which took both first and third place. Second place went to Tampere with a robot that was controlled by external computer that monitored the course with hanging camera setup over the track.

Co-operation network hacklab.fi is an attempt to have more interaction between Hackerspaces in Finland, in similar fashion as UK Hackspace Foundation etc. Robot competitions such as this one have been in our schedule once or twice a year since 2012 as a part of Hacklab Summit Finland, which gathers Finnish Hackerspaces together making the scene work more with each others. Making the robot competition a public event became more obvious as the competition became more established tradition and the number of robots started resemble a real competition. This year’s race was supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland. Participants in Hacklab Summit Finland event came from cities Helsinki, Tampere, Kuopio, Vaasa, Turku and for the first time, the small town of Virrat, which might see its own hackerspace in near future.

Photos by Helsinki Hacklab
Photos by Tampere Hacklab
Photos by Kuopio Hacklab

Results page in Finnish: http://robotit.hacklab.fi/2017

Talkoopäivä ja remontin edistyminen

2017-06-07 jssmk

Tiistaina pidimme hacklabilla talkoopäivän, jossa päätyönä saatiin tyhjennettyä vanha puutyöhuone. Suunnitelmat etenevät ja niistä kerrotaan myöhemmin lisää, kun osaamme tarkemmin sanoa, mitä muutoksia tilaan on luvassa.

Rakentaminen jatkuu HSF:ään asti. Kompressori liikkui aiemmin maanantaina paikalleen uuteen nurkkaansa. Nyt odotellaan uusien ovien saapumista, ja ne asennetaan heti kun mahdollista.

Slack, IRC ja Telegram

2017-06-02 jssmk

Helsinki Hacklabin viestintä on myllätty uusiksi ja jäsenille on lähetetty kutsuviestit Slack-keskusteluun. Tavoitteena on palauttaa keskustelu enemmän yhdistyksen toimintaan liittyväksi, aktivoida ihmisiä osallistumaan ja avata yhdistyksen suunnittelua ja päätöksentekoa laajemmin.

Tiiviisti tämä tarkoittaa seuraavaa:

Slack on pääasiallinen keskusteluväline
IRC:ssä Freenode-kanava #helsinki.hacklab.fi on sillattu yhteen Slack-kanavista, eli keskustelut välittyvät molempiin suuntiin yhteystavasta riippumatta
Telegram on otettu käyttöön uutena yhteysvälineenä, ja se on sillattu samaan Slack-kanavaan kuin IRC
Slack on yhdistyksen jäsenten keskusteluille, ja siellä voi perustaa uusia kanavia, jakaa keskustelua eri aihealueisiin ja luoda viestiketjuja
IRC ja Telegram ovat avoinna ihan kaikille: jäsenille, muiden kaupunkien hacklabien tyypeille, vieraille tai muille ulkopuolisille

Jäsenille IRC-kanava #helsinki.hacklab.fi jää legacy-yhteystavaksi keskusteluun, sillä sitä seuraamalla ei jatkossa pysty seuraamaan kaikkia Slackissa olevia kanavia ja keskusteluja.

Wikistä löytyy lisää infoa uusista Slack-kanavista. Telegramilla voit yhdistää keskusteluun tämän sivun linkkilistasta.

Talkoopäivä ja laajennettuun tilaan tutustuminen

2017-05-29 jssmk

Tiistaina 6. kesäkuuta pidetään Helsinki Hacklabilla talkoo- ja siivouspäivä. Samalla päästään tutustumaan myös kellarikerrosen tyhjentyvään toiseen puoliskoon. Tavanomainen omien projektien rakentelu ja säätäminen ei silloin ole mahdollista. Aloitetaan työt heti kun pystytään, ovet ovat auki viimeistään alkaen klo 16. Tule mukaan kun pääset.

Mukaan siivoukseen voi ottaa mm.

työvaatteet, haalarit, työhanskat
pihan siivoukseen työvälineitä

Tehtävänä on mm. siirtää irtainta tavaraa ulos, ja päättää, mitä kannetaan takaisin sisälle.

Huomenna tiistaina 30.5. varataan takapiha tilaansa tyhjentävän naapurin Siriuksen kuormurille ym. siirtelylle. Vältetään siis pysäköintiä takapihalle, jos siellä on työt vielä kesken.

Muistathan ilmoittautua HSF-viikonlopulle!
Tapahtuma järjestetään 9. – 11.6.2017

Pääsy Hacklabille on HSF-viikonlopun aikana varattu vain tapahtumaan osallistuville!

HSF17½ – ilmoittautuminen avattu

2017-05-10 jssmk

Helsinki Hacklabin ja hacklab.fi:n järjestämä HSF17½-tapahtuma 9.–11.6.2017.

Kutsuttuina ovat aloittelevien ja toiminnassa olevien Hacklabien jäsenet koko Suomessa. Mukaan saavat tulla myös muut hack-, säätö-, radioamatööri- ja DIY-henkiset yhdistykset ja henkilöt ympäri Suomea. Osallistumista suositellaan erityisesti toimintaansa aloitteleville tai vasta suunnitteleville ryhmille.

Perjantai on varattu aikataulussa Kaivopuiston lentonäytökselle. Järjestämme ovet auki Hacklabilla niille, jotka eivät tule katsomaan näytöstä.

Robotit Strömbergin puistossa on lauantaina 10.6.2017. Rata on sama tuttu hacklab.fi-robottirata kuin aiempina vuosina.

Ilmoittautuminen

Tapahtuman nettisivut, infot ja ilmoittautuminen:
http://hsf.hacklab.fi/

Robottikisan omat nettisivut:
http://robotit.hacklab.fi

Perjantaina Kaivopuiston lentonäytös:
http://suomifinland100.fi/event/suomi-lentaa-juhlalentonaytos/

Tapahtuman järjestäjille voi esittää kysymksiä sekä hacklab.fi:n irkkikanavalla että keskustelussa:
https://discourse.hacklab.fi/t/hsf17-9-11-6-tapahtuman-jarjestaminen/644/

Kevätkokous 2017

2017-04-27 jssmk

Helsinki Hacklab ry:n sääntömääräinen kevätkokous pidetään sunnuntaina 28.5.2017 klo 14. Paikkana oma työtilamme Takkatie 18.

Voit saapua paikalle jo 12 alkaen valmistelemaan ja siivoamaan tilaa. Virallinen kokous aloitetaan kello 14. Ennen ja jälkeen on epävirallista kokoontumista.

Tarjoilu nyyttikestiperiaatteella. Tervetuloa!

Helsinki Hacklab holds its annual spring-meeting on Sunday 28.5.2017, 14:00, at our premises in Takkatie 18. You can arrive starting from 12:00. After the official part there is general hanging around and snacks using the potluck principle. Welcome!