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.