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Holiday Make-A-Thon 2012 [Time Lapse]

Hack Friday

Here’s a quick time-lapse video from the 2012 Holiday Make-A-Thon that Milwaukee Makerspace does in cooperation with Bucketworks. We’ve been doing it for 3 years now, and Bucketworks has been doing it on their own even longer.

It seems like a lot more hackerspaces are doing these type of events this year, which is awesome, and there’s even a nice name for it now: Hack Friday. In my mind, part of belonging to a makerspace/hackerspace is the love of creating things, sharing that with others, especially on a day that has become completely over the top in regards to consumerism. Our mission is plain and simple: Instead of buying useless crap on “Black Friday” join us and we’ll help you make something for the holidays.

I figured it was also a good time to test out the time lapse capabilities of the GoPro Hero3. I have a workflow in place that includes taking still images with the intervalometer and then combining the frames into a video, and then resizing and cropping the video to the correct proportions. It seems to work. Oh, and the camera motion near the end is actually the gaff tape giving out before the camera fell face-down. Enjoy!

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Mothership Hacker Moms

Mothership Hacker Moms

I fully support Mothership HackerMoms (The first women’s hackerspace) and was happy to donate to their Kickstarter campaign. Their goal was/is to construct a workshop with tools and equipment, and create a kids program and business incubator for moms. I think it’s a great idea.

So who would be against this? Nobody, right? Well, actually, some people spoke out… see Anti-HackerMoms send hate mail, HackerMoms respond. Great responses from the women involved. Mothers are important to the world, and having a space where they can get their making fix should be viewed as a good thing. Here’s another blurb:

We are a new kind of playground and workspace for creative mothers. Fun to us is not mani-pedis, but making, breaking, learning and hacking our bright ideas. HackerMoms model active creative lives for our kids who learn, explore and create as mini-makers alongside us. We offer members daily childcare. We also welcome dads.

I don’t think they have any plan to be exclusionary, and they certainly aren’t out to stop anyone else from doing their own thing. You want to start a hackerspace geared towards women who have chosen not to have kids, or for single dads, or for people who view their pets as their babies? Go for it. I’m sure they won’t try to stop you.

And here’s the thing… we all have/had mothers. (Well, unless you were created in some other way, I know some people were.) Imagine being a kid and having your mom take you to a hackerspace, and growing up in that sort of community and culture. I can’t wait to see what the kids who frequent the Mothership HackerMoms space turn out like in 10 or 20 years.

If you believe in creative spaces like these, support them, and let others know how awesome it is.

One more thing… over at Milwaukee Makerspace we’ve talked about how to reach out to more people, men, women, robots, etc. We’re interested mainly in maker, and less about gender, but you can bet that if a bunch of women (or mothers, or men, or cats) came to us asking for advice on how to start their own space, we’d help them out. In fact, we’ve already done that a bit for Spring City Launchpad. We’re also hoping that our new space will be much more inviting to all kinds of people. I guess we’ll find out how that goes in 2013!

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I heard you like cameras…

GoPro Mount

Yo dawg, I heard you like cameras, so I put a camera on your camera so you can take pictures of taking pictures…

Occasionally 3D printing is accused of being useless, or worse, silly. Well this is anything but silly, and it’s certainly not useless.

GoPro Mount

By combining the hot shoe mount I recently printed along with this Female GoProHD Mount we’ve got the camera-on-a-camera thing down like nobody’s business.

GoPro Mount

So yeah, camera on camera action, courtesy of 3D printing. Yeehaw.

But seriously folks, one of the great things about open 3D printing is that combos and mashups are quite common, and since we’ve first jammed a piece of chocolate into a hunk of peanut butter, sometimes things just go better together.

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Radio Times

Radio

This post from NPR, Radio: The Port In The Storm, got me thinking about radio, and while I’m pretty well entrenched in the world of podcasts and my own music library, I do still love radio, and the interesting thing is, I think we’ve increased the amount of radio we listen to in our household this year.

Part of the rise of radio in our house might be due our dumping cable TV. We didn’t completely dump TV, as we still get the local channels, but it’s not that 500 channels (and nothing to watch) world we’re used to. We still use Netflix and Amazon, and we still record a few shows using an EyeTV Hybrid, but overall, our TV consumption is down, and our radio listening is up.

It’s mostly Radio Milwaukee and NPR, and the quality of both of those tends to outdo the TV we’d usually watch. It was just too easy to flip on the TV and let it play whatever… even with a laptop out and browsing/working, vapid television in the background isn’t that useful, and good radio is a better alternative.

I’d be interested to know if others who “cut the cord” ended up just replacing all their TV watching with online video alternatives, or if radio is taking some of their attention.

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Processing PhotoBooth v2

Simple Photobooth

If you saw my old post about a simplistic photo booth using Processing, you probably loved it so much that you used it, and you probably loved using Processing so much that you used that too, and you even installed the betas of Processing 2.0, and then you cursed out loud as the code no longer worked.

Calm down, sport… we’re here to help.

While not final yet, Processing 2.0 has a lot of changes compared to Processing 1.5.x, and those of us who dabble in writing sketches can expect some breakage, but we can also attempt some fixage.

Here’s what I’ve got now… which works for me! (YMMV) 

/**
 * PhotoBoothV2.pde
 */
 
import processing.video.*;

// resolution: 800x600 - change it if you want
int cols = 800;
int rows = 600; 

Capture cam;

int mainwidth  = cols;
int mainheight = rows;

void setup() {
  frameRate(30);
  size(mainwidth, mainheight, JAVA2D);
  colorMode(RGB);
  cam = new Capture(this, cols, rows); 
  cam.start(); 
  noSmooth();
  background(0);
}

void draw() {
  if (cam.available()) {
    cam.read();
    image(cam, 0, 0);
  }
} 

void keyPressed() {
    if (key == ' ') {  // space bar
       saveFrame("picture-####.jpg");
    }
}

Boom! You got a simplistic photo booth application. Congratulate yourself by purchasing this lovely button for it. (Or get this “bare” button and build your own damn case.)

Also, special thanks to Evil Mad Scientist for releasing their Atkinson Dithering sketch, which reminded me I had to fix my Processing code, and provided some hints on what needed updating.