Tag Archives: Maker Nights

Maker Night #4

A quiet night last night – I think we were all feeling the effects of the muggy weather!

Maker Night 3

A mix of returners and new faces, but all aware that there are only 2 Maker Nights remaining as part of this series at The Public, talk turned again to what made the sessions valuable and what should happen after Many & Varied depart.

We covered a lot of other subjects too including: LibraryBoxes, being able to see Saturn (or not), Iridium flares, harmonographs and giving the rugby-types at school electric shocks.

A nice phrase that came up a few times was “being a bit crap”: the importance of having a space in which you can make the mistakes you learn from; a place where you don’t have to be perfect.

Pi-Lite shield for the Raspberry Pi

A Furby shell awaiting a new face.

For the next session (6th of August) there is talk of Big Red Buttons.

There’s also a general call out for people who may have experience of working with touchscreens – do you know how to programme them? We also have someone who’s interested in using either ethernet or wi-fi connected Arduino for home automation – if you have any experience with either of these and can feed into his thinking that would be great.

Maker Night #3

For the third Maker Night at The Public we had a nice mix of returners and new faces.

I remember looking up from the middle of a stint at trying to figure out some code and being very impressed at the range of activities going on around the table: drawing, mask-making, traffic control (a nice Arduino model of some traffic lights with a pedestrian crossing), illustration, morse code and aspirations for tai-chi tracking kinect sensors!

traffic control

20130709_195201

We’re starting to get some nice link-ups between people’s projects too: with inspiration and know-how flowing in different directions. Another recurring theme is how Maker Nights are proving to be a really nice ring-fenced space that people are using to get on with the creative activities that they normally don’t get around to.

We’re halfway through our run of Maker Nights as part of our stint at The Public. The next one is on Tuesday the 23rd of July, drop-in and join us any time between 5 and 9:30pm.

Maker Night #2

Coming in the same week as The Great Big Skills Jamboree, the write-up’s been a little slow, however here are a few photos from our 2nd Maker Night at The Public…

The first wave of Makers get started:
Makers

After a quick lesson in how to solder, one chap (sorry, I can’t remember everyone’s names!) embarked on this project – a shield for a Raspberry Pi computer:
soldering project

Antonio’s on a mission to learn how to glitch visuals through sound input. Here are a few of his early experiments using live images from a webcam and tone generated through PureData:

glitch patches

Many & Varied Maker Night

Many & Varied Maker Night

The second wave of Makers wanted to do some drawing. So they did!

drawing

This is, I think, the key thing about Maker Nights – they are what you want them to be. Bring whatever you’re interested in along on Tuesday the 9th of July and join us for the next one!

Our first Maker Night

We’ve just got back home after our first Maker Night at The Public: a night that involved story-telling catalysts, learning to solder, spaceblanket interfaces for jumping monkeys, “ooh! Do you remember when we did that!” devices, a TOP SECRET project, and, importantly, not letting the mains get into your cup of tea. That last one’s important – never let mains electricity get into your cup of tea.

Here are a few images from the evening – more can be found in this Flickr set.

The early-birds settle in for a night of making.

The early-birds settle in for a night of making.

A short time later the thinking faces and solder-sucker come out...

A short time later the thinking faces and solder-sucker come out…

A story-telling catalyst - his son tells a story and touches the different foil strips to trigger the noises he wants.

A story-telling catalyst – his son tells a story and touches the different foil strips to trigger the noises he wants.

Learning to solder in a totally non-competitive manner.

Learning to solder in a totally non-competitive manner.

Ian thinks he's won with this abstract expressionist sculpture capturing the physical immediacy of metal, plastic and the juxtapositions inherent in contemporary Western society...

Ian thinks he’s won with this abstract expressionist sculpture capturing the physical immediacy of metal, plastic and the juxtapositions inherent in contemporary Western society…

...but then Anne made this really nice butterfly!

…but then Anne made this really nice butterfly!

Taking a break from carpentry.

Taking a break from carpentry.

Trying out the MaKey Makey. First impression: but a keyboard is so much easier! Changing to: this is a lot more fun than a keyboard!

Trying out the MaKey Makey. First impression: but a keyboard is so much easier! Changing to: this is a lot more fun than a keyboard!

Serious discussions about interfaces, play and discovery.

Serious discussions about interfaces, play and discovery.

Seriously! You don't want the mains getting into your cup of tea!

Seriously! You don’t want the mains getting into your cup of tea!

Thanks to everyone who came – we had a great mixture of people learning skills like soldering and basic electronics for the first time as well as more practised folks bringing in their interesting projects. By the end of the evening we had made various sculptures, some code that talks to Flickr and numerous blinky lights.

At least two people are now remembering broken things they have at home and thinking “if I bring that in next time, I can fix that!”. Here at Many & Varied we consider that to be a very big win!

The next Maker Night is on the 25th of June.

Maker Night #1

Our first of six Maker Nights is on Tuesday night.

Blank canvases are always a little daunting, so we’ve seeded a few things for you to think about and get your creative juices flowing: basic skills in Arduino and soldering, as well as leaping around like a crazy leapy thing (see below). You are of course welcome to work on projects of your own devising too!

Basic skills: Arduino

One of our Arduino kits available for you to use.

One of our Arduino kits available for you to use.

Our background is in the hackspace movement and interactive art, where Arduino is a nifty little computing device that can link the digital and physical worlds. It makes it very easy to do amazing things even if, like us, you’ve never had any formal programming training.

Check out the Arduino section on Instructables for a few examples of what’s possible. On the page as we type are step-by-step instructions for projects like a capacitive touch piano, an Iron Man costume, a morse code generator, robots, blinky lights and a hacked Roomba.

Arduino projects on Instructables

Arduino projects on Instructables

We’ve got 2 Arduino kits available for you to use at Maker Nights to try out and learn the basics. Bring a laptop with the Arduino software installed on it and we’ll help you get some LEDs blinking as the first step towards your mad inventions!

If anyone feels like making a Loud Noise Device that we can use for The Great Big Skills Share Jamboree, that would be most appreciated. We’d like something fun (and LOUD!) we can use to time participant introductions and the skills-sharing sessions.

Basic skills: Soldering

There are lots of kits around for cool things that you can make yourself. To do this you’ll need to be able to solder. Again, we have 2 soldering kits for you to use and we can teach you the basics so you feel comfortable to work independently on your projects.

Leaping around like a crazy leapy thing

MaKey MaKey board

MaKey MaKey board

We bought a couple of MaKey MaKey kits to use for the upcoming BANANAS! event in August.

We gave them a quick test yesterday:

First MaKey Makey test

First MaKey Makey test

It’s a lot of fun!

Basically you can connect up different things to the board and then use these to simulate keyboard button presses and mouse clicks.

For our first attempt we sliced up some space blanket, gaffa taped it to the floor, connected the MaKey MaKey and loaded up a game featuring a jumping monkey. It may have had us jumping around a fair bit too…

Your mission:

  1. Find a fun-looking online game that needs only simple key presses to play (out of the box the MaKey Makey supports left/right/up/down cursor arrows, space bar, mouse click, W, A, S, D, F and G).
  2. Make a note of the URL so you can find it again.
  3. Bring in some things that might make interesting interfaces. The instruction booklet says “Anything even slightly conductive should work”. Tin foil, coins, graphite pencils, silverware, humans, plants, fruits, water, marshmallows, Play-Doh…
  4. Combine game, objects and MaKey MaKey to invent a game that’s crazy silly and fun to play!

The Youth Orchestra will be downstairs with their tuck shop, so there’s easy access to calories and additives to fuel this process!

Tuck Shop

So: see you there!

We’ll be up on the 3rd floor in the Long Room. If you go to the reception desk near the main entrance the staff will give you directions. Drop in any time between 5 and 9:30ish. The Maker Nights are free, as is the wi-fi.

Please note: The main café closes at 4:30, but you should be able to find somewhere selling food on the nearby high street if you need to.

Travel and accessibility information is available on this page.

What is a Maker Night?

As part of our residency at The Public we’re hosting 6 Maker Nights.

In essence a Maker Night is a bunch of people hanging out together. It doesn’t matter what background, skills or job you have: at Maker Nights all the differences fuel each other and, as people start to dream up amazing things, it’s generally possible to pool all the bits of stuff everyone knows and end up with a collective ability to make the idea a reality.

Giving it a go is the most valuable skill you can come with.

Make Magazine published a blog post yesterday that describes a Dutch novel written during World War II. Here’s part of the story that it quotes:

We have to establish a club for boys with a technical hobby to, like Verburg so strikingly said, get grand results by cooperation. A club with its own clubhouse, where you can experiment, where you can make a mess and loud noise, where you can be your own boss and disturb nobody! A club of merely enthusiasts, of boys, who love technique, one with their hobby! A club for radio, photography, film, chemistry, electricity and more! A club that has never been, but that we will found! Our club…. The Hobby Club!Leonard de Vries, “The Boys of the Hobby Club.”

Nearly seven decades later, we can confidently replace the word ‘boys’ with ‘people’, and point to the growing number of hackspaces, makerspaces, FabLabs and craft nights that are today’s versions of the Hobby Club.

But what about this emphasis on technology?

I really like this short documentary that, amongst other things, talks about the importance of making technology accessible through looking at something, knowing it, understanding it, taking it apart, putting it back together and remaking something new.

We Make Things. from Tunnel Media on Vimeo.

Wikipedia describes Maker Culture as being an extension of “a technology-based extension of DIY culture” [source] Here’s Ken Denmead’s take on it in another recent Makezine post:

The DIY and Maker Movements [..] are filled with people who want to figure out how to make or do stuff on their own, rather than purchasing pre-packaged goods or services. Are the two movements different things? I don’t think so. I think they’re two circles on a Venn diagram that overlap almost completely. Perhaps there’s a bit more art and design in the Maker Movement circle (what we might call the “Burning Man Influence”), and a bit more changing-your-car’s-oil-in-the-driveway in the DIY circle, but otherwise the passions for creating, building, and sharing are the same.Ken Denmead, “Why the Maker Movement is Here to Stay”

For me the Maker Nights are all about the people who come to them and the unpredictable things that bubble up out of conversations. They’re what you make them.

Perhaps this post should have been titled “Why is a Maker Night”. I think the answer to that involves a combination of “because it’s important” and “because we all have an urge to dream and to make things”.

Our first Maker Night is on Tuesday – see you there.