Tue, 01 Sep 2009
Christchurch Creative Space meet the people video
A while back we had some video footage shot at the Christchurch Creative Space so people could get an idea of who comes along and what they get up to while they're there. View the Christchurch Creative Space video here or in the embed below:
We also had a series of friendly chats with people who have been along (thanks to Jack) and you can read the Christchurch Creative Space people interviews.
Creative Space media coverage
The Space and its activities have also been featured in a couple of other media related items. A half-page article about the Creative Space and Hackerspaces in general appeared on page 14 of this month's Unlimited magazine (it seems not to be online). The MsBehaviour Files also made mention of us:
Posted at: 17:53 | category: / | | Comments ()
Fri, 14 Aug 2009
Bright Bunny Project
Meet the cute and cuddly Bright Bunny Pirate who has a secret...
...his heart lights up when you feed him his favourite food...a carrot! (Bright Bunny on YouTube)
I designed this project for a workshop I taught at the Christchurch Craft 2.0 fair in June 2009.
We had three women and two girls participate, they learned to solder and assemble the bunnies each ending up with their own personality. It was good to have Lucy from Felt and Dave on hand to lend assistance as we under-estimated the time a bit!
It's turned out the project is an ideal introduction to incorporating electronics into craft. As an added bonus you can download the Creative Commons licensed Bright Bunny pattern.
The video above was recorded at the Christchurch Creative Space and edited in Blender.
Posted at: 22:50 | 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 ()
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 ()