Mon, 18 Feb 2008
Hardware Into Art: TVIC/Geekosystem Crossover
What will this become?
Come to The Valley in Christchurch this week (Tuesday!) and don't just find out, make IT/ART happen!
Here's some of the details, check out the event announcement for more details:
The Valley In Christchurch February dinner and hack events
When: 6:00pm Tuesday 19th February 2008
Where: The China Kitchen, on Hereford St, opposite the Flight Centre
And then join us post-dinner for a special TVIC-exclusive Geekosystem session:
When: ~7:00pm—10:00pm-ish
Where: The Physics Room, Second Floor, 209 Tuam Street, Christchurch
Rumour is that some pizza and beverages will be provided while you work on your hardware hacking masterpiece.
Thanks to Adam and the Physics Room for organising this special after-hours session for us!
The photo above (courtesy of Adam Hyde) shows some of the "raw materials" that will be on hand.
Tending Networks: The 5th Aotearoa Digital Arts Symposium
As it happens, the Geekosystem coincides with the The 5th Aotearoa Digital Arts Symposium produced by The ADA Digital Arts Network.
Self-described as "New Zealand/Aotearoa's only digital artists' network. ADA was born of the observation that although new media artists were often highly networked in terms of both their own practice and their professional relationships, there was no national organization drawing together those with a common interest in digital art."
The symposium is an opportunity for New Zealand's digital/new media artists to meet face to face. Check out the upcoming weekend's programme.
I've actually been invited to present a brief overview of some of my Arduino hacking to the group during their "lightning talk" session on Saturday afternoon. A pleasant parallel to the symposium topic is my most recent project has been an ethernet expansion shield for the Arduino. I must write some more on that.
Foo Fruition
Speaking of needing to write more... My presentation at the ADA Symposium and the TVIC/Geekosystem crossover are a direct result of my attendence earlier this month at Kiwi Foo Camp 2008 (a.k.a. Baa Camp) and some people I met there. I must write some more on that. :-)
Posted at: 06:12 | category: / | | Comments ()
Mon, 11 Feb 2008
Belated Ponoko Update
In case you were wondering, no, i haven't been waiting for my Ponoko package since December. The package arrived within the estimated time—I think it was about a week, but I can't recall exactly now. My blog post delivery has just taken a bit longer.
Here's the puzzle design:
(The reflection in the puzzle pieces is because I took the photos outside.)
And here is the bracket for the WIZ810MJ with a RJ45 in place:
For thoses interested, check out more Ponoko "unboxing" pictures.
Overall I think this has been a successful experiment and hope to be able to use Ponoko again in the future—I think the "personal manufacturing" revolution is only just beginning...
Posted at: 14:00 | category: / | | Comments ()
Mon, 03 Dec 2007
Playing Geppetto at Ponoko
A couple of nights ago I placed my first order at Ponoko to take advantage of their free shipping in November offer:
Since I originally didn't have anything specific in mind to produce I thought I'd try my hand at designing a simple 2D "fit the pieces together" puzzle. I created the design in Inkscape and the final puzzle version (the piece on the left) can be seen in Inkscape's outline mode here:
The smaller "P" will be a "Heavy Raster" etch while the other lines in the design will be cut through. (Feel free to assume the "P" stands for Philip or Ponoko... :-) ) Here's a sample of the "Heavy Raster" effect on the black acrylic the puzzle will be produced from:
I ended up selecting 4.5mm thick acrylic but it would have been around 25% cheaper in the 3mm thick variety—because I'm not sure of the rigidity of the material I decided to try the thicker option.
The rest of the order is made up with some mostly test designs, including the piece on the right which is designed to make a 3D "L" shaped object that includes a slot to hold the RJ45 adapter from a WIZnet WIZ810MJ module.
Impressions
According to the Ponoko Manufacturing FAQ the turnaround time is "between 5 to 10 days" with shipping time on top. We'll see what happens!
The free shipping was the major motivator for trying this now, though it meant I probably spent more on cutting/materials than I would have...
My overall impression of Ponoko is it has a lot of promise but is still rough around the edges. While the site graphic design is impressively slick the design/price/order process doesn't flow very easily. If you're price-conscious and frequently want to know what a particular design change will mean to your cutting cost the upload/quote process is down-right tedious.
It would be great if Ponoko could produce plug-ins for the supported design packages to allow you to calculate the cutting cost from within the application. If I didn't already have multiple projects on the go I'd probably consider moving this from the "nice idea" stage—but I don't envisage that happening any time soon...
Puzzled?
My unsolicted Ponoko marketing suggestion of the day: Produce a bunch of puzzles with the Ponoko logo and brand them with "Make it yourself at Ponoko" or something... Bonus points for 3D...
Posted at: 03:10 | category: / | | Comments ()
Mon, 19 Nov 2007
TVIC : Six geeks, Seven CD-ROM drives, One Pub—The Movie
Seth's blogged and uploaded the video from this month's The Valley in Christchurch tech dinner and CD-ROM hackfest.
Here's the finale, just in time for the Christmas lights season:
Links to all the videos on YouTube:
- Deconstruction getting started
- Morris risking his cell battery on the tray eject (Not shown: Successful drink delivery mechanism. :-) )
- Tim trying out the cell battery on a handy motor
- Another "bright" idea
- The result! CD-ROM Christmas Lights!
Thanks Seth!
Posted at: 13:50 | category: / | | Comments ()
Thu, 08 Nov 2007
TVIC : Six geeks, Seven CD-ROM drives, One Pub
I've just got back home from this month's The Valley in Christchurch (TVIC) tech dinner. It was goood... Real fun.
After dinner at our now usual haunt we ended up at our (fast becoming usual) follow-up haunt.
Last month—after visiting the recycling oasis Supershed—I had brought along an old CD-ROM drive and dismantled it during the post-dinner conversation. (Hey, why not? ) Apparently inspired by the fun I had had, this month Marek had organised to bring along seven old cd-rom drives supplied by Morris. By this stage we had six people at the table, various beverages and enough screwdrivers that we could all attack the task of drive dissasembly with gusto. And we did.
The highlight of the evening (warning: non-geeks may not understand) was when—following a comment I made—Morris managed to hook up a tray-eject motor to a pair of green and red LEDs (salvaged from a drive), making them flash alternately when he pulled the tray in and out. Seth took some photos and video so hopefully it'll be online soon.
In spite of all this frenzied electrical activity the bar staff never asked us to leave or stop, so I apparently mass cd-rom drive disassembly counts as an acceptable activity at the Bohemian.
Next month: printers!
Update: Check out the CD-ROM hackfest videos.
Posted at: 23:20 | category: / | | Comments ()
Wed, 31 Oct 2007
Gratuitous Update
In a transparent attempt to not leave the month of October blog entry-free here's a quick and gratuitous update.
One-way wiki
As noted back in July, I've been running a personal "one-way wiki" as an experiment. My primary goal was to get more of my in-progress hacks off my harddrive and onto the public net where they might be of more use to someone. The secondary goal was to try to reduce the number of browser tabs I had open and chewing up memory.
Overall I think the experiment has been a success with a (very) rough count of about ten-thousand words over about thirty pages in the wiki. While many of those words are only links there's a few in-progress projects partially documented also.
I still probably have more tabs open than I'd like but I think I'm making progress on that front.
The wiki has definitely been a plus for documenting in-progress projects and keeping track of details for recovering from context switches. Hopefully the notes—such as they are—are of use to others as well.
I think the only down-side is that my blogging activity has become even more curtailed than it was—mainly because I'm documenting items in the wiki rather than on the blog. It is entirely possible of course that I wouldn't have posted anything more to this blog even if if I hadn't had the wiki. In light of this however (and a couple of requests in this direction) I'm thinking of generating blog entries from the "recent changes" record of the wiki so people who are interested can still keep track of what I'm up to. When or if this idea actually gets implemented remains to be seen. :-)
Recent changes
In the interim here's a few links into the wiki:
- Most of my recent projects have focused on the Arduino hardware platform. I've been working on interfacing an I/O expander and ethernet module with success. You can check out my Arduino interfacing demonstration videos too.
- A growing list of links on various electronics topics including PCB-making, DIY test equipment and tutorials.
- Some notes on using the open source elecrtonic design software package KiCad on Mac OS X.
- I also created a set of electronic breadboard templates in SVG, PNG and PDF formats. That page even got featured on the Makezine blog.
- Finally for now, an in-progress project to reverse engineer the Skannerz Racerz hand-held link-able toy racing game. This project has also made use of the xoscope sound-card oscilloscope software package.
Posted at: 23:20 | category: / | | Comments ()
Fri, 28 Sep 2007
Ponoko has two dirty little secrets
It's true, Ponoko has two dirty little secrets:
- It's actually affordable.
- It's crack for Makers.
I've been attracted to the idea of Ponoko since I first heard about it—particularly once I knew they were New Zealand based. But I was always put off by the fact it seemed an expensive service—or at least the "flag ship" products available for purchase made it look that way.
Now that they've opened the beta up to New Zealand users and I've spent a bit of time with it I can reveal that Ponoko seems to have been holding out on us. (It's basically impossible to find pricing information for your own project until you upload something—which isn't without its issues.)
The first price-related figure for a personal project I saw was this one:
Cutting Cost (x1) $0.56Add $10 for delivery in New Zealand and "You could be manufacturing something today and get it delivered for less than $15!". Now as it happens the object in question was a small acrylic square :-) but that's not the point. I later managed to design an ~150mm square acrylic puzzle with a delivered price of under $20.
Material Cost (x1) $2.27
I haven't as yet ordered anything (I don't need another habit :-) ) but if you've been wondering about Ponoko but been put off by the price of getting started it looks to me like it's worth investigating further.
Inkscape and Ponoko
While Ponoko mention using Inkscape to produce the required EPS files on their site I was unable to open the templates they provided—and it seems I wasn't the only one having Inkscape problems with Ponoko. The good news is that Inkscape 0.45 seems to produce the required EPS files okay—I can't say yet if they'll manufacture okay, but if you want to try just ignore the templates. (I'm hoping Ponoko will soon provide a Inkscape-compatible template set.)
Customer service
And the funny thing is while I was writing up my experience of the site I actually had received two emails from one of the Ponoko's development staff (at nearly 11pm!) who noted I'd encountered a couple of errors while using the site. The first email was to let me know they were working on the issue I'd encountered and the second around an hour later was to let me know they'd fixed the issue. Nice.
Posted at: 03:40 | category: / | | Comments ()
Tue, 31 Jul 2007
A winning streak
I seem to be on a bit of a winning streak lately...
- A couple of weeks back I won tickets to the Christchurch preview of The Simpsons Movie. A chorus of "Spider-pig" has been heard around the house by various singers since...
- Then last week I entered a "Name the Thing Contest" contest on the Hacked Gadgets - DIY Tech Blog and won a Aryca D-pod mini camera tripod like this. The D-pod gets a good user review:
...little tripod - an aryca, very lightweight and strong. It is actually an extremely well designed bit of kit and folds flat into 15x5x1.5cm, so that it is easy to carry in ones pocket. Again I find it extremely useful...
I've recently acquired a Black and White parallel port QuickCam without a base so until it gets absorbed by a project the D-pod can serve as a base. - And then of course there's this Saturday... :-)
Posted at: 21:40 | category: / | | Comments ()
Fri, 13 Apr 2007
It's here... OLPC/XO-1 etc
You might have guessed my silence over the past couple of days was either:
- completely normal due to the usual reasons for my erratic posting schedule; or,
- due to the OLPC/XO-1 laptop prototype finally arriving.
XO-1 self-portrait
As to the reports I took a trip to the courier's airport depot just so I didn't have to wait an extra day to receive the laptop... Well, what do you think?!
OLPC at TVIC
I managed to get the laptop upgraded to the latest firmware and system build just in time to take it for a show-and-tell at our monthly The Valley in Christchurch dinner. This display of geek-dom resulted in a small video recording demo starring Marek, Paul and myself (signed model releases not available).
Posted at: 02:05 | category: / | | Comments ()
Mon, 09 Apr 2007
Like Christmas at Easter
Late last week I received an email saying:
If I said I hadn't been repeatedly refreshing the package tracker page ever since i'd be lying. :-) Unfortunately while I know the package left Auckland late this morning I won't be getting it until tomorrow at the earliest as today is a public holiday. :-(Please send us your complete address and phone number so we can send you a XO B2 machine.
Now I just have to come up with something to do with the OLPC laptop to make their investment in sending me one worthwhile:
(The delivery is the result of a submission I made at linux.conf.au in January where Jim Gettys invited people to email development ideas for a chance to get a OLPC laptop to develop on.)
But remember: "It's an education project, not a laptop project."—Nicholas Negroponte
Posted at: 14:40 | category: / | | Comments ()