Tag: hacks

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Milwaukee Makerspace

Milwaukee Makerspace

I stopped by the Milwaukee Makerspace for a few hours last weekend, and I was pretty impressed with the progress they’ve been making.

If you’re not familiar with a Makerspace (also sometimes referred to as a Hackerspace) check out hackerspaces.org where you’ll learn that they are: community-operated physical places, where people can meet and work on their projects.

CNC Mill (In Progress)

At the Milwaukee Makerspace you’ll meet people who know how to build robots, hack Arduinos, weld, cut, drill and use every power tool/hand tool you can imagine. These guys have built electric cars, furniture, camera control systems, and even gained some recognition in the PowerWheel Racing series at the Detroit Maker Faire.

What was going on Saturday? Brant was working on building shelving space for projects, Matt was planning his guitar repair, Ron brought his keychain video camera (and I played with it a bit) and Royce repaired the access control system. There’s still much to do before the open house on April 9th, 2011.

Makerbot

So even though the Makerspace has drills and saws and tools and welders and electronics testing equipment, and they’re building a CNC mill, and repairing a laser cutter… you might wonder why you would really want to be a member… and the reason is: community.

The guys at the Makerspace are passionate about making things, but they want to do it around other people, not in their basement or garage, but in a space where collaboration takes center stage. And these guys are pretty smart, so if you’re trying to do something but don’t know how… chances are there’s a Milwaukee Makerspace member who knows how to do it, and can help you.

"If you can hack it, you can have it"

This might be my favorite photo of the Makerspace, and it’s a great motto: “If you can hack it, you can have it.” :)

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Stylish for Thunderbird 3.1

I got sick of waiting for Stylish to be updated to work in Thunderbird 3.1, so I took care of it.

By “took care of it” I mean I did the following:

  1. Read through Hacking Firefox Extensions
  2. Hacked Stylish
  3. Tested the Hacked version

And since it worked for me, I’m putting it out there.

Over in the code section is a new directory named stylish. Go there, download the file stylish-1.0.9a-fx+tb+sm.xpi, and install it into Thunderbird.

There’s also a simple readme file there that explains what I did. I’ll show it here as well: 

stylish-1.0.9a-fx+tb+sm.xpi is a hacked version of stylish-1.0.9-fx+tb+sm.xpi

There are basically two differences from the official version:

 - This one has an 'a' in it's name.
 - This one will install into Thunderbird 3.1.x

All I did was change the string that says what 
version of Thunderbird it can install into.

I could find no license info for the original code. 
If the author wishes me to remove this, I certainly will.
Update 2010-07-28: The code is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3.0

Use at your own risk.  <-- the lawyers told me to say that!

So if you trust me, feel free to download the hacked version and install it into Thunderbird 3.1... and if you don't trust me, go read the Hacking Firefox Extensions post and then do it yourself.

(You'll also find my 'Various Tweaks' file in the stylish directory as well. This is a style I use for Thunderbird based on info I got from this page on Thunderbird Chrome. )

Update 2010-07-28: The source code is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3.0

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Fix Your InfoLithium Battery

We’ve got a Sony PD-150 video camera which uses these “InfoLithium” batteries, and over the years, these batteries have given us a hard time, but no more… (We hope!)

See, when these batteries go “bad” they tell the camera not to work. When you power it on, there’s an error message: “For Infolithium Battery Only” which is the camera telling you it doesn’t like the battery. It should be noted that we’ve had the camera for about 9 years, and we’ve used third party batteries for years without issues, but hey, Sony is Sony, you know how they are.

Video Shoot

Turns out the battery has a processor it in, and when things are not quite right, it tells the camera, and you get the error message. Don’t worry, the battery is not dead, it’s just very sick. :)

We got this error with one of our batteries, and since we still had one good one, I tossed the bad one in a drawer and forgot about it for about 9 months. Then our good one did the same thing, so I decided to pull out the bad one and give it one more try. Amazingly enough, it worked! Seems that since it was sitting dormant for so long, it must have lost enough charge to reset itself, and it was back to normal. (So now the bad one was the good one, and the good one was the bad one…. you follow?)

So the fix is to let your battery sit in a drawer unused for 9 months.

Or… I guess you could manually discharge it.

I’ll provide the warning that if the phrase “manually discharge” scares you, you might not want to do what is described below. (If you’re careful, it’s really not that dangerous, but people love disclaimers.)

I initially did some searching, and came across this page on Infolithium Batteries which held the secret. The whole page is worth a good read.

With knowledge in hand, er, in head, I stopped by Radio Shack and picked up a two-pack of 10 ohm/10 watt resistors. (Cost was about $2.00)

resistor
Photo by Mike Krukowski.

The idea is to short the battery with a resistor (do not try it without the resistor!) so that the battery can drain its charge and reset the processor. This took quite a while for the battery I had, and when you read that part about the resistor getting very hot I hope you were paying attention. It actually started to melt the MiniDV cassette case I had it sitting on. It’ll definitely burn skin. Put it on a safe surface that can take the heat!

I was warned by local robotics enthusiast Royce Pipkins that I should perhaps not let the battery drain all the way, as that might render it useless. So at this point I was letting it drain and checking the voltage every now and then. Here’s where I screwed up and left it on too long, and I thought it drained completely. (I assumed the voltage would continually get lower and lower, but I don’t think that happened.) Luckily, even with the battery completely drained, I was able to charge it and the camera recognized it, so I guess it worked!

Anyway, even though the Infolithium Batteries page has been around for years and years, I figured I’d add my 2 cents about the issue, since, you know… that’s what the Internet is for.

Enjoy your (like) new battery!