Difference between revisions of "Archives/Shop 1.0/Make Shop"

Revision as of 02:51, 12 March 2007

Overview

A place where people can go and work on assorted projects in an environment that stimulates creativity and motivation. Most people's problem with working on projects is there are too many distractions preventing them to from completing and often even starting on a project. The make shop will provide work area, resources, and knowledge to help people with their projects.

See TechShop[1] for more details.

Outline

1. Start out small, like a hobby club, and build up a baseline of projects to work on.
2. Determine the resources that are needed to complete these projects.
3. Develop a means of keeping track of progress for each project.
4. Work on the projects.
5.  ?
6. Profit!
7. No seriously though, just work on the projects.
8. Eventually expand out into a larger area and attempt to attract more people.

Supplies Obtained

• 2 19" CRT displays
• 2 17" CRT displays
• 1 mini rack
• 2 cork bulletin boards
• 1 large classroom style whiteboard on wheels with scanning arm
• 1 fold up table
• 2 fold up chairs
• 2 deskjet printers
• 1 black and white laserjet
• 2.5' parabolic reflector dish
• 1 frequency generator
• CB radio & antennae
• 1.5' fresnel lens
• 3 pdas, one of which has a usb host port/

Future Plans

1. Become non-profit organization and find projects that are a good source of income to put back into the organization.
   1. Tool upkeep.
   2. Finding a larger place.
   3. Net acccess.
2. Once a more permanent place has been found, provide access to all members via rfids.
   1. Building access could then be all hours.
   2. Everyone would be a keyholder and responsible for building security.
3. Net accessible cameras would be setup inside and outside the shop to provide security and ability to see who's working before you head there.
4. Lockers would be provided to members to have a secure place in shop to keep items.
5. Open house nights would be setup to bring in possible new members.
   1. Volunteers would be available to ask questions and provide physical security for peoples projects etc.

History

• 10/27/06: First "official" meeting. Projects were discussed and some were worked on, most notable of which is the Weeble Antenna. Two prototypes were made out of tennis ball halves with lead ballast and seem to work pretty well.
  • Attendees:
    • Gregabyte, Brimstone, Gomez, Tanstaafl, Nykodemus, and Strages.
  • Pictures
• 11/04/06: Managed to figure out how to make the PDA magic window, which turned out to be a lot easier than originally thought. Brimstone managed to make some progress on his new file server with the help of Tanstaafl. Gomez managed to fix his remote by resoldering a component. The first collaborative edit of the wiki occured in the making of the new Supplies Obtained section above.
  • Attendees:
    • Brimstone, Nykodemus, Tanstaafl, Gomez, Opticron, and Strages.
  • Pictures
• 11/11/06: Met Nykodemus at Stanlieo's Sub Villa around lunch time. He gave me an introduction to smalltalk and we discussed Croquet and it's future. Managed to come up with a couple of new projects while sitting there: CRML and Wall widgets.
  • Attendees:
    • Nykodemus and Strages.
• 11/25/06: Had a small meeting at my apartment. Nothing new really came out of it, just fleshed out some details on the wiki.
  • Attendees:
    • Opticron and Strages.
• 12/02/06: Tanstaafl, Gregabyte, and William took apart a broken convection microwave to salvage parts. Nykodemus, William, and Strages worked on Croquet some more. Then everyone played around with Second Life.
  • Attendees:
    • Nykodemus, Tanstaafl, William, Opticron, Strages, Brimstone, Nick, and Gregabyte
  • Pictures
• 12/15/06: Meeting was held at Strages's apartment this time. Nykodemus showed up around lunch time but most everyone else showed between 7pm and 8pm. There was much discussion about the Strages's Photobooth and many design improvements were made as well as deciding to build not one but two because of the ingenuity of a second design made by my coworker Adrian. There was also a fair amount of discussion on Nykodemus's Arfomyta. The whiteboard was used very constructively. Meetings will most likely be held at this new location until an actual shop is found.
  • Attendees:
    • Nykodemus, Opticron, Strages, Brimstone, Catpants, Korc, and Gregabyte.
  • Pictures
• 12/22/06: Went to Toroid on the corner of Wynn Dr and Bradford Dr to see about renting the second floor for the Make Shop. The owner gave a complete tour and things look very promising. No heating or air, which can be overcome with some ingenuity, but thankfully functional plumbing. LIghts work as well.
  • Attendees:
    • Nykodemus, Strages, and Brimstone(More would have been there, but we didn't want to overwhelm the owner.)
  • Pictures
• 12/29/06: Met at Strages's apartment, mostly discussion of projects in the wiki though a shelf was constructed in the livingroom to hold a projector. Some progress was made in development of Strages's Multitouch screen, as we now know a lot more about touchscreen technology. We figured out how Jeff Han's Multitouch screen works and that existing passive resistance and capacitance type touchscreens already register multiple points. Their software just isn't written to use them all but merely average the locations to place the mouse pointer roughly in the middle. We're no so much concerned about the pointer, so it's just a matter of rewritting the software to handle the multiple points in a more natural manner.
  • Attendees:
    • Opticron, Gregabyte, and Strages.
• 01/06/07: Met at Strages's apartment. Finalized design of the Photobooth and determined the supplies needed, construction will begin and hopefully end on 1/07/06. Things left to work on with it are power consumption, platform, scripting, wifi, and gps.
  • Attendees:
    • Opticron, Gregabyte, Brimstone, Nykodemus, Jim Shoe, Chazz, Tanstaafl, Fred, and Strages.
  • Pictures
• 01/07/07: Met with Fred and went over the design for the Photobooth some more with regards to the dimensions of available space in a car and refined the design to a 3'x2'x2' box that acts as a dolly for transport. Design still expands out to a 6'x5'x3' photobooth that looks like any traditional one.
  • Attendees:
    • Fred and Strages.
• 01/13/07: Met at Strages's apartment. Strages was slightly late to the meeting because he was out purchasing the wood and supplies for the Photobooth. Largely nothing was really worked on aside from upgrading the wiki to allow for image resizing. A couple of new projects were thought up and added to the wiki once upgrades were done.
  • Attendees:
    • Opticron, Gregabyte, Brimstone, Nykodemus, Jim Shoe, Tanstaafl, Gomez, and Strages.
  • Pics
• 01/14/07: Met with Fred and began day 1 of construction of the Photobooth. Had to slim the design to be able to fit in through the backdoor to Strages's car, which overall prevented it from being built in a day.
  • Attendees:
    • Fred and Strages.
  • Pics
• 01/26/07: Met at the.narro.ws, then went to Friday's for dinner. Afterwards we came up with the Hovercraft Robots and made a couple of initial prototypes(chassis only).
  • Attendees:
    • Opticron, Gregabyte, Strages, and Nykodemus.
• 01/27/07: 09:00-12:00 Day 2 of Photobooth construction. Three sided partition that sits atop the seat is done and parts have been purchased to attach the curtains.
  • Attendees:
    • Fred and Strages.
• 01/27/07: 12:00-whenever Met at Strages's apartment. Work on the Hovercraft Robots continued with only minor success, but a lot was learned. A few resources for making a BEAM robot were salvaged from an old hard drive.
  • Attendees:
    • Gregabyte, Strages, Tanstaafl, and Jim Shoe.
• 01/28/07: 12:00-16:00 in 32 degree conditions, Day 3 of Photobooth construction. Everything is built with the exception of 3 more leaf sections going up one side of the camera tower.
  • Attendees:
    • Fred and Strages.
  • Pics
• 02/03/07: Met at the.narro.ws. The smallest hovercraft yet was made and attempts were made into making it into a BEAM robot but fell short due to lack of appropriate parts. Major progress was made toward getting the touchscreen working on the Ramline 510 tablets in Linux. A couple of new projects were thought up over the course of the day and added to the wiki.
  • Attendees:
    • Gregabyte, Strages, Tanstaafl, Brimstone, Nykodemus, and Opticron.
  • Pics
• 02/10/07: Met at Strages's apartment. Continued work on smaller Hovercraft Robots was done with moderate success. An arguably more functional OS was loaded onto the tablet after much trial and error for the Photobooth. A scavenging trip to a thrift store was made with mixed results. Jim Shoe created his first project and added it to the wiki.
  • Attendees:
    • Gregabyte, Strages, Tanstaafl, Brimstone, Opticron, Gomez, and Jim Shoe.
• 02/24/07: Met at Strages's apartment. Worked on the code for the Photobooth some more attempting to iron out some kinks and Strages added three new projects.
  • Attendees:
    • Strages and Opticron.
• 03/10/07: Met at the.narro.ws. Much time was spent going over the haul we got from dumpster diving the night before. Managed to get at least a couple of oscilloscopes working and mounted in the rack. At least one new project came out of the meeting and a lot of discussion over the name of the future shop.
  • Attendees:
    • Gregabyte, Strages, Tanstaafl, Brimstone, Nykodemus, Korc and Opticron.