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?