WIP: Project World Domination

At shackspace we always aim for higher goals, therefore team krebs took action and started with the utlimate project - world domination.

For a long time shackspace has had the wooden ‘world domination map’ on the lounge wall, which gave the whole room a unique flair.

Finally, this weekend some minor but annoying bugs on the map got fixed, like the missing Black and Caspian Sea in Eurasia.

The goal was to place as many hackerspaces (among those who implement the Hackerspace API) as possible on the map and show their open status using RGB LEDs.

Here’s a short timeline of this hacking weekend:

Thursday:

Sadly, all Mapping projects for the spaceAPI seemed dead at this point, so @momorientes and @makefoo teamed up and built http://map.krebsco.de to get started. In the process we found some hackerspaces that had switched lat and lon on their API implementations and notified them, in the near future there should be less hackerspaces in the Somalia region ;)

Friday:
ciko, @lotho and @momorientes began to make plans to fix minor bugs in the map and add the Caspian and the Black Sea
@phrewfuf and @momorientes started by adding the Caspian and the Black Sea to the exisiting wooden map initially built by @n3rdybirdy.
@lotho and @momorientes gave the map a finishing paint.
Saturday:

3pm:
Jo merged a piece of wood to complete the Caspian Sea
Jo and @codingrixx began to plan the path our bus would have to take around Eurasia
@phrewfuf started to solder the WS2812 LEDs and was later replaced by @pcopfer and @codingrixx.

10pm:
@codingrixx and @pcopfer did an awesome job and got half way through Europe
Meanwhile @flachdachjogger had started to rip out the existing background illumination and began to replace it with a high density LED stripe

Sunday:

1am:
@codingrixx single-handedly finished the soldering on Germany (so many hackerspaces!)
ttb and @codingrixx continued till 8am to finish Eurasia by soldering LEDs for the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Spain

11am:
@gryhsl started to assemble a sorted list of all APIs on the maps part.
@momorientes and @flachdachjogger added 3 more hackerspaces to the map.
@flachdachjogger, @momorientes and ttb added wood and hot glue to improve the overall sturdiness of the map.
@flachdachjogger added a power supply and improved the map‘s supply voltage.
@phrewfuf added an arduino for doing a simple fade as long as no ‘brain’ is added.
8pm:
@momorientes and @flachdachjogger put some finishing touches on the map and put it on the wall.

Monday:
@makefoo quickly hacked together a control script for the ws2811 on the esp8266 on the nodemcu firmware. The firmware opens a coap server and exposes the control of the LEDs from an external instance. A VM polls the hackerspace APIs and sets the LEDs to red/green according to their open status. Together with Samu the ESP8266 got deployed in place of the arduino used for testing.

After this long weekend the team had completed continental Eurasia (lacking some small islands such as the UK) and added about 80 LEDs (>450 solder joints).

Sadly, smaller hackerspaces didn’t fit on the wooden map in crowded places (the Netherlands on the map is as big as four LEDs), but their status is always correctly displayed on http://map.krebsco.de.

If your hackerspace isn’t on the map, make sure to implement the current version of the hackerspace API, especially when your hackerspace is on the African continent or the Middle East

Work will continue during the next weekends and islands and other continents will be added. The map will also receive a new paint coat and the background illumination will be finalized (we didn’t have enough LED Stripes at hand).

For more pictures of the build check the shackspace Log!