NortHACKton

As Steve pointed out, we’re back from the Maker Faire. The Faire was another great success, with the centre for life estimating 3000 visitors to the event. Not to mention all the makers and crew that were manning the place the whole weekend without whom the show would be nothing. It was great to be able to meet up with other groups and makers and forge some better links between us and them.

Despite my best efforts there was still quite a lot of work left to do on the spider. Having the extra pairs of hands around on Friday meant that we managed to get it all assembled with a little time left over to head to the pub for the first of the nights out. The socialising was definitely one of the highlights. Evening chats were unashamedly geeky, with regular appearances of phones, laptops and electronics.

Meeting the public and explaining all of the projects was quite fun. The better conversations will always be with other makers who ask the more relevant questions but the whole point of being there is to explain stuff to all levels. The crafty aspects of the group seemed to be much more appealing than the technical aspects, probably because of the lower entry requirements. It’s fairly easy to understand how 30000 rings become a suit of chain, but electricity still confounds people.

This year because we were a hackerspace instead of individuals I think we were taken a little more seriously. I managed to blag the group a license for Cambam and a potential discount on a 3D printer from bodge it quick.

Steve and I discussed several ideas on the way back. I think it would be nice to see all the hacker spaces put together next year. Each group should still get their own space to demonstrate their projects, but they should all be next to each other. Also it would be a really good idea to get one stall up to explain to the public what Hacker spaces are and present a map showing where each of the exhibiting hacker spaces are located. If each group puts just 2 hours into manning this stall it shouldn’t be too much effort on any one group. Stay tuned as the the other ideas will be surfacing shortly.

Martin

We’re back #MFUKers!

Nobody’s sure if the hashtag for this year was deliberately chosen to sound slightly rude or not, but Twitter has certainly been busy over the weekend. Maker Faire 2011 was the busiest event at the Centre of Life ever, although this doesn’t totally guarantee the location will be the same for next year.

We arrived on Friday and started building. And building. And building! At 7pm we finally finished the cardboard spider, which should be visible in the site’s new sidebar to the right. It is huge. A significant number of people visited our stand before spotting the spider, as they didn’t look high enough. From the second floor it looked pretty good. The Centre for Life technicians were very helpful and put a spotlight on it directly and added a green gel, which I think really improved it.

Nestling by the front left leg was the racetrack. This project was unfortunately more of a qualified success. We did get a TV and the the car could be driven around the track via wiimote. After a bit of feedback, the control was changed to use MarioKart-style tilt steering and buttons for forward/back, which participants found slightly easier. However despite having two batteries, the car spent most of Saturday waiting for a battery to charge, and many children (and some adults) had to be told to come back later. On Sunday this worsened when one of the battery packs gave up overnight (undervoltage is permanent on Team Losi batteries). The backup pack simultaneously also deteriorated to the point where the car could not be driven long enough to complete a lap, and reluctantly we closed the exhibit.

It still generated some interest from the public, in terms of the use of cardboard (as did the spider), and just leaving the camera on kept a lot of children entertained. However it required no maintenance whatsoever, which turns out to be useful as talking to the public is surprisingly tiring as everyone present concurred. Martin’s Etch-A-Sketch had no problems in this regard and children could use it unattended for the whole weekend.

Tree’s chainmail was incredibly popular, although unfortunately there aren’t any pictures of it to show, but it was good to meet our honourary member in Newcastle. Having someone so tall was also useful when lifting the spider body off the ground. It looks very impressive, and it’s gratifying to still be using the present tense, as the Centre for Life have kept it, hopefully to use in an exhibition this week, titled Spiders On Drugs part of a rather more titillating event. Fingers crossed!

Finally, and most importantly, we had a chance to meet makers from around the country and beyond. The London and Nottingham guys are a little closer to home, and were very friendly, even when drunk. We’re going to definitely do more events with them this year.

For those at the Maker Faire who wanted to build their own paper spiders, here are the plans.  The ones at the show were printed on A4, but you can print at whatever size you like.  We’re sorry we didn’t have any to hand out, the post failed us

2x small spiders PDF format, should be fine printed as A4

Small paper model of the larger spider, PDF format, can be done on A4 but A3 would be easier to assemble

If you have any questions or problems then feel free to email me msraynsford@gmail.com

I spent another interesting weekend assembling the spider framework. It was quite the challenge because it is extremely large and trying to do it on my own our back garden just adds to the fun of it all. It went well and despite a wet day on Sunday I managed to get something up and standing on my Monday off (yay for valentines day). It is mostly solid but it has an alarming amount of twist around the vertical. I’ve tried to reduce this with some cross braces from the fist joint back to the body and I’ll need to assemble it again to see if it works. While it’s up I’d like to add the cardboard cladding to the body to see how that is going to work too. But I’m going to need a hand or two.

I’ll be taking the spider over to NSME on Sunday 20th Feb at 1pm and will be assembling it there and hopefully getting it to look a little bit like the final spider we want. If you’re in the area please drop by and lend a hand it would be most appreciated, there is plenties of screwing, measuring and cutting to be done (in cardboard and wood) so lots to keep people occupied, plus you’ll have the satisfaction of helping this project actually get to maker faire.

After discussions with the Maker Faire people last week it appears it’s going to be a bit tricky to take the whole spider along to Newcastle. We can erect it outside the stadium but we need to be able to prove that it isn’t going to blow away which is apparently a little more than just looking at the vast weights in the feet and saying ‘That looks heavy enough’. So we struck a compromise deal which suits us pretty nicely. We’ll only take the front half of the spider and we’ll prop it up against a wall inside the venue. then we can set up stall underneath it. Suits us in many ways because the front half is already made and it will be easier to transport.

I realise it’s not overly worthy of an update post but I spent 20 minutes this afternoon doing a quick framework test. I screwed some of the longer pieces together to test my plans for the joint. It’s pretty strong but would benefit from a matching plank on the other side of the joint, so I shall head back to Wickes tomorrow to buy the rest of the wood and something suitable for the job. Hopefully I’ll have more to show by the other end of the weekend.

(and yes I realise that first image shows it resting on a window ledge but that does simulate the additional leg joint that will be going down there)

Spent some time this week assembling the leg panels that I cut last week. This is the first time I’m able to see how big these box sections are going to be and what we actually have to transport up north for the maker faire. These are only 4 of the legs currently put together but as you can see in the other images, the sections for all 8 legs have been cut.

There is discussion with the Maker Faire people about how much space we have available. So potentially we have offered to only assemble the front half of the spider. This is appealing because all the work for this has already been done. I’ll happily go on and do the rest but there are many projects I could also be working on, so this is put on hold until we hear more.

Been a while since the last spider update, there was a pause over Christmas where I ran out of cardboard. My problems were solved with a trip to Halfords, they get lots of bicycle boxes which are all massive and double thick cardboard. I’ve started to turn these into the legs for the spider bot and have currently cut the pieces for the top two sections on all eight legs. I’ve decided to redo the first leg with this newer/nicer cardboard so all the legs will be similar.

The design for the wooden frame is also complete but it will take a little effort to assemble it and I’m still a little worried about how much weight it will have to hold and the 6.5m span between them, guess there will be another trial at some point and a test leg or two.

This evening I complete parts of the head and then tacked the parts together to see what it would all look like. Photos are still being added to the album of course.

I just noticed that I hadn’t put up a post about the leg and facial features that Phil and I made (probably 2 weeks ago now). We started with a single leg section, the smallest of the bunch and it’s still mahoosive. It’s going to be an interesting project and I suddenly realised we’re going to need a lot more cardboard. So I’m scouring Freecycle and approaching the usual suspects. What I really need though is a single large piece for the head. I really want that to be made from one as it is a nice curve. It’s 0.8 wide and 2M long, if anyone spots a suitable piece then nab it.
The photos are in the usual picassa album and a few sampled below

I received a very late entry for the robot competition from Manny Jasus this morning. He is well aware that the competition was closed but wanted me to post it up anyway, since he already worked on it. It’s a shame because this robot would work very well, towering over the people visiting the maker faire.

In other news the spider bot is still progressing nicely, I have now done all the facial features and am slowly realising the scale of this bot. It’s crazy but cool at the same time. It has got a 6.5m leg span, it will be 2m between the floor and the belly and 3m on top (10ft robot after all). The bum will be 2.5m x 2m x 2m or to put it another way, the size of a car. Still working out the finer details of getting it into a car, supporting it all when assembled and where we’re going to get the rest of the cardboard from but good progress none the less.

New photos can be found here

NortHACKton met this evening at our new NSME facilities (http://www.nsme.co.uk/). The club house was pretty much perfect for what we needed, we made good use of the projector and it was nice to have tea and coffee on demand. As most of us drive and don’t drink anyway it seems to suit us well. From now on we will probably meet there twice a month, once for a project night and once for a lecture night, after the lecture we can probably retire down to the Malt shovel anyway.

Back to this evening anyway. The idea was to build a loop to drive the remote control car around. This is a precursor to any potential wipeout track we want to build for the Maker Faire. We previously had a 3D model for a loop made in paper so this evening was about scaling it up to a useable size. This was also a key factor that we needed to test in order to make the large spider bot. We used a projector to shine the pattern onto sheets of cardboard so we could draw round it and cut them out at the appropriate sizes. A team of cutters and some people drawing and we had all the bits we needed cut out and ready for sticking. More team work ensued with one man on the hot glue gun, one folding and holding tabs till the glue dried and a third pair of hands to feed the card in and we were done.

The whole project was a testament to teamwork. Many hands managed to get the whole pattern cut and assembled in 3 just hours.  The only real disappointment is that the loop was too big and the poor little car couldn’t actually complete a full loop. Time was drawing short so we bundled up the loop and stuck it in the back of the car. I will modify the loop making it smaller and we can try it again. Anyway the evening was a still a great night, and despite the lack of success I’d definitely do it again. All my photos from the evening can be found here. http://picasaweb.google.com/msraynsford/NortHACKtonLoopTheLoop