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 ()
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 ()
Mon, 26 Mar 2007
Browser tab grab bag #4
A few more random tab closings...
Planet NZTech feed links
While I think of it, I also just added the Planet NZTech RSS 2.0 and Planet NZTech Atom feeds to the page header so it should be more discoverable.
Christchurch needs "co-working facilities"
One of the biggest negatives about being self-employed and working from home is the social isolation that often goes along with it—a complaint I have had re-enforced by my contact with other home-based self-employed people. A possible solution is to have a shared office with other self-employed people. The downside to this is there is a big jump from working from home to working somewhere where you need to pay a weekly office rental with a medium- to long-term commitment. An alternative approach is to make use of "co-working facilities".
A co-working facility provides office space (or desk space) on a more casual basis than a traditional office rental arrangement. The "tenants" may be a mixture of "foundation" and "casual" where the former receive a better daily rate in exchange for an agreed term commitment.
Here are a few related links describing various implementations of this idea:
- Boing Boing post
- BusinessWeek article
- Coworking Wiki
- Hatfactory in San Francisco
- Writer's Grotto in San Francisco
I would really like to see a coworking facility develop in Christchurch. In fact, I would like to see multiple facilities develop in Christchurch. Ideally I think a city like this should support multiple suburb-based coworking facilities: I don't want to trade a no-commute lifestyle for a long commute to an office!
At present I wouldn't be in a position to bankroll such a project but I do wonder if existing organisations or individuals would be in a position to support a development like this through financial support or provision of currently under-utilised space. Perhaps one or more of these:
- Christchurch City Council
- Canterbury Innovation Incubator
- University of Canterbury
- Canterbury Development Corporation
- Christchurch City Libraries
- Successful local businesses
Speaking for myself simply having a space with internet access and power would be great. Any offers? :-)
Tracking code with Google Code Search
When Google Code Search was released I decided to track down a little watermark I put in something I did a while back.
In the early days of Google Maps when I had developed an approach for displaying a map in a non-Google page I put up some example JavaScript. Because JavaScript tends to be a very "cut and paste" language I thought I'd put in a unique identifier to see where the code snippet ended up. So, in a couple of places I attached the suffix _frb to variable names. When I searched for container_frb it delivered two results—one which seems to acknowledge the source and one which doesn't.
I think the next item will get its own post...
Posted at: 04:40 | category: / | | Comments ()
Sat, 24 Mar 2007
Browser tab grab bag #3
In an attempt to clear out the tab bar in Firefox and other browers, here's a bit of a link dump:
48 Hours Filmmaking Competition
I was part of the team that produced the fairytale short "The Last Wingnut" for the 2006 New Zealand 48 Hours Film competition:
Most of my contribution was behind the scenes as general dogsbody with some script ideas also. I did get a walk-on one-liner though and produced the wonderful credits at the end—I wonder if that's enough to get an entry in IMDB? :-) The competition was a fun weekend and I mostly enjoyed the experience—I'm contemplating finding a team to be part of this year.
The director's cut linked above—slightly modified from the submitted version—is from the middle of last year which gives you some idea of how long some of these tabs have been open... It appears the movie made it onto the DVD(s) and an online high resolution version is also available.
For those of you reading this on Planet NZTech see if you can spot the (at the time) topical NZ net tech reference. (As it happens, ours wasn't the only film to make the reference..)
Oh, and if you're interested in seeing what I thought was the best film of the competition (even though it didn't win) check out the masterpiece that is Puppeton—it's classic—may feature some offensive content.
Did I really say that?
An IM conversation with Nat Torkington before Christmas ended up adding a couple of items to O'Reilly's Open Source Gift Guide: OpenMoko phones and Gumstix. Apparently being "the first to break Google Maps API before they had a public API" can still be used as justification for adding my suggestions to a list. :-)
Unfortunately I received neither suggestion for an actual Christmas present but funnily enough I did end up getting to "make a Nokia 770 bluetooth-controlled model car" at Kiwi Foo Camp. (A topic which I fully intend to return to but at this rate it'll probably be mid-year before I do so...) As it happens, the Arduino system I used in the Bluetooth car hack actually featured on the gift list as well—before I knew about such things.
Planet NZTech banner
Before the recent redesign I had been looking at making a pretty header for the Planet NZTech page but before long was reminded why I left the design biz... Purely for my own future reference here's links to the two images I was thinking of basing it on: waterfall and PCB. (Of course, if a real designer felt like providing one thus saving me the trouble that'd be good too...)
Have also just added another dozen or so blogs to the feed—up to around 140 people now.
Sure plays a mean pinball...
By the way, if you're ever looking for a gift at the last minute and can't find me something here's a possibility: :-)
Yep, I probably wouldn't turn down a Creature from the Black Lagoon pinball machine—it's always been my favourite. "The snackbar is now open..." Apparently there were 7,841 units made and it would appear at least two are in New Zealand.
I'll leave the last few items for another post...
Posted at: 21:45 | category: / | | Comments ()