YES! OUR FIRST OPEN HOUSE SINCE THE COVID LOCKDOWN!
We’ve finally mustered up the courage to let more people in. Our first post-COVID open house is scheduled for Thursday May 5, 2022 in our home at the David Dunlap Observatory.
If you’ve been before, you still want to come out. We have lots of new tools, and we’ll be announcing some new classes and event nights.
We’re charging a token $5 because:
We are limiting the numbers (still COVID nervous!)
A token fee has been proven to prevent people from registering and not showing up. That’s important if when we are limiting numbers
We are donating the entire amount (we’ll eat the fees!) to Doctors Without Borders in support of their work in the Ukraine
If you’re the kind of person who will whine and protest about this fee that’s going to such a good cause… well… hmmm… maybe you’re not good membership material for us.
Register here to reserve your spot!,Space is limited.
Great to see many new faces at our amateur radio open house on Monday, June 25. In addition to the presentation and discussion around the various aspects of amateur radio, we had a great group of people from Toronto Mesh.
Directional antenna for mesh networks.
They are active in several areas of distributed mesh networks, and are putting a lot of effort into getting people educated. Some of them are playing a part in the our networks conference from July 13-18 that includes 2 days of seminars and 3 days of code sprints.
In addition to some classic ham radio decks, we showed off some really inexpensive technology like SDR (software-defined radio) USB sticks. Originally designed for terrestrial digital television, they can scan a full 6 MHz band, and are available with antenna and accessories for around $25.
Cheapo RTL-SDR USB wideband radio scanner. See the difference between CBC and Virgin Radio?
A copy of our presentation can be found here, and it includes links to the cheap radio sources and ylab Canadian ham certification material we covered in the presentation.
Repent from your unlicensed radio usage! (Actually, just a home-made Yagi-Uda antenna. Yes, that’s a cut-up tape measure.)
We’re looking forward to more radio nights – and our next open house – Drone night – on Monday July 9.
It’s a family event – ages 6 and up, according to the RHPL event listing. While you’re in the area, bring out your skates and hit the beautiful Richmond Green Skating Trail. It’s beautifully lit in the evening.
No registration required, but we’ve created a meetup.com event to help publicise it. Registration not required, but it’s nice to let us know you’re coming.
We had a great group show up for the Wed Oct 12 Arduino: What’s It All About? open house. Big thanks to members Jack, Richard, Pek, Ross and Paul for bringing in and sharing their creations, and as always, to Jay for loaning his light sabres.
We’re caving to popular demand and finally scheduling an Arduino hands-on class. It will be taught by ylab member and robotics guru Paul. Registration is open on Eventbrite, and seats are limited. You have the option of bringing your own board, or we’ll provide one.
We had some excellent feedback and comments from last night’s talk.
LED and powertail in parallel: our presenter mentioned that when linking the 120V powertail and LED in parallel, there wasn’t enough current to run both. Comment 1: this wasn’t required. It was out of laziness. There are lots of other outputs on the Arduino board. Comment 2: Paul advised that it’s probably not a current issue. The D in LED is for diode, and the diode typically limits the voltage across its terminals to something under 2 volts. This is not enough to trigger the powertail’s relay. We’re breaking out the voltmeter to test that.
BREAKING NEWS: Our not-a-l*ght-s*bre making class (it might happen to look like one, but is clearly not, as we don’t want Lucasfilm to be upset with us) is open for registration. YLAB MEMBERS: Check your email for the secret access code.
EMAIL LIST GOING AWAY
Some of you receive messages through our meetup.com group and because you’re on our email list.
We’ll have one more email notice through our non-meetup email service and then kill it. Communications will be through this meetup group and direct emails to paid members.
The privacy rules around email make it almost impossible to manage an email list without using a professional email management service, and we’ve done that scrupulously since the startof ylab. We’ve had sign-up lists and have not added anyone without their express consent. We used Elite Email’s excellent free service. But people who’ve willfully signed up will frequently mark the messages as spam instead of unsubscribing. This creates a vicious circle where the major email programs like google and yahoo then automatically flag all the emails from the service to the spam folder. We know from the Elite Email reporting service that the open rate is dismal, and people tell us they didn’t get a notice because it went to the spam folder.
Come out and hear how three York Region companies have innovated to use cloud computing to create new lines of business.
These companies are building and running successful ventures on an international scale that would not be possible without the resources and technology of the cloud.
Our speakers are not just users – they’ve been leaders in addressing the regulatory, security and data locationon issues with government and some of the biggest cloud suppliers.
Find out how they’ve handled business, scaling, security and other issues – and join in the Q&A to get your own questions answered.
Larry Keating – President and CEO, NPC(http://npcdataguard.com )– invented and brought to market his industry’s first secure managed endpoint computing solution, changing how laptop computers are managed for business. NPC uses the cloud to secure, manage, monitor and back up laptops in a way that’s superior and cheaper than companies can manage themselves. As president and CEO of Keating Technologies he founded in 1987, Larry has brought more than $1.5 billion in technology and services to Canadians, and is a 3-time national winner of Canada’s 50 Best Managed Companies award.
Anthony R. Pearlman – President and COO, Intertainment Media ( http://intertainmentmedia.com ). When some of the biggest names in entertainment hold their special events, Intertainment Media is there. Through their divisions and various company investments, they manage the dynamic web presence and ensure it can scale to meet the demand. They syndicate live content to millions of users globally. They’re enabling cloud-based ventures like Yappn for real-time e-commerce translation services. Anthony has over 25 years of hands-on technology experience from co-founding and running early stage late 90’s e-commerce start-ups all the way to the C-suite in large public enterprises.
RJ Juneau – CEO and Founder, Maxxian( http://www.maxxian.com). Maxxian provides world-leading technology for managing and securing millions of video set-tops and Internet access devices for cable operators from Alaska to the coast of South America. They use the same virtualisation and system management technology used by cloud providers to manage systems at their customer sites to reduce their costs, speed deployments and increase reliability and flexibility. RJ’s been at the leading/bleeding edge of technology for over 30 years in banking and trading systems, supercomputing, MPEG video and other fun things.
BATTLEBOTS! Ylab’s monthly Robotycs evening is back with a vengeance on Wednesday January 27. This month’s Robot Talk features battlebot veteran Ramy Gattas. Ramy hosted our first Robotycs events at Logics Academy last year. It’s a privilege to have join us at the DDO for the evening.
Ramy will be sharing his adventures in building and participating on the University of Toronto Team entry in the Robogames competitions in great places like San Mateo, California.
Not a robot. Breaks other people’s robots.
You can check out some of the mayhem his team wreaked on their opponents here and here.
As always, bring your own robotic creation for Show and Tell time, continue work on your toy hack, get some help and help some others. Ross has been advancing his own creations with a Raspberry Pi board and Python code, and is eager to share what he’s learned.
October was a crazy month. YLab is all about tech community, so it’s more than just the events we put on. YLab regulars, volunteers and friends have been all over the place, including:
YLab’s Python Constricted class, hosted by the Markham Public Library, where a dozen people were introducted to the Python programming language, and helped along by ylab volunteers.
Our second monthly Robotycs meeting, hosted once again by Logics Academy, covered an intro to Arduino and Raspberry Pi. We’re looking for a serious competition project!
We have a small offshoot of beginners from Robotycs who are eager to learn and will start some hands-on weekly training by hacking remote control cars. Experienced volunteers will be showing up to help them with soldering irons, oscilloscopes and Arduino gear.
Robot Ross Giving a Presentation and Halloween at the DDO.
We were busy with our friends at the Markham Public Library, where:
YLab’s Robot Ross and Jedi Jay displayed their wares that the Mini Maker Faire.
A few ylab regulars’ faces were in the audience for their evening with Cory Doctorow.
Their Nov 13 TEDx put out a call for speakers. We introduced a couple of ylab friends from The David Dunlap Observatory (DDO) and Site 3 Maker Space who have been selected. Our proposal for a Site 3 flaming demo in the parking lot… well, that went down in flames. Tickets are going fast!
Halloween at the DDO!
Speaking of the DDO… We wrapped up the month with a Halloween eve visit to their Haunted House in full geek-out costume, complete with pocket protectors, taped eyeglasses and white socks. That was after a visit to TAVES Consumer Electronics Show held at the Sheraton at Hwy 7 and Leslie. Big thanks to the TAVES organisers for the free weekend passes. The must see item: the Richmond Hill AMD team’s virtual reality demo.
YLab Visiting TAVES and Getting an AMD VR Demo
The DDO’s Haunted House was augmented this year by contributions from YLab friends and robotics experts Eric and Brett Hagman. The sound-activated, full-size crawling skeletons were a nice touch.
Filling the boardroom with makers and networking equipment.
It was an amazing turnout at our September 16th event centred around securing your home router. After going through some background information on routers and how their firmware is developed, YLab makers eagerly started reflashing their router’s with open source alternatives such as dd-wrt, OpenWRT, and Tomato. And the best part was managing not to brick them! The iconic blue and black Linksys WRT54G routers of course made an appearance as well as many common open-source friendly alternatives.
It’s always nice when everything works perfectly while explaining the process.
We also did some penetration testing with Router Check‘s founder who went through the basic Dos and Don’ts of securing your home network and showed off their Android app (a great way to quickly check if your network is secure). Some basic tips we learned: never use WEP, turn off the easy setup, and check against all the common vulnerabilities (because once a hacker gets access to your router your computers are next)!
Group shots of some of the YLab makers in attendance.
We’ve also got two great free events coming up that still have some space for new makers:
The inaugural YLab Robotics Group monthly meeting is on September 30th. At last count there was only 4 available spaces left. To register click here.
Looking to get a basic footing in Python? We’re hosting a crash course for experienced programmers at the Markham Public Library, click here to register.
