I decided to award myself some badges, I mean, no one else is gonna do it, right? Badges? Badges! Yeah, all those awesome badges you’ll find over at Adafruit… those badges.
And, no, I’m not the first to show some badges, and hopefully not the last either. At Milwaukee Makerspace we often refer to ourselves as “Skill Collectors” so these badges fit in nicely with that idea.
3D Printing: I think I’ve earned this one. While it’s true my RepRap is only (about) 80% done, I’ve managed to tame the MakerBot CupCake we have at Milwaukee Makerspace.
Bike Repair: As a kid I used to fix my bike all the time. Also, when I was in college I managed to rescue a bike from a dumpster behind a frat house in Madison and re-built it into a completely usable ride.
Catapult: I seem to remember building a small catapult out of scrap wood and rubber bands when I was a kid. I’m pretty sure I scared the cat with it. (Since I have no photographic evidence I should probably try to earn this one again.)
Circuit bender: I supposed I did do this thing… but let’s be honest, that was pretty simple, and again, I should do much better to earn this badge.
Drawdio!: I have built a Drawdio! I wasn’t really happy with it though, and I want to rebuild it into another device, but that’s a project for another time.
Dumpster Diving: I’d actually have a sash full of these. Besides the bike I mentioned above, things I’ve gotten from dumpsters include: stereos, books, money, a photocopier, food, clothing, tools, and on and on and… I’ll stop before I embarrass my family any more.
ESD (Electrostatic discharge): Have you ever grounded yourself by touching something metal before installing something new inside your computer? In the olden days when I had a Macintosh IIvx I used to put on rubber soled shoes, attached a wrist strap and treat RAM like it was highly explosive. Of course nowadays I install new RAM while eating pizza and sipping whiskey. (RAM also costs about 1/10 what it did back then.)
Hacked Kinect: All I’ve got so far is that we did some 3D scanning of heads at Milwaukee Makerspace, and then reduced the complexity of the models, and 3D printed one of them. (It’s a work in progress.)
Linux: Although it took me a few years to get into Linux, I now own about 3 Linux machines and administer 5 more. I like Linux. (Well, for servers anyway.)
Magic Blue Smoke: Sadly, I have released the Magic Blue Smoke at lease once… and at least once it wasn’t my own equipment. Oops!
Metric System: Ah, the good old Metric System! I really didn’t use it much until recently. Working in the RepRap world, and with the laser cutter, and other hacker/maker things, I’m starting to get used to it. (Sort of.)
Multimeter: I probably first used a multimeter in 1986, and while I still have a lot to learn about them, I can handle the basics, so that’s something.
Whew, I didn’t realize there were so many badges!
That said, I’m going to break this post into two parts, and I’ll cover the rest of my skills (or lack of skills) in the next post…
3 replies on “Skill Badges”
Oddly enough, I’ve been kind of interested in badges for awhile now and have been working on some software to build sites that would allow anyone to make badges to give to anyone.
Also, Mozilla has been working on the Open Badge Infrastructure, which makes badges portable between sites. I wonder if I could talk the Adafruit peeps into doing that with theirs?
Les, your name was the first that came up in a conversation last night that mentioned the Mozilla Open Badge stuff, but are you not involved directly with that?
I think it would be a great idea for Adafruit to get on-board with what Mozilla is doing in that area… I’ll talk to the people I know and see if anything can happen. (Maybe you can do the same?)
No… I’m not on the Open Badges team itself, more of a very interested observer. I haven’t made any major contributions yet, but I do have my stuff, and have their stuff running on my laptop, and am working on getting my stuff talking to it.
Mainly I work on developer.mozilla.org these days, though we do have some plans to get badges there for contributions