Open Make: Circuits!
We are proud to report that our first Open MAKE event happened last Saturday in our new space on the Exploratorium’s floor, which we call The Studio.
First, we hosted the Young Makers participants in The Studio, and with the help of this month’s featured makers Ken Murphy, and Windell and Lenore, we made Blinkybugs and Bristlebots.
Then the featured makers were interviewed by Dale Dougherty, Editor of Make Magazine to a full auditorium, and took some interesting questions from the public.
Finally, we opened our space, for the first time, to the public, offering both BlinkyBugs and BristleBots making activities, as well as thematically hand-picked exhibits to play with. The Studio was full, bustling, and great fun!
Click below for a selection of photographs from the event!
And here you can watch the interview with Ken Murphy and Windell and Lenore!
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The making of The Studio gallery
We’re been working hard for the last three weeks to prepare a great space in the Exploratorium where we will be doing most of our upcoming work. Our big deadline was last Saturday’s Open MAKE event, and so we worked tirelessly and sometimes frantically to prepare the space. This little timelapse movie will give you an idea of some of the work that went into it. Enjoy!
BristleBots, hexbug style!
Ted fellow Marvin Hall, a long-time friend of the Learning Studio, was in town this week to participate in the First LEGO competition with a bunch of kids from Jamaica.
They stopped by the Learning Studio, and all his kids are obsessed with a set of robotics kits called Hexbugs. As you know, we’ve been developing and playing around with BristleBots, and a logical next step took shape…
Radioshack sells these for $8, and other places for even more. But:
| Toothbrush | $2.40 |
| Pager motor | $0.99 |
| 3V coin battery | $1.00 |
| Total: | Less than $5 |
And of course, pride in having made it yourself: priceless!
BristleBots!
Here are some fun photos and a video of our initial attempt to make BristleBots
Cutting vinyl
The latest addition to the Learning Studio growing arsenal of fabrication tools is a desktop vinyl cutter, the adorable Craft Robo. One of the first projects I decided to embark on (after playing around with some geeky papercraft toys, of course), was how to use adhesive-backed vinyl to modify and decorate my laptop.
The initial inspiration came, once again, from Adam Somlai-Fischer, who has a black sticker covering the glowing apple in his laptop that lets light shine through in the shape of his company’s logo. I thought it was a brilliant idea to repurpose one corporate identity into another.
So my first attempt was, of course, to make an Exploratorium sticker:
There were a few problems with that, though. Mostly, it seemed unsatisfying, to lack oomph in a sense. Mostly this was due to the fact that only a thin line of light came through the outline of the big “O”, and that seemed a waste of a perfectly good light source!
Coincidentally, I also became aware of a neat software called LiveBrush, which allows the user to draw smoothly using the mouse, and with very interesting and artistically pleasing brushes. For example, this took about 20 seconds to draw:
The problem was how to turn the raster image that LiveBrush produces into a vector outline in Illustrator, which the vinyl cutter needs in order to know how to cut. After a bit of fiddling with both programs, I devised a series of tracing settings that do the job automatically quite nicely. Here are a couple of my most successful efforts:
Next step: figure out a way to streamline the process so that it can become an activity to do with the public, possibly in conjunction with the upcoming Rods and Mods event in February. The idea is for people to bring in their own computers, design a decoration in an easy and intuitive way using LiveBrush, and then cut it out of vinyl: voilà, instant laptop mod!