News

Ever work on a project and find yourself needing a spring? Ever go to
the hardware store looking for one, and have to compromise because the
offerings are so slim?

At the next Open House (Sept 28th) we will have materials for
making simple coil springs. If you have a project in need of a spring,
or if you’d just like to check it out, come on by. We’re certainly no experts and you wouldn’t want to mass produce them this way, but adding
a new tool to the toolbox is always fun and may come in handy one day.

If you have a project in mind, try to bring as much information as you
can so we can take a stab at making you something that will work. We
can do extension-, compression-, and torsion springs. Note that the
final heat treating process takes about 2 hours so I will probably do
that part at home and bring the completed springs in to the following
Open House.

Our friends at The Hacktory are hosting an event this Friday from 7 – 8:30PM to discuss their experiences at the Chaos Communication Camp. I hear tell they will have popcorn, which is quite something. I wish I had gone just to see Disco Lenin.

We had a solid, but uncrowded open house last night, complete with all the usual unstructured goings-on and a side order of semi-structured activities.

Adam Korshid, UArts Industrial Design alum and local “kombuchaneer” stopped by to share some Acetobacter Xylinum cultures and give Pez’s microbial cellulose operation a re-boot.  We were joined by local artist and 915 building neighbor Ann Saintpeter.  We mixed up two 44″ by 18″ trays with a special “blanco cellulose” medium in the form of sugar, yeast and apple-cider vinegar. To prepare the medium we used a rigorous, proven methodology that is generally referred to in the relevant scientific literature as TLAR (“that looks about right”) and verified our efforts using the TTAR2 methodology (“that tastes about right, too”) — as if we know what constitutes A. Xylinum’s standards of delciousness.  Then we turned the bacteria loose in the pond to do their thing.  We’ll deliver the resulting paper to Ann to see if it has a place in her art.

Ann also donated an Epson 7700 that needs some TLC.   We spent some time working on it, and learned a thing or two.  For example, we learned how to reset the counter on the maintenance tank (yay, $60 unnecessary expense avoided) and also tried to clear the black ink line by “replacing” the cartridge (boo, $50 unnecessary expense incurred when the printer apparently rejected our “spent” ink cartridge for good).  We’ll re-flash those ink cartridges and show the printer who’s boss — and the printer is well worth the effort involved in rescue.

Dan and some-guy-whose-name-i-didnt-catch were off in a corner working on developing something using some framework whose-name-i-didnt-catch.  Maybe Dan will edit this part.

And Monday’s MMM workshop — Great Success — we had five or six fresh faces and it seemed that a good time was had by all.  We were prepared with lecture materials, if needed, but everyone in attendance seemed to be in a loosely structured kind of mood — so loose, in fact, that we didn’t bother to take a single picture.  PJ has suggested a Halloween theme for the next workshop, and we’ll probably prepare some reading and code snippets in advance on things like LEDs (charlie-plexing, POV and the like)  and maybe some schematics and code involving upcycling old CD drives into creepy animatronics.