Visualizing Data, Rearchitecting Stacks, and Translating Music at HackUpstate HackUpstate is a regional hackathon with the mission > "to unite and facilitate collaboration among greater Upstate New York hacker communities. In doing so, we aim to contribute to the growth of Upstate NY Tech sector, and create a robust network of technologists and tech companies." ...

A huge part of the project for the HFOSS course is creating a game/application/contribution to Sugar Labs projects. As I am not a game design student I proposed a project that will take a little bit of a different path that would include hardware, my interest (and stronger suit). The XO laptops can interface with these sensors or, with a modified XO, a serial port. We are hoping to use these sensors to build off of the [Measurement Activity](http ...

Hey world it's been a while!! I took a bit of time to get used to the new semester system that RIT is using instead of our dearly loved quarterly system. In the mean time I've had some thing happening and continue to happen that I believe I should blog about to get some stability back into my work life. Past things that have been going on: Summer COOP was glorious! I can't believe the amount of awesome individuals that I've met and am continuing to meet through the Fossbox and it's many faith ...

For the HFOSS course, we completed a Commarch assignment, basically just investigating an open source project and learning a bit about it. My group chose Fedora Badges, because I was familiar with it and it is an awesome project led by people that are already close to FOSS@RIT. Project: Fedora Badges IRC Channel: #fedora-infra, #fedora-apps, #fedora-badges on freenode Code Repository: https://github.com/fedora-infra/fedbadges **Mail ...

Here are a few images that show the basic functionality of Sash. AttachmentSize 01.png 250.38 KB 02.png 115.31 KB 03.png 214.35 KB 04.png 205.95 KB ...

So during Software Freedom day I began hacking on the BeagleBone Black and a small stepper motor. Are only goal was to gain familiarity with the BeagleBone by controlling the stepper motor with Python code that is FOSS. For the hardware setup I utilized the 28BYJ-48 Stepper Motor, the L293D Driver Chip, a breadboard, some wire ...

Saturday was Software Freedom Day! The weather was terrible but the day was awesome! We started off with a 'My first Kernal Hack' talk in which we actually edited the kernel to fix a simple bug. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get the actual submission email to work so we never submitted the fix, but it was a nice start to kernel hacking. Plus Matthew Whitehead may be coming to RIT more as a mentor of sorts so I may have the opportunity to learn some more from h ...

So Tuesday was RocPy and I have only just gotten around to blogging about it. It was the first time for most of the HFOSS class to go to RocPy and it was really neat to see so many people there! The talk was way over my head (and over the heads of most people there, I think!) I am always amazed just how much Threebean (Ralph Bean) knows about Python! He wasn't the speaker but he knew a lot about the talk, and even though he learned some he also ...

Today was Software Freedom Day and there was a lot of amazing talks and hacking going on! The project that I began with a fellow hacker and friend, Suzanne Reed, was a bot that will be used for dispensing beverages via SMS message to a BBB connected to some motors. I do not know much about the mechanical process, but I know I will be writing most of the software portion. Our goal for today was to try and get some sort of response from a motor that we hocked up ...

Today in class we had a brief quiz on Weber's Eight Principles and the Five Pillars of Open Source. Here is my quiz: What are the titles of each Pillar? Open exchange Participation Rapid prototyping Meritocracy Community What are the titles of each General Principle? Make it interesting and make sure it happens Scratch an itch Minimize how many times you have t ...