Friday 26 October 2012

EMF Camp


This is one of my long long overdue planned blogs! Way back at the end of August / beginning of September five hundred (or so) hackers converged on a field in Milton Keynes and pitched up their tents, plugged in their laptops, 3D printers, laser cutters (ok laser cutter), logged onto the field's wireless network (or wired!) and got on with swapping knowledge and drinking beer.

As man in charge (sometimes) of phenoptix, I was there as a (in fact the) vendor for the camp. Later dubbed as the silver tongued seller of shiny things.



My planning for the event was somewhat hampered by the planning that is involved in selling and moving out of a house. So what happened was I filled three boxes with the things I thought were cool, put them in a van and drove to Milton Keynes! On arrival I was greeted by a staff that seemed to be a many armed beast, fighting the fires associated with running an event for the first time! My Tilda badge wasn't ready yet and nobody was really sure where I was supposed to go. So like the folks at Cheers, I went where everybody knew my name (or at least some of them did!) Nottinghack's super amazing laser enabled camping zone. 


Unpacking and setting out was the first challenge. I decided to have a beer instead and leave it for the next day. Again Nottinghack trumped all with a firebowl and 80 ish meters of EL Cable (the latter from an anonymous, handsome and enigmatic donor).


Fuzzy headed the next day I started to set up my stall, quite literally! From the first item that went onto the table we had visitors and started talking shop, it's was the first time I've had face to face contact with my customers and it was a really amazing experience. This was day one!


 Man it was busy! But just so good! My view of the event was mainly from the other side of this table but I met so many interesting people it was well worth it. It was probably 21:00 when I decided to pack up for the night and get out my soldering iron and enjoy a beer.


I've wanted to solder a LOL shield for some time and it was nice to sit down besides other people tinkering and chatting whilst also tweeting about it! The creator of the shield - Jimmie Rodgers, even tweeted back with his record soldering time! About 40 minutes I think!

The Sunday saw me start out with a bit of a stock take, of course this didn't last long again as people wanted to talk cool stock! I ended up spreading my stock across the ground sheet and becoming a one man electronics bazaar. Not stopping until it was time for me to head home and finish moving house!



My take on the EMF camp was from a very narrow view point, quite literally, as I saw it over the top of my stock. But it was a really great and friendly event. I met so many cool people that I thought it couldn't be topped. 

A lot of people made the camp amazing for me, the hospitality of Nottinghack - Dominic and James in particular. Paul of Pimoroni who appeared with a coffee for me on the Sunday. The lock pickers with their safe cracking stories. All of the organisers who worked so hard to make sure everyone was fed, watered, sheltered, powered and networked. Hats off to all who attended though, you all made it a great event.



Friday 5 October 2012

Big Blog Backlog!

An odd thing. I once struggled to blog due to the apparent lack of content, walking to the shed every day, packing LEDs into bags and walking back again. Seemed that there wasn't so much to talk about back then. Oh how things have changed. Now I'm a tad busier with life in general but with work there's so much going on now! Lots of new products, lots of events to write about, so much so that there is currently a creative log jam going on in my head. First I want to write about EMF Camp, then my trip to New York to the Open Hardware Summit, then to Adafruit HQ, then to Maker Faire! I could even write about my trip to the New York Museum Of Modern Art in search of my coffee machine and the merry White Rabbit chase that it gave me amongst the Monets and Van Goghs.



Lets see what comes out first...

Wednesday 15 August 2012

Family Joules at Derby Makers


Last night I attended a fantastic workshop at Derby Makers, run by Graeme Smith and his daughter, where we made a legendary piece of hackery - The Joule Thief. This is something I've seen all around the internet but never got around to gathering the parts for. Probably my favourite incarnation saw the JT fused with sew-able circuits to make the "Cat Burglar". 



Bat Burglar would have been more appropriate, but probably wouldn't have made such a cute construct. For those who have never heard of a Joule Thief or have but don't know what it is. A JT (I've typed it in full enough!) is a circuit that allows you to run an LED on a nearly dead battery. For those that don't find that amazing, consider that the LED I used runs from 3.4V and a fully charged AA battery gives at best 1.5V. For those that don't find that amazing see here (might be more your sort of thing).

It was one of the busiest Derby Makers sessions that I have attended and there were lots of new faces eager to get their hands on a JT kit. Comprised of a lovingly etched PCB, battery holder for the nearly dead battery, a transistor (2N3904), a switch, a resistor (1K) a ferrite bead, a long length of magnet wire and perhaps most importantly an LED. 


A keen group had arrived early and started to make headway on their JTs, which was fortunate as it freed up Graeme to help a second table and get them winding their ferrite cores with magnet wire (the first step). The bead comprised the complicated part of the procedure, but this was all nicely explained and had a great diagram on the second page of the instructions.


Once the bead was wound and the ends identified we got onto some soldering (and eating of biscuits).


What is that excellent piece of product placement, er I mean PCB holding equipment, I hear you cry? That is the Panavise Jr. Available from phenoptix.com. Sorry about that, it's the first one in four blogs though. 

The soldering stage was a blur as the red mist descended and the camera was forgotten. I was soon the proud owner of a working JT!



All that remained for the workshop was to discuss how the JT works. Which hopefully will follow in another blog post. 


But to summarise, it was a great evening at Derby Makers where people of all ages and abilities made something together, helped each other and enjoyed discussing and showing off what we'd made. If this is something that would interest you then please come along to an event! They run every second Tuesday at the Derby Silk Mill. If you're not able to make it Derby Makers why not see if there's a hackspace in your area?

Thursday 9 August 2012

Lush Visit...

Don't know how long this is going to last, a blog post a day for three days. Suppose it's starting to make up for the two years without one.

Yesterday Iain Sharpe of Lush Projects (or @alphabetter as he's known to the twitter sphere) came round for a cup of tea. It was a long overdue visit as he had planned to come and visit us in the cosy LED Shed some time back, it would seem we've all been busy though and it's much easier having visitors here to the Workshop.

Iain got our now standard tour, where I show people draws full of LEDs, Arduinos and other goodies and as usual something caught his eye. Since they could be for his next world domination project I won't link the item.

We sat down for our cups of tea around my spectacularly cluttered desk and had a look at Iain's projects, his world famous Vibrati Punk Console 



and his new project the LushOne modular synthesiser, which comes beautifully clad in Acrylic.


They are, for me, fantastically fun items, but to the musically minded I'm sure they are far more interesting. They are exceptionally well made and the Punk Console is a nice easy solder with less than 60 joints and comes with really sturdy pots so they wont break during a hard jamming session. The LushOne would be a bit of a labour of love, a good hour's soldering for the experienced solderer but well worth it as it is pregnant with musical possibilities. 

We spent the rest of the visit discussing the joy of making kits and their various logistical intricacies. Something we hope we're going to be able to help Iain and others with. The eagle eyed amongst you will have also noticed another kit nestled by my keyboard, awaiting some TLC from a hot soldering iron.

We wrapped up and I was left a Vibrati Punk Console to try and we hope we'll be able to stock them in the near future. At last I have something to do with my old Illy coffee tins!

Wednesday 8 August 2012

Making Derby Makers

The Derby Makers started as a show and tell last September at the iconic Derby Silk Mill. In the last year they've grown from a handful of folk to become a real handful of a group intent on putting together a Mini Maker Faire and Yarn Bombing everything in site!

They meet every second Tuesday for a group event and their numbers are growing all the time.

Last night they met for the first time to decide their constitution, and elect their committee and officers.


Twelve brave soles attended the meeting, summarised by the @derbymakers tweet 
"So we’ve got a knitter, an illustrator, a jet engine builder, a computer science lecturer and a frustrated engineer with us tonight!"


The image above captured part of my arm, my beverage and my pride and joy, taken along to show to the group after my triumphant first day's cutting.

The first ten minutes were spent discussing the logo... we were all fearful of late night! However the pace picked up a bit after that and they got down to the business of discussing the points of the constitution. Lots of valid points were made and the draft ended the night with some significant annotations and very valid new points. 

All members present agreed to be the steering committee of 12 for the Derby Maker Group and set about electing the officers. Of which I was made one, the treasurer. A role that will work hard to do a good job of, considering there was some competition for the post! 

So that was another step in the making of Derby Makers. I'm confident that the committee around the table are committed and capable of making the Derby Makers into an even more amazing group to be a part of, a group that will be indispensable to the Derby Silk Mill and a group that will represent the best of the making scene in the UK and globally.
  

Tuesday 7 August 2012

The Alan Parsons Project

Many many things have happened since this blog was last live. But rather than catch up all in one post I'll just get on with what's happening now. 

WE JUST GOT A LASER CUTTER!

Sorry for the caps but I'm excited, it's been on the list for some time but we've finally got one. Spurred on by the lovely folk at Adafruit as well as a good few others, we finally took the plunge with the view that we can manufacture some of Adafruit's products in the UK and it will slowly but surely pay for itself, whist we develop our own awesome laser cut goodies.
Here it was first thing today: 




We purchased it from some cool dudes in Halifax called HPC, as recommended by some other cool dudes (Aaron from Oomlout, MSRaynsford and Dominic Morrow to name but three). Ordered on Friday afternoon, dispatched Monday and arrived Tuesday, with great instructions and pretty much ready to go. So much so we were cutting within a couple of hours - feeling ever so glad that the old laptop with it's XP operating system would still take a charge.




Considering the purpose was to manufacture some of Adafruit's products that was our first goal! After a few hours of nervous tinkering and fearful turning of the dial we finally hit 11 and cut through our first sheet of 3mm Acrylic to produce...



A UK made Adafruit Raspberry Pi Box! Some more tinkering needs to be applied and also the etching and proofing by the folks in New York city before we start selling these but I'm pretty pleased with the results with just a few hours laser experience.

Oh and we also produced this...

Hakko Wire Stripper

This is a review posted by one of our forum regulars. BigAl344

Anyway after asking politely for a set of these from the guys at Phenoptix, they arrived in a small parcel with some other bits on Friday.
First impressions are that they have a nice weight to them that suggests that they won't fall apart or into pieces the first time you use them. The grips are nicely formed and of a decent length so that even my huge hands can grip them comfortably without slipping about.
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At the business end the 6 stripping grooves are handily marked in both wire gauge (AWG) and size (MM), making life easy for anyone who can't easily pick which size cable they have. 
The cutting blades are incredibly sharp and easily make short work of stripping plastic sheathing or cutting wires, so much so that the first few times you use them you may end up cutting right through whilst stripping back plastic using these!!!
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The two halves of the cutters are held firmly together with a press fitted bush assembly instead of the usual nut and bolt. This means that the two blades meet perfectly flush with each other and do not flex apart when put under pressure during use.
They are sprung loaded open, but have a handy locking mechanism similar to most tin snips and such that allows you to lock them closed when not in use. This is handy for storage and also for safety, because as mentioned earlier they are very sharp. 
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As can be seen in this photo you can see that the cuts are neat and straight, with the strippers cutting easily through the outer without touching any of the stranded wire inside. Such an improvement over my old 'automatic' wire strippers that would alternately cut the wires or fail to remove all of the outer leaving me frustrated and swearing rather a lot!
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They made easy work of this two core cable, both sheath and inners!!
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These caught my attention originally when browsing the Adafruit website, they described them as,
'The finest wire strippers we have used, and if you have to do a lot of wiring, you will agree! 
I must admit that so far I completely agree, they make light work of everyday wiring with ease and mean that you can swiftly cut and strip wire for your projects.
They may not be the cheapest product that you can buy, but they are worth every penny!
On sale at Phenoptix now.