Here at the shackspace we love pointing our 50W lazor towards all kinds of materials for fun, more benefit and no profit … yet! The only slight downside is that the laser can (at the moment) only be controlled through a quirky Windows software – the reverse engineering job is still pending. Also there’s a lot of people around which just had to buy “a few” Raspberry Pies when it came out as new – ultra-affordable mini-PC last year.

While looking for use cases for the new toy we discovered that it makes an awesome  (literally) thin client. It has a very low power consumption ~2W and manages to handle remote desktop applications reasonably fast.

To combine both pain (Windows Krepelsoftware) and pleasure (RasPI) the motivation for this project is to provide a means to control the laser cutter - and since the software for controlling it only runs on Windows – without requiring a native Windows computer (which concerns most people around here).

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Thanks to Sabrina Winter who was very busy filming and interviewing the participants of this year’s Global Game Jam at shackspace there’s now a video documentation showcasing some of the games and folks behind them.

After watching the video make sure to check out the flickr set and play the games as well!

We’ve had a great time hosting this year’s Global Game Jam at shackspace.
Turns out that with 33 game developers, students, designers and musicians working on building games the Stuttgart Jam was one of the largest in Germany!

This years topic was “Heartbeat” and the Stuttgart event resulted in seven games being developed in two days. Make sure to check them out, most of them are implemented so you can play them right from your browser.

• Shopping Queen
• Heart Beat Berta
• Willy (Kinect)
• LOOVE
• Party Planet 45 Heartbeat
• flow
• Grand Theft Ambulance

There’s also a short review in German by the folks over at Wirtschaftsförderung Region Stuttgart and a collection of photos taken at the event over on flickr.

Photo: CC BY-NC-ND Region Stuttgart 

As some of you might know already, shackspace does have a piano for everyone to play.
Of course we also have quite a few members who can use this instrument virtuously and do so on a regular basis.
However, our piano was suffering from a few notes which were slightly out of tune.

Lucky for us we also have members who have both the equipment and skill to do day to day tuning jobs. Now, without further ado, we shall present you shackspace resident musician and piano virtuoso flyx tuning the shackspace piano. The suspense! It’s unbearable!

Klavierstimmen from shack e.V. Hackerspace Stuttgart on Vimeo.

shackspace hacker @4RM4 was looking for something to hack when he visited 29c3. He found someone who was selling RGB-LED stripes with individually addressable LEDs which was (understandably) irresistible and he already had a RaspberryPi to control it with. Controlling the stripe is done via one of the Pi’s SPI ports. However there was nothing to mount the stripe to… except for a trash bin.  Luckily the trash bin had a circumference of exactly 1 meter resulting in a 10 row high tubular display when he wrapped the 10 meters of LED stripe around it.

One of the first hacks was a text scroller which was nice but not quite there yet. But soon after that was done 4RM4 was off to the land of classic games and quickly hacked together a snake clone.  Playing snake on a tubular display was quite a challenge and since the trash bin had to stay at the congress center once 29c3 was over he opted to go for a more familiar and usable form factor by cutting the 10 meter LED stripe into smaller pieces to build a rectangular display.

He improved his snake clone by adding a high-score feature, auto-play bot, support for free dot placement for debugging, and a clock display in idle mode.

Playing it got even more fun with a Wii-Nunchuck hooked up to the RasPi which was quite easy since he could use the Pi’s GPIO port to talk to the Nunchuck’s I2C interface.

Of course the full code is available on GitHub and there’s some documentation (in German) on the shackspace wiki.