Tag: makerfairemke

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Museums and Making and Work (and Fun!)

BBCM

Since the semester wrapped up at UWM and left me with a summer of no work or classes, I thought it best to get a job and return to the “normal” world of work. (I know, supposedly academics take summers off and don’t do anything. Kidding!)

I’ve accepted a position as “Technology Project Manager” at the Betty Brinn Children’s Museum. I’ll be working on developing a number of exhibits as well as a few other things, not the least of which is helping plan Maker Faire Milwaukee coming up on September 26th & 27th, 2015. This is pretty darn exciting for me. I attended my first Maker Faire just a few years ago and now I’m helping organize the largest Free Featured Maker Faire in the world. I’m passionate about people showing off the amazing things they create, so helping make that possible is pretty amazing. (Also, I’m now dealing with some of the folks I’ve known for years at Make in a day-to-day capacity. Neat!)

MakeShift MKE

I’m also helping out with things like MakeShift MKE, which is an adults-only event we have at the museum once a month which involves things like fire, drinking, making, and hacking. This takes place in BAM Space the “Be A Maker” Space within the museum. (Web site coming soon!) It’s basically a mini-makerspace that does programming for kids, but also caters to adults and families. It’s still in development, but it’s going to be awesome.

Oh, and because I never finished the multiple posts I started writing, this all came about due to some work I did with the museum last fall to develop a part of their Word Headquarters exhibit. At some point I will post more about that. I promise. Also, I’m working with Arduinos and Raspberry Pis and doing all sorts of prototyping, at work, and they pay me. I think. (I’ll find out next week. Kidding again!)

Basically, it’s gonna be a great summer!

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Laser Maze 2015

Laser Maze - Photo by Eric Schneeweis

You may remember the Laser Maze from Milwaukee MakerFest in 2013, or maybe you experienced it at Maker Faire Milwaukee in 2014. Well, it’s coming back! Somehow I volunteered to design & build the hardware for Laser Maze 2015!

Laser Pointers

Step 1: Acquire lasers.

I’ve got a big pile of laser pointers, so far so good. Now, I should mention I didn’t do the set-up in previous years, and I don’t have much to work from, so I’ll be making a bunch of decisions, and if they are terrible, let me know.

In the coming weeks I’ll be designing a 3D printed mount for the laser pointers. It will hold the front half, so we can unscrew the back half to change batteries without removing the laser from its position. There is a zip tie on the laser that slides and rotates into place to hold the button down. (A simple design, we’re going for simple on this whole thing.)

Scoreboard

The scoreboard is an Adafruit 1.2″ 4-Digit 7-Segment Display. I’ll probably use a Teensy 3.1 as the controller, and there will be a big green start button and a big red stop button. You press start at one end of the maze and the counter begins… and when you get to the end you press stop and you know your time from the scoreboard.

Oh, and the laser pointers… they bounce off some mirrors and hit solar panels connected to the Teensy. When you break the beam the voltage from the panel drops (which is recognized on the Teensy) and you get penalized. We’ll add time to your total as well. So if you’re 10 seconds into it and break a beam, the timer will suddenly display 20 seconds instead of 10 (or whatever, we’ll figure out the math later.)

There should also be a buzzer of some kind, for the start, stop, and breaking of the beam. I’m just using a piezo for prototyping, but we’ll make sure we have something LOUD for the event.

There are some notes about everything on the laser maze wiki page, but I’ll keep documenting here as I go.

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MFMKE MMPIS Countdown

Countdown

So the President (of Milwaukee Makerspace) emails me and says “MMPIS countdown days to Maker Faire… can you make it happen?” Luckily, I can decipher this to mean he’d like to see a countdown screen on the MMPIS. Oh, the MMPIS is the Milwaukee Makerspace Pi-powered Informational System, and whipping up a new screen to do something simple is, well, simple. So I did.

It’s one image, about 20 lines of CSS, 20 lines of HTML, and a few lines of PHP. I hacked together some code, uploaded it, and sent Brant the instructions to load it into the kiosk via Screenly.

So the next time you’re at Milwaukee Makerspace, take a look at the countdown, and then freak out about how little time we have until Maker Faire Milwaukee!