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NodeSchool #2: chatbots

It’s time for the second edition of NodeSchool Rotterdam. While the first edition was mostly theoretical, this time we’re going to be doing mostly practical things. Namely: Building a chatbot! With Node.JS obviously ;-)

chatbots

This workshop is meant for people that just started programming, but also fun if you’re an intermediate developer.

Our program

7:00 - Opening doors

7:30 - Introduction (doors are closed, please message us on chat if you’re later)

8:00 - Building our first chatbot

9:00 - And we’re done!

You can stick around to ask questions, discuss the meetup or just chill afterwards.

Looking for sponsors

If you like us, and/or want to make sure people don’t starve at a hackerspace… please contact us! We’re looking for a sponsor to help us provide free drinks and food for everyone that’s interested in learning to code. Contact: david@pixelbar.nl

Join us on meetup.com

Announcing NodeSchool Rotterdam

logo

We’re hosting the first NodeSchool in Rotterdam. NodeSchool are hosted open source workshops that teach web software skills. And best of all… they’re free.

Node.js is a popular, open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment for developing a diverse variety of tools and applications. This first edition will be focussing on the basics of JavaScript (ES6) with Node.

Let’s see whether people in Rotterdam are interested to learn writing software.

We’re planning to organise this every month. The first edition is already full, but when you signup on meetup.com, you’ll be notified when the next one is announced.

Join us on meetup.com

We have to blog more!

The holidays are over!

In our last post we mentioned some of our members went to allsort of different camps. From Gamer-related camps to Hacker camps. Our participants are very diverse!

This summer some of our members decided on traveling to the United Kingdom for EMF Camp, against all expectations the weather was pretty nice and the camp was great. After returning from EMF Camp mc.fly and cookingroffa decided to go directly to CCC Camp in Germany. At the same moment miep, david, dennus, pim and tucje travelled to Limburg in the Netherlands to visit CampZone.

Because the writer of this article was amongst the “CampZone” visitors i will not have very much to tell about EMF and CCC Camp :(, We might add an update later!

At CampZone, a gamer camp held for the 16th time in Kronenberg we have met a lot of awesome people. We also noticed the general idea of “Gaming” at a camp like this is just for a small part of the visitors. Others are just here to put raw meat on the bbq or even perform some cosplay acts. Fortunatly we noticed in the last couple of years there was a great interest in hacking, not just the it-hacking part but also some electronics came by.

As a good hacker, you should at least destro,.. expiriment when you are somewhere. This CampZone we have found out, Inflateble bed pumps work under water, providing us with a nice fountain which tickled. After measuring we noticed there was around 80V AC flowing through us. And, our coffeemachine pump stopped working. This offcourse was an immediate reason to do some expirimenting. this time we just overclocked the poor 12V-DC pump to a comfortable 36V-DC. We managed to get the thing going again for some short time ( but the water got up very high ).

We had also brought lots of tinkering stuffs, which gave us the possibility to do an upgrade to the “beer-counter”, add an external antenne to a drone controller and we even got started with some SDR stuff. David found out cheap batteries sucked.

As a side project, one of out awesome friends Trouble came up with the idea of a festival-newspaper called “de PixelPaper”. An idea that got into everyones head. 5 editions were made, and they are still online today! please visit pixelpaper.nl where you can read all editions, even the ones with the real-life capture the flag storyline! Thanks Trouble!

If you want to visit us during our weekly meetups on Wednesdays. Please check our website for the current spacestate, follow @pixelbar010 on twitter or subscribe to our Pushover group to get Push messages when we are open!

Buildlog new space part 5

Update #5 Hacking confirmed!

Since our last post, pretty much everything has changed. At least, as far as it concerns our hacking/building ratio. We even had some time to do some hacking, tinkering and soldering, Nice!

The walls downstairs are allmost completely done, so we continued upstairs. After some carefull planning to get the forklift in the smallest spaces we allmost made it to the ceiling. The last part of the walls upstairs will be left open for now, leaving some space for a “led-enabled” rooftop. Mc.fly thought of a very nice idea which would completely cover up the entire ceiling, making sure none of the industrial ceiling will be visible anymore. Offcourse we will update you with pic’s when it is done. We have also installed lockers for our participants to leave their projects and personal tools in the hackerspace. Every full member will get a locker until they are all gone.

At the 27th of June, we had a small hacking day. Just a day without hammers, drills and screws. We started with some nice projects. Pim and David even started building some nice electronic kits. Miep was doing weird stuff with a SDR dongle and a raspberrypi 3 and Cookingroffa created her own temperature regulator for some awesome food hacking tools. Needless to say, the day was a great success and the start of the “Yay! we’re getting there” feeling in and around the space.

Next wednesday will be a busy evening, since it is getting very close to the holidays. If you are around and want to get a nice peek inside Pixelbar, we’ll be there around 19:00. After this week, some of our members will attend summercamps and events like EMF-Camp and CampZone. Will we see you there ? Most of our members who attend CampZone will bring loads of tinkering stuffs with them. We will update you if awesome projects are created, after the holidays we will try to bring most of the projects to Pixelbar so they are visible for everyone in real life.

Because of the holidays there is a small possibility nobody attends Pixelbar during our weekly meetups on Wednesdays. Please check our website for the current spacestate, follow @pixelbar010 on twitter or subscribe to our Pushover group to get Push messages when we are open!

Buildlog new space part 4

Update #4 The floor is done, We’re getting somewhere

Last week a lot of work was done on the installation of our floor by Dennus, Teq, Gollum, Jchn, Tucje and Pim. We can safely say, the floor is now finished. Yay!

We also created a front wall. The wall even includes a door with a lock. Miep and Pim have learned how to (not) install a door, and eventually they managed to create a way of closing off our hackerspace.

This buildlog is not as big as the buildlogs before, this has to do with the fact that we really want to continue our work on the hackerspace!

Next build meetup

Next Wednesday ( 25th of May ) we will be back at Pixelbar to continue our work. Miep and Pim will continue working on the big door in the front of the hackerspace, Tucje and Dennus will continue working on the closet and some of our members will start working on the walls upstairs. If you are around, feel free to drop by. ( but note, we might ask you to help us ;) ).

I want more info

Do you want to know all about our new hackerspace ? Please look over here.

Feel free to send us advice or, even more important help us building the new space. We are nowhere without help from our participants and our friends. We try to keep the Wiki as up-to-date as possible. When we have final dates for building the construction we will also send out an email to our mailinglist which you can join here.