Hackspace Manchester - A new space for HAC-Man

HAC-Man who now prefer to be called Hackspace Manchester, have recently moved into a new space just a couple of doors down the road from their old stamping ground at Mad Lab in the Northern Quarter just a stones throw from the Ardale shopping centre.

Previously HAC-Man had a few square feet in the community based, technology and arts centre known as Mad Lab where they could at least work on electronics and store a few soldering irons and components. The move to an 800 square foot room on the 1st floor above a cafe is an infinite improvement. The hackers have divided the area up. One area with a long central communal table, electronics area, media PC with a huge TV screen and snackspace is the main area. This is shared with the DIY Bio lab that is being made in the same room. A DIY Bio group who share space with the Hackers, hope to set up an accredited lab though progress had been minimal on my visit. A fortuitous acquisition of JB Sports shop shelving from a local furniture salvage company has provided both a divide and great compartmentalised storage for all their bits and bobs from AV kit to kettle leads.

In the workshop or "woodwork hall" as it was grandly called, there is a good selections of power tools including a scroll saw, chop saw, table saw and pillar drill. centrally was a good size work table at a useful height. there projects are all over the entire space. In the "metalwork hall", a cupboard sized room off near the loo, they have a super little Myford lathe that at this time is minus it's chuck key. They hope also to make that room a dark room for developing film and other light sensitive projects.

At the moment Hackspace Manchester (as they shall now be known) have about 17 members. I forgot to ask what the cost of membership is. They have an open night every Wednesday at 7pm which is open and free to all.

Before my visit to the hackspace I decided to go and check out Fab Lab in New Islington. It occupies a unit on the ground floor of the Chips building by Urban Splash. At the time of visiting at about 12:00 on a Sunday it was closed. Pointless in my opinion. I know it's not trying to be a hackspace, but I would have thought most folks would want to use the place on a day they are doing traditional work? I suppose it costs too much to provide the technicians. Still I'll try and have a look at it the n ext time I go to Manchester whenever that is. I still got to see lots of nice architecture on my way over there which made it worthwhile.

Something that was open but was also a bit of a disapointment was the Lego store in the Arndale shopping centre. After the visit to Hackspace and being unable to get to the Lego Discovery Centre I thought a trip to the Lego shop would be good. Lego is too expensive which makes me sad :(

In all it was a great trip up to Manchester and I've recorded some stuff for the Hack ALL the Spaces which I hope to post before too long!  

A weekend of geekery in a field.

The Nottinghack village, a beacon in the night!

I’ve just returned from the long anticipated Electro Magenetic Field camp at Pineham Park, Milton Keynes. I’ll be honest and say that I was expecting chaos to rein at the camp but was massively surprised how organised and slick (in a good way) the whole operation was. I think I’d have benefited from a site visit prior to the camp to easy my mind about the site, as it really was much more pleasant than it looked on paper or even on Google Earth.

As I work for a government agency that has something to do with sewage and water, I was very aware of the huge sewage plant next to the site and the sorts of aroma such a place is capable of generating from time to time. Not only that, but childhood memories of growing up next to the busy A1 road made me wonder how noisy the M1 was going to be. As it turned out we had the wind in the right direction most of the time pushing the smell and the noise away a bit. Even so I thought the site was pleasant.

my van with Mythbusters paper on the bonnet

Nottingham Hackspace wanted to have a really good presence at the camp and I think this was achieved through achieving our ambitious plans. We had a large number of Gazebos that we could tag together fairly easily making a sort of semi-enclosed space. We had large amounts of hand tools in Martin, Ben’s and my tool boxes as well as soldering irons, lots of sockets to plug in, colouring books and knitting by Kate, the vinyl plotter and the laser cutter in the back of my van. In many ways we were better equipped than we ever were in Hackspace 1.0 and really had a bigger site, and all that in a field.

We made our living village around the back. Jame’s fire pit and 10 hay bales as seating surrounded by our tents. In the end that choice backfired on me as I hadn’t considered what a draw the fire would be to visitors, many of whom stay until 3 or 4 in the morning chatting laughing and having a good (but loud) time. The Hacking area of the village was often in use until just as late too. At one point Martin Raynsford was showing people how to make “Useless Machines” at gone 4am whilst Sam-the-techie and RepRap Matt thrashed out code for the TILDA camp badge.

laser setup in the back of my van

There were a load of talks scheduled across a couple of large tents with stages Ben Goldacre spoke about Big Pharma, it was a personable and well delivered talk but I felt he was preaching to the choir to some existent. Goldacre was trying a few ideas for a talk on Big Pharma and did get a few laughs, mostly when he said “this story doesn’t have a Gillian McKeith or to give her full medical title Gillian McKeith” though the talk had nothing to do with McKeith so was a bit like sticking with something that gets you a laugh in another talk, McKeith is (rightfully) finished as a serious entity much thanks to Goldacre for that but... be a little more magnanimous in victory? He also got a few laughs when he said fuck. I was pleased to see a big name like Goldacre at the event and hope to see similar luminaries at the next camp.

My favourite talk was probably Tom Scott’s Science Fiction monolog done before a 5 minute and 18 second video presentation. If he posts it up I’ll put a link. This short story was delivered to the Beta Stage audience immediately following Tom and Charles talk about their experiences on Gadget Geeks last year. It was very funny and very interesting.

We were delighted to see our friends from TOG Dublin (Rob, Jeffery and Conner) as well as Richard from Bristol Hackspace who showed a number of us how to make Sporks from sheet metal. Bob from HacMan also stayed with us at the Nottinghack village as did Build Brightons Andrew, Toby and Mike. Also loads of friends from the London Hackspace dropped by, Heather and Sulli, SamLR, Sam-The-Techie, Ken, Jonty, Russ and all the others.

Hay Henge on the last day pack up

The whole thing was very well organised. I'd half expected it to be chaos and totally disorganised. On paper it shouldn't have worked. The organisers did a brilliant job, the power and data was spot on! The showers were good, the toilets were clean. There was food drink and a great atmosphere. It really was the highlight of what has been a truly great summer of hacking for me. I simply can't wait for 2014 and the next camp. Thank you to the EMF team. Amazing hard work and an amazing event.

OpenShed need money



Upstairs at the 200m Sq OpenShed in Penzance

 OPENSHED the Penzance Hackspace

I wasn't sure about OpenShed the Penzance Hackspace when I first heard about it. But I've seen so many Hackerspaces grow in so many different ways that anything that is progressing the movement should be encouraged I'm sure. There web pages give the OpenShed quite an arts collective in a coffee shop feel but...okay... it's okay. We need a nice Hackspace in Cornwall for our holidays, and goodness knows it must be difficult to set one up there without this sort of structure.

They have listed their project on Sponsume.com and at the time of writing are £70 into a target of £3500. You can see the details for the listing below

I'll be trying to get an interview with them on my podcast too. Wishing them best of luck.

Dublin Mini Maker Faire

When I saw how plausible a trip to Ireland by air was from Bristol I knew that I’d take advantage sooner or later. When the opportunity arose to visit Ireland’s first Maker Faire how could I say no and a trip to Dublin Mini Maker Faire ensued. Trying to keep costs low I opted to travel on Saturday morning 14^th July leaving the boat at about 5:30am for a 6am bus.

me looking angry drinking Club Mate and pointing

 Finding the Mini Maker Faire was fairly easy. It was held outside in the grounds of Trinity College on what they call the Physics Lawn… seems appropriate to me. They also used the Science Gallery as a venue too and this inside/outside approach worked well though we were lucky it didn’t rain.

There were about 30 makers tables in total and a few familiar faces including Martin with his Underwater Autonomous Vehicles, Build Brighton where Mike P brought pedal powered Scalextric grandly constructed of KNEX and Matt Edwards had brought along the latest variant of Robo-xylo (he tells me there will be 2 Robo-xylo at the Manchester Mini Maker Faire). There were also a table for old friends Sugru (James, Jane and Suki) and Beta Layouts (Siobhán). The Irish Hackspaces had a large banner with the names of all the spaces on, great idea! There was also a table for TOG and for 091Labs from Galway.

Irish Hackerspaces promote each other... great idea! 

TOG co-founder Rob “Partfusion” Fitzsimmon and myself were setup on the “Learn to Solder” tables. Rob had made up a classic flashy badge with “I can solder” on the front. We taught about 200 folk to solder the youngest must have been about 5 and the oldest about 80 so Rob and I reckoned later on.

The makers were well looked after with a minion bringing us lunch (a very nice ham and cheese sandwich and a home made flapjack). This was a nice touch. The volunteer minions also happily looked after my bag all day and insisted I have a free Tshirt before I left. One big difference to other Mini Maker Faires I’ve been too was that they had arranged for talks to be given throughout the day in the theatre of the Science Gallery.

Jane from SUGRU did an excellent talk on the Maker movement. The talk was very well attended and well received. Jane spoke of a need to encourage making and fixing things and introduced the new branding of SUGRU with the tagline “the future needs fixing” and explained that mending stuff rather than buying new things wasn’t going to save the planet and we need to start applying the maker culture to every walk of life. Also Irish TV star Mary “Make & Do” Fitzgerald who some of the TOG guys got very nostalgic about but sadly I missed her talk.

TOG co-founder Jeffery Roe told me that they estimated they had had 6000 visitors through the Physics Lawn based on a couple of counts and a bit of fancy mathematics. The event was free so they didn’t have an entry point to keep an exact count. The event was part of a number for Hack the City a Dublinwide event lasting most of July.

I stayed in the Old Jameson distillery in Legal Quarter (or Smithfield) a very modern and well done hostel called Generator. It was very cheap about £12 per night. Obviously I was in a shared dorm but it was clean and the bed was simple and comfortable with plenty of power sockets for charging electronics and a good sized locker for my gear. The shower and toilet were clean and en suit too. I heard from a friend that the girls dorm (for 10) had a hot tub in it.. they wouldn’t let me stay in there though. Breakfast was €4 and consisted of coffee, toast, cereal and meat and fruit. Seeing as it was eat-what-you-like it was very good value indeed. Staff were helpful and courteous and helped me break the padlock off of my locker with a massive set of bolt croppers at 8am in the morning after I left my key at TOG. It barely woke my house mates either.

I’ll write about my visit to TOG in another blog post soon! I can’t wait to return toIreland and plan on going back before too long to visit the other Hackerspace inCork and Galway.

Leeds Hackspace - Doing it right!

On the 7^th July 2012 Matt Little, James Hayward and myself ventured north to Leeds for the Leeds Hackspace Open Day. Having moved in on Star Wars day earlier in the year, Leeds felt ready to show off their Hackspace 2.0.

I’d been to visit the Leeds Hackspace v1 in February 2011 on their open night. It’d not be fair to say they were doing it wrong back then. But they were doing it wrong back then. They’d managed to find a space to rent right out on the ring road at the end of some back-to-backs adjacent to the Eland Road. I spent about 45 minutes on the street looking for the door, which I only found when I saw one blue LED shining out. When I got inside, there wasn’t really anywhere for me to sit. The regular members were already occupying all 6, 1-seat-desks. There was no milk for coffee and I had to introduce myself to people. It transpired sometime later that the Hackspace had run up large debts through unpaid bills for internet and other things.

To show that spaces can rise from the flames lets find out about Hackspace 2.0 behind trendyRegent Street, just minutes walk from the city and main bus station. Okay I have no idea ifRegent Street is trendy. But it’s a huge improvement on the old area the space v1 was in.

http://leedshackspace.org.uk/our-current-venue/

Finding Mabgate Green was pretty easy. Not only that they Hackers had made some really big clear signs for the entrance and side of their new space. No question where it was at all. I think it’s a very good idea to have good signage on the outside of a Hackspace. Lots of folks think this is an open invite to robbers though so the debate continues. I’d argue that there isn’t generally anything much worth nicking in a Hackspace unless there are members in it, then you could get laptops, money, phones and other shiny. However you can say the same about anywhere really.

The space is on the 1^st floor. My first impression was that it is open, airy and well lit. The windows on 3 sides help a lot with this. The space itself is a fair size and is well laid out with workshop benches to the right of the door as well as electronics areas throughout and a big SNACKSPACE-TUCKSHOP area with fridges for both types of drinks. All the light in the day time makes the space very conducive to working on projects. The ceilings are a good height and have ironwork grid girders which are handy for hanging shiny and awesome off of. They also made good use of these gantries for extra lighting.

At the far end of the room is a comfy area with a chaise longue and other comfy seating. The comfort is somewhat offset by the looming presence of a drum kit… how I hate band practice. The Chaise longue adds a certain amount of class I suppose. I was delighted to see the “Chiltern Railways” digital clock being used as a matrix display repeating the last tweet mentioning @leedshackspace. This had been completed by Angus who was in fact himself made by a member of the Nottingham Hackspace so we’ll take credit for that here at Nottinghack too… (Angus’ Mum is an active member of the Nottingham Hackspace).

As we entered Jon who we know well from other stuff bobbed up and gave us the dime tour. I was very impressed with the central work table which had a large Leeds Hackspace sky blue H logo painted on it. The table was easily able to accommodate 6 or more hackers with kit. At the top end HACMan’s Bob Clough presided, he’d popped over by train to warm the space too. Other notable visitors were Jo from Edinburgh Hack Lab and me of course!

I can confirm that Leeds Hackspace has the largest pizzas. These things were the size of mountain bike wheels. There was also cake, lots of cake. Excitingly there is another room right next door about double the size of the one they have. They are currently allowed to use this to break out into and had a lot of their junk stored inside. Below was a brand new unregistered Jag! They’ll have the option to rent this room in the future. At the moment they can’t secure it physically as they have to share access to the toilets with their neighbours (a bike co-operative also worth a visit).

High jinks were had with a small Mamod steam engine trying to generate electricity with it. We almost managed to run an LED with steam, but not quite. Matt Little had a lot of fun plying with some sensors and a pizo buzzer. We were very kindly given party favours of tubes of 555 timers and OpAmps to take back to Nottingham and Bristol too.

 I was keen to grab some audio for Hack ALL the Spaces but like a Muppet I forgot my mic and also my iRig mic for my iPhone. Leeds Hackspace didn’t have a good one unfortunately and we had left it too late to get one from Maplin though an interesting debate about there 9 hour delivery did ensue. Maplin is 2 minutes walk away but was shut. In the end we had to use the tiny mic in a broken headset. I’ve not yet been able to do anything with the audio files we captured because they need converting to a format I can edit. When that is done I will be posting the mini-podcast with myself Bob (of HacMan), Jon and Flig.

Overall I was very impressed with the place. Seems that they are doing it right.

I made a titanium spork!

You could criticise Bristol Hackspace for being a little too focused on electronics, however it's not true to say they don't have the ambition to do more. One Hackspace member, Richard Sewell (http://jarkman.co.uk/), is a prolific maker. When he asked me if I'd like to be shown how to make a titanium spork I could not say no. 

Tools used for Spork

Making a spork isn't actually as difficult as I thought. If you have the right tools it's intuitive really. We started with a bit of cardboard onto which I drew my spork. I cut the cardboard out and placed it onto a sheet of titanium. A number of people seem surprised that you can get titanium. Richard buys it from one of two places which are Noggin End or Hempel Metals. The guy at Noggin End reportedly buys the off cuts from Airbus and touts them at model fairs.

Once I'd drawn around my card template onto the titanium sheet I took a set of Wiss Compound tin snips and cut the shape out. Some of the smaller off cuts are very sharp indeed and tend to fly all over the place so safety glasses are essential.

using a vice I clamped the spork shape and started the long process of filing down the edges. It's important to keep the file moving along the edge so as not to make one bit more filed than another. You should remove all the sharp parts and burs. Once the edges are filed they'll still feel rough. Take the file and file the edge at the flat sides. Using a Garryflex Blue Block which is a sort of block of rubber filled with grit, I rubbed all surfaces until they are smooth to touch. Any further smoothing was done with "Wet & Dry Paper" the 240 grit type.



After this essential prep work it was time to use hammers! Richard took a spade bit and drilled a hole in the top of a bit of wood. We placed the ends of the spork over the hole and hammered it with a Domeing Hammer to make the basic bowel shape at both ends.

The SPORK I made!

To add some strength to the handle and stop it folding whilst being used. To do this I used a creasing stake and a Delrin punch. Somewhat like the top of a cricket wicket the stake has a groove along the top which the punch, punches into.


To get a very smooth finish we use the Planishing Hammer and a lot of tapping at the spoon to make tiny dents all over. This adds the finish that you see in the pictures. To smooth out the flatter bits we used a Crosspein hammer. We did that onto a hockey puck.

I'm very pleased indeed with the spork I made. I'd like to run it as a workshop in the future. I'd also like to make a slightly slimmer one. Working with metal is very satisfying and not at all complex. I highly recommend getting stuck in!

All about Heath-Robinson, Rube Goldberg and Pythagorean Switches.

Some years ago the "Nottinghack" made a Rube Goldberg Machine as well called it at the time and I made this blog post about it. These incredibly pointless machines can be very very difficult to make work. They also teach you more about physics in one day than you could learn from a book in a month. As mentioned in my previous blog post on the subject Adam Sadowsky engineered the OK GO Rube Goldberg Machine for the RGB version of "This too shall pass".

These machines do not have to be huge to be impressive. Look at these from the Japanese children's educational programme ピタゴラスイッチ Pitagora Suitchi  Pythagora Switch 

These simple machines use mostly grooved wood, cups, marbles, counterweights, baffles, gates, sew-saws, pulleys and so on. Marble runs are a great project for any age group and can be completed in a very small or a much larger area. 

One of my favourite Rube Goldberg Machines is this one called "Creme That Egg" which is dedicated to the "World's Most Tolerant House Mates. 30 hot melt glue sticks and 300 drawing pins".

and also this Star Wars themed machine just for it's pure geeky-ness. 

I have a new Rube Goldberg Machine type project in the offing. Watch this space!

A new project idea

I'm a ridiculous know-it-all, any time I see a business being run I'm convinced I know how to do it better and the food industry strikes me as ripe for improvement almost always...it MUST be easy right? Anyway I was talking about this some time ago to my brother who told me about a chip shop he'd travelled more than an hour to visit. It only open's twice a week on Friday's and Saturday lunchtimes and reputedly has a queue out the door. He said they were some of the best fish and chips he'd had. So as a result I was interested to find out more about it...

Today I visited the famous Upton Chippie in Upton near Gainsborough, North Lincolnshire. This is a BBC Look North segment from their webpage about the shop.

My interested was really in that the chip fryers are heated by coal. Recently I started to cook bacon in a pan on top of my log burning stove. The slow and constant heat combined with the bacon taking a little time to cook somehow made the bacon taste extra nice... well at least in my mind it does. It seems to have a nicer texture and more intense flavour than the bacon cooked on the gas hob. I had similar hopes for the chips from the coal powered fryer!

The chippie was busy and the staff friendly letting me take snaps and telling me about how the fryers work. I asked about temperature regulation and the lady in charge said that it was quite an art to getting the fire right and the temperatures right. The fryer had a coal hole at each end and a long tube for the fire up the middle below each of the fryers. There are a number of storage areas to keep the food warm along the top of the fryer.

In this picture Sally Shaw the co-owner is moving stuff about in the hot oil. You can see the fire grate's door at bottom right. There was a similar one at bottom left.

 I was only a tiny bit disappointed with the chips. The chips are a bit, well soggy. I'm not saying that they aren't everything they are supposed to be. I'd sort of put it into my mind that they would be crisp and chunky because that's what I suspect I've been conditioned to think a "good" chip looks like. These aren't supposed to be gourmet chips though, they are supposed to be traditional and I am certain they are JUST as they would have been in 1950. They are made using beef dripping. I had cod and that was very nice indeed. The chips were nice too, just not what I had imagined. To emphasis, this chip shop is about tradition and I was going with a mind for quality. Though there isn't really any question that these chips were comparable with the best chips I've had anywhere else.

When I visited my friend Glen in Grantham "Shades of Japan" at his woodworking shop where he had a very good gas bottle stove in his workshop and I got to thinking... could you build a fryer out of one?

Soon in a blog article I'll be telling you how Jarkman (Richard Sewell) helped me make a titanium spork. In the meantime I've been looking at his project "Steve's Stove"  as I'd like to try and make a portable coal fired fryer from an old Gas bottle. I suspect I'll be going for a bit more showman ship than tradition.

I want to make a great crisp modern chip that people might like to think is old and traditional because, lets face it most people won't have had an old traditional chip and like many experiences in life, we could just make them up to suit our pre-conceptions. More on this project as it happens!

I hope to put wheels and a steam whistle on it too!

Vinyl Cutting Vs Screen Printing

A couple of weeks ago I decided I absolutely had to have a vinyl cutter. How had I managed so long without one I said. In the end, preferring simplicity and a friend’s recommendation over the gamble of “something” cheaper off of eBay I purchased the Cameo Silhouette from mdpsupplies.co.uk for about £320 including a big bundle of vinyl’s, backing/transfer film, VAT and delivery.

Screen printed t-shirt Democratic People's
New Republic of Space Korea (on the Moon)

You could say the Silhouette is firmly aimed at the crafter market. It even has a picture of a girl on it and is sort of pastel coloured. The best thing about the machine is it’s software called Silhouette Studio, (I don’t think it runs on LINUX) which is slick and functional. The interface is really well done too. I’ve been impressed also with the trace function and the simplicity of working with the images you’d like to cut. A laser cutter with software this good would sell like hot cakes (take note HPC and others) and I can’t think it’ll be many years before we’ll see A4 sized cutters on the crafter market with similar functional software. Having software that works must increase sales through word of mouth and recommendations. After all I brought one, because I tried the software first, because the software was straight forward AND I could try it before buying the machine it eliminated some of the concerns I had about a cheaper machine with unknown software.

So far I’ve used the Silhouette to cut vinyl rather than paper. Having dabbled a bit with screen printing I could immediately see that I could get very good quality results from using heat transfer vinyl rather than a screen and ink. Screen printing can be very messy indeed. You need lots of space and time to do things and it’s easy to mess up. I was making a QR t-shirt (this would be quite hard on a vinyl cutter though) and made 3 or 4 different screens before I got the result I wanted, even then the ink didn’t look professional but blotchy and uneven. Then after you’ve made the t-shirt you have to dry it and clean up all your screens and squeegees. Doing something yourself is fun of course and I’d not discourage anyone from trying to make a thing they way they want to. It’s only after having messed about with screen printing that I feel I can move on to this simpler method. I almost certainly would never have considered vinyl cutting if I’d not already done a load of screen printing!

Vinyl cut logo

I have a bit of an unhealthy obsession with the chilling aspects of the cold War and have been wanting to make a t-shirt based on the 80s “Protect and Survive” civil defence leaflets for ages. After a bit of messing about with the image I was able to use Silhouette Studio to trace the logo and output a line to cut. I popped along to Tesco and purchased a £4 black t-shirt and it only took me about 30 minutes to cut, weed and apply the logo.

Vinyl cut layers the backing needs
to be just a simple circle next time!

Weeding is where you pick all the unwanted bits off your vinyl. It’s the most tedious part of using the vinyl cutter though it does have the same satisfaction (at times) as popping bubble wrap or scrapping the silver stuff off scratch cards. My brother showed me an Aperture Laboratories t-shirt he was going to pay £15 for. Instead I found the required logo and cut him one out. He can now iron that on any t-shirt he likes and it cost less than £1. The possibilities for customising t-shirts is pretty much endless, you just have to have a few “original” ideas!

I’m working on a standard t-shirt for Nottingham Hackspace. I’m hoping to stock them in the vending machine if they can be folded small enough. The Hackspace logo is “Lincoln Green” which is a dark green. This means it only really shows up nicely on light colours. It also tends to look black against colours like yellow and light blue. Being of “powerful” build myself (ahem) I prefer a darker colour t-shirt. This means that it’s really difficult to make a t-shirt with a dark green logo. To make the green standout on any colour I’ve been experimenting with layering the vinyl. The green going on top of an under layer of white. Here are the results. As pointed out the shape of my white layer isn’t great on this example though I’m pleased with the layering generally and I’ll hopefully be able to either use a white circle (worried it’ll look a bit 1939 though) or some sort of shape like an ink splash or something. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

If you’d like a custom t-shirt or laptop sticker making or one of the designs in this blog post please do comment or email mechickengrylls@gmail.com and I’d be very happy indeed to help you out!

I made a Maker Faire

Derby Mini Makerfaire from Barney Livingston on Vimeo.

So I probably owe the Nottingham Hackspace about £150 in "I'm going to blog once a week or pay Hackspace £50." money. However I think as I was busy organising a Mini Maker Faire that I should be let off the hook. 


The faire was awesome and I'd like to thank all those who worked so hard on it especially Hannah Fox, Kim Miller, Emma Hallam, Amanda McLaren, Jonathan Wallis and the staff at the Derby Silk Mill museum particularly Alan and Andy who where brilliant! The Maker Faire was a great success for a number of reasons. 


The event started on Saturday 2nd June with a Maker's only day. I think the Maker's only day worked well and I was particularly pleased with the talks by Tim Hunkin and Andrew Harsley. Tim was very enthused by Jonathan's behind the scene tour of the Derby Museum and Art Gallery and gave a short talk on the History of Electricity Research which he sort of gave on the fly but had some excellent slides ready to show us. Andrew really surprised a few people with his talk. Everyone who went to it felt they'd got a treat really as it wasn't a well advertised part of the day. 

We had makers from all over the country and a particularly strong representation from Hackerspaces. London Hackspace brought along their giant “Ridiculous Mini Golf” course which took quite a long time to set up. If you ever organise an event and they offer to bring it, say yes as it’s very good. Make sure you set aside about 30m2 of space though as it’s gargantuan. I was a little worried we’d not fit it all in and I was forced to move both Ciseco (sorry boys) and HACMan out of the room to accommodate the craziness. Matt Edwards from Build Brighton brought along the excellent RoBoXylo which annoyed everyone all day. We put Martin Raynsford and his laser in with the superb Rolls Royce RB211 engine. Martin was able to bring his laser and was cutting all day which was exactly what I was hoping we'd have at the Faire. At one point Jake from Instructables was working with Martin on a Raspberry Pi case. 

I was really pleased to see so many visitors. There were about 550 in total and about 70 Makers and their hangers on. It was a super weekend and I was delighted with all the Makers. Same again next year?

Messing Up - Part of the Design Process

This weeks blog was to be a £10 digital camera tear down and rebuild into a Kite Aerial Photography (KAP) rig. I'd found this super cheap digital camera at Sainsbury in Derby called the Vivitar Vivi Cam 7020 that was less than a tenner. I took to it with gusto at the Thursday night hack at the Bristol Hackspace.

ViviCam 7020

After removing the 5 case screws including the one hidden under the QC sticker then dropping one on the floor never to be found again, I managed to pop the casing off this incredibly cheap (in build and cost) digital camera.

Further dismantling showed that weights had actually been added to the camera to make it feel... well more like a camera?!

I located the shutter button and proceeded to try and workout how to activate it using an external switch on the little controller circuit I'd made from a plan by Limor Fried  that makes any cheapo camera into a time-lapse device.

Unfortunately to test the camera in it's unmade state I needed power and the batteries weren't going to stay in place without the casing so I reach for the Bristol Hackspace power supply. Things unravelled fast from this point. I must admit I failed to note which knob was current and which was voltage before whacking the wrong ones up to full power and probably frying this tiny flimsy camera.

A rapid reassembly and a borrowed SD card (for this little camera needs one to work possibly) would only produce little beeping sounds. I'd done something terrible and irreparable.

I disassembled and reassembled a few times. At first I thought it might be because I'd left a few screws out and these screws had part of the copper substrate from the circuit board connected to them.  Adding these in made no difference. The camera was just dead. Toast.

Though I must admit I felt a tiny bit frustrated I did feel I was adding to the long tradition of "DOING THINGS WRONG" that is at the heart of all tinkering and boffinry. I feel society (and perhaps it always has) dusts over the stories of failure and likes to laugh at them if they are told at all. But in my experience All truly good making has it measure of failure, mishap and just down-right buggering things up. I'm not suggesting this should happen, but we mustn't be afraid of it. I can think of so many exciting and promising projects that myself and others have started and never finished because they didn't go right the first time. In UK Government project we use something called Optimism Bias. It's where we add a % to the time and cost of any project because it is (and this came as a surprise to me) human nature to be overly optimistic. We too should be taught this from an early age in school or wherever. Maybe that's the true role of a Hackspace. Come here to Make... MAKE MISTAKES!

A wise man once said to me "If you're not making mistakes... You're not making ANYTHING!" Just to emphasis this here are two pre-Secret Life Of Machines (SLOM) films of Tim Hunkin where I think it's quite clear that the UK's premier Hacker makes a few errors as he goes along.

and this one from slightly later...

I managed to take the camera back to Sainsbury for a full refund (thank you Sainsbury) unfortunately the branch of Sainsbury I took it took don't sell this camera so I had to have a cash refund rather than an exchange which will hold up my adventures in KAP for a little longer, though I admit my appetite for it has increased since the recent trip to Southwold. In the meantime look at this phenomenal picture taken by David Steward of Bristol Hackspace. It's called a light painting using LEDs on a long stick that flash in sequence as you walk slowly along infront of a very long exposure camera.

Logo photo by David Stewart Bristol Hackspace using light painting stick with Arduino

David Stewart actually refocused the camera closer to the action after this first picture. It wasn't clear in the small view finder on the camera what a great effect the light reflecting off the cobble sets was. These sort of pictures are sort of spooky, in an arty way they make me think of how something last through time, like the very old wall in the background whilst other things (the people in the pictures) are fleeting. Yeah... I know right?!

13 Go to Southwold!

Mike Pountney's GoPro HD Hero 2 camera mounted on my Cody Box Kite at about 150ft (ish) looking over the camp site with the sea and Southwold on the horizon. This is a fish eye lens that is not the curvature of the earth. 

Had an excellent weekend in Southwold, good weather making our Geek weekender rather good. In addition to the camping and beer drinking we enjoyed a pleasant afternoon kite flying on Saturday hence all the pictures.

We very much enjoyed an early morning (10am) visit to the Adnam's brewery with a tour and tasting that I think got us all a little merry. The afternoon was spent at The Under The Pier Show, which was further improved by a behind the scene's tour from it's proprietor Mr Tim Hunkin. In addition to the camping and beer drinking a pleasant evening of BBQing and kite flying back at camp and at one point flying about 8 kites including my Cody Box kite (see picture) a brave little blue sled kite also in the picture and Martin's mental wing like kite surfing monstrosity.

Photo by Spencer Owen

A slow start packing away gear and then the highlight of the weekend a visit to Tim Hunkin's workshop just outside of Southwold. I was very delighted to be shown how to use the MIG welder by Tim and had a go at joining a couple of bits of metal together. It really was a lot of fun and I'm pleased to have grasped the welding nettle. Tim took time to show us his latest under the pier attraction in progress the super "Somali Pirates" arcade machine.

I was really delighted to see everyone have such a good time. It was one of the best weekends I can remember. I hope we can do it all again next year.

Tim Hunkin crouched down on the floor causing one hacker to exclaim "You look more like Tim Munchkin now!" a good time was had by all. Photo by Gillian Zirmer 

Poster for Mini Maker Faire Derby

I'm pretty excited about the up coming Mini Maker Faire in Derby on the weekend of 2nd & 3rd June. I'm one of the co-organisers and it's been quite a bit of work already especially for Hannah Fox at the Silk Mill and her team.

On the left is a very tiny and low resolution version of the promotional poster for the Faire. I really like the robot and silk mill graphics. I'm really pleased that the Nottingham Hackspace has such a prominent logo which is also a QR code so should drive some traffic back to the Nottinghack.org.uk website!

It's going to be a pretty busy week and weekend for me but it'll be worth it. Hope to see you there! You can get tickets on Eventbrite

http://makerfairederby.eventbrite.co.uk/

Fishing for keys!

It's been a tough couple of weeks for me and I've not been able to bang a blog post out. That probably means I owe the Hackspace £50 as I did promise I'll penalty myself £50 if I don't write a post a week. Well we'll see I don't like reneging on a promise but I also don't like giving away money.

The saddest Captain's hat in the world yesterday

The week started fairly badly when I left my netbook power adaptor in Nottingham (I now live in Bristol). I'd lent my wife (who was working on a murder trial in Birmingham) my MiFi which is the only way I can get online on the boat. Having no power adaptor for the netbook meant that McDonald's and other flavours of FREE (and no doubt evil) WiFi were not an option. Dragging my ancient power adaptor only Ubuntu laptop to Bristol Hackspace was the only way I was going to get any work done for the Derby Mini Maker Faire (which is on the 3rd June btw). I packed my huge Ubuntu laptop into my bag grabbed my bike, bike lock and Hackspace keys with the bike lock key on. At either end of the pontoon I live on is a big gate with a padlock on it. I'd manoeuvred my bike through the gate and was about to lock the padlock up behind me. I had one of those weird involuntary spasms we all have from time to time and somehow flicked the Hackspace (and bike lock keys amongst others) off the karabiner I keep them all on and into the harbour. As if in slow-mo I lunged out and watched them sink. I ran back to the boat and grabbed the 10ft boat pole that's lashed to the side. Pushing it down as straight as I could I discovered that the harbour in that spot is more than 10ft deep. Annoyingly I had to accept that these keys were gone... FOREVER!

Here is the thing about Hackspaces, a lot of people have a lot of ideas about how to do things, but often they don't DO those things. I think I've developed a "RULE 3" filter in my head somehow. They don't have Rule 3 at Bristol Hackspace so the bike shedding was rife. The one repeated theme I heard was "GET A MAGNET ON SOME STRING!" I heard it so many times I thought I had to do it just so I could say, "Yeah I've done that." David W (the Bristol Hackspace treasurer) very kindly provided me with a stack of HDD magnets (very powerful had my fingers bitten by them a couple of times) and I borrowed a long reel of string from the Hackspace stationary pot.

It was past 23:00 before I got back to the harbour. I put a head torch on and went out to fish. I determined that this bit of the harbour was 12ft deep. That's pretty deep really, the draught of the SS Great Britain is 16ft and I'm talking about a bit of the harbour near the edge. Anyway I tentatively started plopping the magnet in and dragging it about. Almost straight away I got some feedback. There must have been some girders or re-bar down there as the magnet was attracted to something immoveable (by me I mean). Dipping that thing in and dragging it about on such a calm evening was very soothing. Before long it was no longer about fishing for keys and was about finding anything metallic for the magnet to stick too. I'd have been pleased to pull a nail up really. I did get a number of rusty tiny chunks of iron. I'm not sure what they could be from. Maybe the remains of some industrial process or bits that have rusted to almost nothing. THEN SUDDENLY ... I'd got a bite. I could feel I was lifting something. I was more than 2m from where I thought the keys had gone in. I pulled the string a little too eagerly and I felt the line lighten. More carefully this time I lowered the magnet again. A slight change in weight... did I have it? Surely whatever I'd caught wasn't still attached?

Cautiously I wound the string in. My muscles playing tricks on me that the weight was actually the same as it ever was BUT NO! I'd somehow found my keys! They smelt a bit like fish and they were a little tarnished and already rusty in places. But I'd saved myself at least £25 in deposit costs on the Bristol Hackspace keys as we'll as ensuring I had spares for my different bike locks.

So there must be a lesson here right? Well I'm not sure there is. I could say something about optimism or having a try. I could say something about simplest solutions being the best or dogged determination. I could talk about chance and probability or get very nerdy about search patterns, the depth and flow of current in the harbour or about the distance from where they went in to where they were resting. But I'm not going to. Still I have to admit I've been in a much better mood since I found my keys.

The Wolf Returns!

What is the wolf? The wolf stops us being lazy, the wolf stops us being greedy... the wolf behind us drives us. What are we with out the wolf...

About this time last year Nottingham Hackspace had some very serious and potentially devastating news. We learned that we had to move out of our Hackspace. This quite literally was putting us out of our comfort zone. We paid the princely and, I admit at the time, scary sum of £100 per month for a suite of rooms above the Tesco's on Station Street in Nottingham. It's an old Police Station and I guess that it was falling into a very poor state of repair.

David H in the workshop of Nottingham Hackspace Circa 2011

At that time we had seemingly few options. Our total income from membership dues was about £200 per month, maybe a little more. We had about £500 in the bank in money earned from kit sales and workshops and we had a lot of good will. In some ways it felt like the Hackspace ride was over, how could we possibly move forward with our backs to the walls and no capital? We scratched around for a new home. We spoke to our landlords, the Art Organisation, who had other highly dilapidated space. Everywhere we looked seemed way too expensive. How could we afford £400 and £500 a month rents when we had an income of only £200? Not only could we not afford the spaces we saw, they didn't meet our ambition. They just weren't big enough. They often had just one room and we'd be climbing over each other to get anything done. Working on code and sawing up wood often doesn't mix. Saw dust is not nice on textiles!

I don't clearly recall when everyone stopped telling me that we couldn't possibly move into the huge set of rooms at Roden House. Before long everyone seemed to believe we could do it. Pull together £2000 in deposit and build up membership over the course of a few months to cover our £1k a month rent. We all did some napkin maths. RepRap Matt, Michael-the-Money and James all did big spreadsheets working out how our income would need to build and how many members we'd need month on month. We negotiated with our (soon to be) landlord and worked out a stepped rent building up month on month starting with two months for free!

In late April 2012 Nottingham Hackspace has received an invoice for a little under £3k in unpaid rent...just like it says in those large famously friendly letters on the cover of the hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy

DON'T PANIC...

We've discussed for sometime that we aren't quite paying our full rent at the moment and had in the past queried this with our landlords. It's important to remember that's we've in no-way defaulted on our monthly payments to the landlord either as we've been paying exactly what they invoice the Hackspace for by direct debit! It seems that since July 2011 our landlords believe they have been under billing us. The board checked Nottinghack's books too and Hackspace accounts show that our landlords are right though we feel that the figure calculated needs some explanation and may not be exactly correct. Hackspace has some negotiating to do as it's the end of it's one year tenancy agreement too. Nottingham Hackspace's landlords apologised for the error and graciously have allowed Hackspace to negotiate a payment plan with no interest being charged on the owed money. 

If anything this new large bill for the Hackspace has been a timely reminder to me that we need to keep the project moving forward. The Hackspace can never afford to get too comfortable or stop actively looking to organise new workshops, events and bring in exciting new members. We need more people and more money to make Hackspace a success. More than that, we need the wolf. Don't get me wrong a sudden unexpected bill for £3k isn't great but it does keep us on our toes. What doesn't kill us will make us stonger. Too many cook's will... not wait a minute that doesn't work.