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Maker Faire “Space Invader” Shirt

mfmke-si-art

While taking a break from reading through all the applications for Maker Faire Milwaukee I had an idea for some art we could use this year. It ended up becoming shirt art after I shared it with the other event producers.

The art consists of an 8×8 grid with 64 items, yes, as always, I try to make these numbers mean something. 8 bit, 64 bit, you get the idea… The color pallet comes from what we used previously for our kaleidoscope design.

The most difficult part was the typeface. I tried many existing fonts but nothing was working. Makey the Robot is (almost) square, so I needed the letters M, K, and E to be square. Stretching existing fonts did not work, so I ended up creating my own type.

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Once I had the M, the E was easy. I just rotated it 90 degrees! The K was a bit more difficult, but the line width matches the parts of the M and E, and I then just aimed for the corners to make them end in 45 degree angles so it would all look even. It’s probably the best “MKE” I’ve ever designed.

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Here’s a terrible photo of the shirt. We still have some left, so if you want one, let me know, and I’ll get you hooked up for a nice price! (The original design was completely square and did not have the long “Maker Faire Milwaukee” logo on the bottom, but Stacie reminded me we should really add that.)

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Maker Faire Miami

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I was fortunate enough to be invited to Maker Faire Miami by Mario the Maker, who I’ve followed online for quite a while, and had met previously at Maker Faire Orlando.

I’ll admit, when he invited me, and told me it was at Miami Dade College (which I had been to before) I assumed it would be indoors. When he told me it was 84 degrees there a few weeks before the Faire, I hoped it would be indoors. I got there and found out it was all outdoors. When people asked me how Miami was, I say “Hot!” (I’m from the Midwest, I don’t handle heat well.)

miami-ppprs

Besides that darn heat, Maker Faire Miami was pretty awesome. Every Faire in every city has a different flavor, and while I know a little about the Maker community in Miami, it was great to see more of it. Most of my time there was spent assisting where I could, and a lot of that involved helping with the Power Racing Series.

This was the first year for Power Racing in Miami, and the Orlando Crew pretty much took care of everything. We had a few issues with water, and power, and magic smoke, but in the end things worked out pretty good, especially for a first attempt.

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Orlando (well, MakerFX Makerspace) also brought along their “Print a Shirt” station, where you can pay $5 to screen print your own t-shirt. (Or $10 if you buy one already printed.) Now that’s how you incentivize making!

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As usual, Florida favorites included Hedgeclipper and the work from Moonlighter Makerspace. They had a giant tent filled with awesome things.

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One of the more interesting exhibits I came across was this little CNC lathe made for engraving drumsticks. I was interested in it because it looked like the little CNC machine I built from a kit a few years ago. Indeed, I talked to the Maker and that’s what it was, a heavily modified version of the same kit. We talked a bit about the Grbl firmware and I gave him a few tips on saving the settings. (Check out a video of it in action.)

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I met a lot of great people in Miami. I talked with John Edgar Park and I think we bonded a little over our love of documenting and sharing work. I met Abby K. (VEX iCutie) who was super enthusiastic about what she made, and spent time explaining her robot to me. I also got to meet Esteffanie (YouTube, Instagram) who gave an inspiring talk about making and failing, and continuing to try new things.

Overall, Maker Faire Miami was a great event, and I’m really glad I got to be involved with it. If you’re in the Miami area, check it out next year, as I’m sure it will only get better with age!

Want more photos? There’s a bunch in my Maker Faire Miami album.

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Designing a Giant LED Cube

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This year my “big” project for Maker Faire Milwaukee was a Giant LED Cube. In this post I’ll talk about designing it, and in a follow up post I’ll talk about building it.

I should mention that the idea for this started maybe three years ago. I think it was during a meeting for Maker Faire at Milwaukee Makerspace and I tossed out the idea of building a giant light sculpture using light bulbs. Lance and Chris talked about it a bit and Tom started looking up parts on Alibaba. Nothing came of it that year, and I sort of forgot about it for a while. In fact, I really didn’t think about it again until after we completed the DecaLight last year. Once the two dimensional relay controlled light bulb thing was done I thought going three dimensional would be a good idea.

I modeled the cube in OpenSCAD, and then animated it just for fun. I figured out how many pieces of each PVC joint I would need, and while I originally thought a 20′ cube would be a good idea, after some initial tests (and the unavailability of 10′ PVC pipe) I ended up going with a 10′ cube so the 5′ PVC pipe I could get would work.

I picked up Jordan Bunker’s book PVC and Pipe Engineer: Put Together Cool, Easy, Maker-Friendly Stuff last year and then ended up learning about FORMUFIT which allows you to build furniture using PVC pipe. I had a plan!

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Here’s the first sketch of the Giant LED Cube. By now I had decided that I would use LED light bulbs and standard household lamp sockets. The nice thing about using such common parts is that they are very cheap. I found these Black Bakelite Fixture Socket with Terminals and ordered some so I could test the fit. It was close enough that it would work, and I just needed to make a small adapter. Well, at least 27 small adapters.

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I designed and 3D printed over 30 of these using clear ABS, which is remarkably close to being white, and since you wouldn’t really see them, I was fine with the close match. I cranked these out so I’d be ready when they were needed. Like many parts of this project, they are just press fit into place. The entire thing was designed to be easily assembled and disassembled for making transport and storage an simple affair.

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I had the basic design of the cube figured out, so I decided to work on the controller. Since we’d have 27 LED light bulbs I decided to use an Arduino Mega, which had plenty of I/O pins, along with two 16 channel relay boards. LED light bulbs are pretty lower power (compared to incandescent bulbs, anyway) so even though they’re 110 volts AC, 27 bulbs all on at the same time probably pulled less than 6 amps.

The image above represents my first attempt at layout out the controller, which I eventually abandoned. The screw terminals ended up not being a good idea. I would be pretty busy running Maker Faire so I assumed that I could find helpers able to strip wire, put them into the screw terminals, and get it all right. After attempting this myself on a small scale I decided that it needed to be even simpler, and clear enough that almost anyone could do the setup. So I scrapped the screw terminals. Around this time I also decided that running all of the power cords inside the PVC was going to be tedious and difficult, so with the decision to just run the cords on the outside (at least for this installation) I decided to just use standard household plugs. This would allow nearly anyone to just match up some numbers and plug things in. Simple wins!

The design process for the Giant LED Cube wasn’t too difficult. Doing this like this (designing, specifying parts, building, etc.) is pretty much my day job. The wiring was definitely tedious, and required at least one unexpected hour-long troubleshooting session due to a bad connection. I had a lot of help with the wiring of the lights from Adrian, and a lot of help with initial assembly from Becky. Without their help things would have taken me a lot longer. (Thank You!)

I think I’ve spewed enough about this project for one post (which I wanted to get out last month!) so I’ll end it here and get working on Part II ASAP.

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The May Update

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Yes, I know it’s July, but it’s time for the May update because summer is so busy that’s just how it works.

In May I went to the Madison Mini Maker Faire and we ran out Design & Build Derby (formerly known as “Nerdy Derby”) and kids and adults had fun. It was not as busy as previous years, which was good, because the number of volunteers was down, but as always, Adrian from Milwaukee Makerspace did an amazing job! If you missed it, check it out at Maker Faire Milwaukee.

Right after Madison it was time for Maker Faire Bay Area. I was able to join the Power Racing Series gang and assist with running the races. I think I can now say that straw bales may be worse than tires. The straw is very irritating. The race was fun, and I got to see a good amount of the Faire (but not everything, I mean, there’s a lot to see!) I also got to attend the Bring a Hack event, and if you don’t already know that Drew is awesome, you should know that now.

Also in May, I went to an event that shared the findings from the State of Urban Manufacturing Report. It was interesting how it relates to the “Maker Economy” and individuals and small businesses making and selling products.

I also went to the Meet the Meetups and it was interesting but difficult due to the crowded venue. I still got to see some old friends and talk to a few people about the Milwaukee tech scene, so that was good. Hopefully it can be a bit more spacious next time. We offered to do another Meet the Meetups at Maker Faire Milwaukee, but I don’t think there is enough interest in it…

I also did a tour of Milwaukee Blacksmith with BLK SHP Milwaukee. Ken is a great speaker as well as a great blacksmith, and it was cool to see what he’s built over the years for his family and the community. If you haven’t checked them out yet, add it to your list.

Besides all that I worked on a lot of components for a new museum exhibit, 3D printed a lot of parts for a giant sculpture, and a few other things, but we’ll cover that in future posts… As always, if you want to see a glimpse of things I’m working on, check out Instagram.

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The NoiseMakers (Part XI)

NoiseMaker XI

This is (almost) the last noisemaker. There’s been a whole series, and they were all at Maker Faire Milwaukee. But don’t worry, if you missed them in person you can read all about them…

This one started out (somewhat) as a joke. While at Milwaukee Makerspace trying to convince other members to join me on this noisemaking quest I found this old radio on the Hack Rack and said “Look! Here’s a noisemaker! All we have to do is connect up a button for power. It’s that easy!” And while I did convince Maks and Dustin to make some noise(makers) others were not as easily swayed.

NoiseMaker XI

Not being one to not follow up on my own stupid idea, I took the radio, confirmed it worked, and then took it home to connect up a button and a power supply. I ended up just using alligator clips and didn’t even bother soldering anything in place. I did however use a generous amount of tape. (This was definitely the shortest/fastest build of all of the devices.)

NoiseMaker XI

As for the button, I already had that handy and mounted, because it was the old button for our garage door. (I replaced it with this one.) Since the old garage door button was something I hacked together very quickly one morning when the original garage door button broke, I thought it an appropriate use.

NoiseMaker XI

This one definitely has an aesthetic different than the other noisemakers, and that’s a good thing. If anything, I wish I had varied things a bit more throughout the process.

Looking back on the whole thing, creating nearly a dozen different noisemaking devices was a lot of fun. None of them were too involved so I could be sure I’d get each one done and move on to the next, and when things got a little more complex or time consuming than it should have, I offset it by working on multiple devices at a time. Some makers I know suggest this is the secret—having multiple projects at once so you can switch between them when you get stuck/bored with the one you are currently working on. Of course the issue with that is to not abandon projects completely, and come back to them in a reasonable amount of time. (Yes, I may be guilty of 4+ years of planning and/or working on a project that has seen very little progress. I ain’t proud!) If you’re interested in making your own noisemakers, let me know, and I’ll do what I can. The world needs more noise!

This is just one post in a series about noisemakers. Check out the other posts as well: