Regular Member Meeting 2017 09 12

Time and Location

Date

Called to order at 8:17 pm by Julia

Members present: Julia, Kevin, Ken, James, Ben B., Tayeb, Enrique, Tom (8)

Members remote:

Others present: Nancy, Bobby, Tristan, David

Quorum

Quorum met? Yes

Approval of Previous Meeting's Minutes

• August, no quorum: http://wiki.hacdc.org/index.php/Regular_Member_Meeting_2017_08_08
• July, no quorum: http://wiki.hacdc.org/index.php/Regular_Member_Meeting_2017_07_11
• June, no quorum: http://wiki.hacdc.org/index.php/Regular_Member_Meeting_2017_06_13
• May, no quorum: http://wiki.hacdc.org/index.php/Regular_Member_Meeting_2017_05_09
• April, quorum achieved: http://wiki.hacdc.org/index.php/Regular_Member_Meeting_2017_04_11

Project Awesome Reports

Project Electron Microscope (SEM) - Enrique

I am not working on this; too many other things. Julia et al are working on providing a digital interface to the new vacuum gauge with an opto-isolator.

I may have managed to read out a similar ROM chip - should able to have a crack at dumping the ROMs from the machine - Oni

Project CRISPR -Enrique

We repeated the protocol carefully with Sophia doing the plating and protocol and good temperature control during the process. But it didn't work, again. I suspect our freezer may not be good enough for long-term storage of the protein and DNA ingredients. I've written the vendor to ask for help because we've spent over $500 in both HacDC money and donated supplies and equipment so far and it hasn't worked once. Regardless, we're planning to press ahead with a Saturday workshop so people can learn about CRISPR and get a hands-on feeling for what the process is like. Nancy and Sophia are working on a video. [email protected]

Project SpaceBlimp -Enrique

We aborted the launch of Spaceblimp 7 during the solar eclipse. Long story short we were not ready and driving 8 hours down to the SC border on a weekday was a high bar for a group of volunteers. We should do Spaceblimp 7 more locally just as Spaceblimp 6 and take our time testing things and making an interesting payload. I now have a cylinder of Helium at home that we're paying $0.20/day to rent, so we're actively losing money not doing anything. But the tracker(s) are still broken or untested, for example. Contact [email protected] for more information.

Member Reports

• Enrique. We had a nice lockpicking class Saturday with TOOOL. About 20 guests came and a half dozen or so got a tour of the classroom. A few even got a tour of the basement, unfortunately. TOOOL-DC is interested in having a monthly-ish 'advanced' lockpicking class but they want it a bit more private than their usual events (eg fewer newbs).
• Enrique. We received the SparkFun parts. A solar panel, USB battery pack, solar-battery charger, two other LiPo battery chargers, 2 motion sensors, 3 temperature sensors, breadboards, and 3 mini-HDMI cables( for Pi Zeros). Sparkfun wants photos of using them duing an event for their marketing purpose quid-pro-quo.
• Kevin: Also, as a result of the conference, students that I mentor at the Arlington Career Center may be part of a team restoring the original KITT from the horrible "Knight Rider" television series, for the next Escape Velocity. The owner of the Season 1 & 2 car is interested in bringing it back to life. The ACC has a an auto repair shop, and two years ago, together with computer science students, we had 3D printed parts and a touch screen Raspberry Pi capable of rudimentary voice recognition ("Hey STACi, turn on the rear defroster.") I don't think the Pi made it into STACi before the end of the semester, but with MoSF offering to help with stuff, I expect there will be a bigger push towards a finished product. I don't know that there will be opportunity for HacDC in that project, but if there's interest and commitment, I'll see what I can do. This would almost certainly be weekday after-school stuff, not weekends.

Director Reports (Governance related stuff)

Vice President's Report

• I've bollocksed up the VLAN for the classroom temporarily. Will fix it sooner or later.

• The replacement for the RasPi on the classroom TV is kind of slow, I think mostly due to the USB flash drive but maybe also due to the processor. Anyway we have a new board and a 3.5" hard drive and I spent two hours dremeling out a rectangle in one of our surplus cases downstairs last night and soon it will be made better.

• The classroom printserver is broken -- not sure what's going on with cups. Probably just a broken config and I'm ready to do a full re-install of the packages and see if that works out. Anybody who wants to mess around with a remote debian box is welcome to take this on.

• Will probably rebuild the classroom laptops this month if a bunch of other things don't come up.

• I'd like to represent HacDC at an upcoming meeting with Mike and the rest of the tenants regarding building security. As tenants we have an obvious stake here and then again as the maintainers and builders of the security camera system and core IT infrastructure. I will try to make sure that we're doing everything we can to serve the church well.

• Two specific tasks related to HacDC that might be good to undertake regarding the above are to improve the security camera coverage outside the church and improve physical security around access to the core router / church IT closet. This is currently very difficult as it's in a shared space and many people may have access to the closet as it is used for storage, or tenants go in to troubleshoot their IT problems on their own, etc.

• I've started two new meetups in the past month. Repair Cafe and Open (imperative verb) Technology Tuesdays. No more Hardware Despair.

Treasurer's Report

• I'm resigning as Treasurer. Good luck y'all.
• We broke about even in August. August financial report is linked below.

Media:HacDC_2017-8.pdf

Director-at-Large Reports

Kevin

• I printed up another 150 flyers and took about 50 to "Escape Velocity II" the Museum of Science Fiction conference, where I shilled for us. Sadly, I did not know we could have had a table for free. The MoCo Makers of Rockville did know, and the guy shilling for them, Matthew Zamora, thought there might be opportunity for collaboration. They're launching a Kickstarter for their own FPGA board. In addition, a gent, Oguz Yetkin, from the Next Gen Systems group of the University of Louisville offered their prototype open source EMGduino "at cost" to us if we're interested. See the links for details.
• I will be out of the country for the upcoming second Community Network gathering being hosted by THRIVE DC, but Julia has taken that on.

Adjournment

Adjourned by at xxx by xxx