Archives/Shop 1.0/Make Shop
From Makers Local 256
Contents
[hide]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.
Status
Working, still need a space.
Outline
- Start out small, like a hobby club, and build up a baseline of projects to work on.
- Determine the resources that are needed to complete these projects.
- Develop a means of keeping track of progress for each project.
- Work on the projects.
- ?
- Profit!
- No seriously though, just work on the projects.
- Eventually expand out into a larger area and attempt to attract more people.
Future Plans
- Become non-profit organization and find projects that are a good source of income to put back into the organization.
- Tool upkeep.
- Finding a larger place.
- Net acccess.
- Once a more permanent place has been found, provide access to all members via rfids.
- Building access could then be all hours.
- Everyone would be a keyholder and responsible for building security.
- 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.
- Lockers would be provided to members to have a secure place in shop to keep items.
- Open house nights would be setup to bring in possible new members.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Attendees:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- Attendees:
- 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.
- 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
- Attendees:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 03/24/07: Met at Strages's apartment. Took apart a few pdas in order to further progress on the wall widgets and discover at least one of the three wouldn't work due to it being a TFT instead of an LCD. There was discussion over the redesign of the photobooth, and the drive used in the tablet was cloned for safe keeping. Nykodemus volunteered to look over the paperwork for becoming a non-profit. Voting on a name will begin on Monday 04/01/2007.
- 04/07/07: Met at the.narro.ws. Gregabyte completed his Laptop IAXy project. We got the touchscreen working on the Ramline tablet in order to begin working on Gregabyte's Linux touchscreen testbed. Brimstone worked on Kraken some more and showed off the new build. Re revealed his plans for making a Bawls shake light. We also speced out pricing on thick acrylic sheets for used with the Multitouch screen project.
- 04/27/07: Met at the.narro.ws. Settled on Makers Local 256 for the group name. Korc setup a group named this on Instructables for future use. We're going to start making instructables for various projects for use in contests and generally getting our name out there. We can also now get a domain for setting up a public face for the group.
- 05/05/07: Met at strages's apartment. Discussed running linux in the Photobooth Mark II and Brimstone suggested we use mencoder to handle live video and do screen grabs for the photostrips. Linux allows us a lot more flexibility and remote access. Finally found a PDA with an actual LCD instead of a TFT for use with the wall widgets project.
- 05/19/07: Met at Bandito Burrito for lunch then continued at strages's apartment. Brimstone managed to get the OpenWRT(or equivalent) modular usage working and Opticron managed to make some decent progress on the gumstix for his Wificopter.
- 05/25/07: Met at Moe's for lunch then continued at strages's apartment. Opticron made more progress on the gumstix for his Wificopter. Nykodemus and Strages discussed upcoming talks, and projects that may be done in time for Phreaknic 11.
- 06/02/07: Met at the.narro.ws. Managed to get Linux installed on the ramline 510 that's in the Photobooth with the touch screen and webcam working. All that's left to do now is rework the scripting, ssh, and video streaming. Full desktop video playback from the cam is now working, a major improvement over the old windows setup. Also automatic upload to Flickr should work now. Opticron bought a wiimote to test out and eventually use with his Wificopter project.
- 06/09/07: Met at strages's apartment. No real highlights other than Brimstone showing off new means of lowjacking things.
- 06/23/07: Met at the.narro.ws. Lots of discussion about the latest Make Shop location candidate and how we're actually going to go about doing it. Consensus seems to be to run the CoLo etc at the location and run the Makers Local 256 group as a private club. Any money making projects either fall under services/products provided by the CoLo or become separate business ventures themselves.
- 06/30/07: Met at Steak and Shake for lunch then continued on to the.narro.ws. Discussed a possible business partnership with the gentleman that expressed interest in providing us space earlier in the week. Tore apart the rack for preparation of being used for a colo.
- 07/07/07: Met at Bandito Burrito for lunch then continued on to the.narro.ws. Made a fair amount of progress on getting the Linux version of the Photobooth working. Tanstaafl made more aluminum powder and iron oxide for Thermite Production. He also tried an experiment with electroplating magnesium to aluminum as an igniter, but wasn't very successful.
- 07/16/07: Met at Rosies for lunch then continued on to the.narro.ws. Thermite Production continues. Nykodemus worked on a nontraditional piano layout some more as well as began work on an interactive to-do list made in smalltalk. Work continued on getting the multicast video stuff working on the Photobooth tablet, but to no avail. The problem seems to lie with mplayer just not liking multicast.
- 07/28/07: Met at Casa Blanca for lunch then continued on to the.narro.ws. Tanstaafl and Gregabyte left to retrieve supplies for the WiFi Filching project. Opticron left to learn about RFIDs from the IEEE group and will return later.
- 08/04/07: Met at Moe's for lunch and continued on to strages' apartment. Tanstaafl and Strages bought parts for building some beam bots. Nykodemus and Gregabyte worked on a GUI for the Asterisk call manager in smalltalk. Brimstone and Jimshoe worked on WEP cracking on their Macs. Opticron fixed the Photobooth stuff on the new Linux platform.
- 08/13/07: Met at Jamo's for lunch and continued on to Korc's house. Nykodemus worked on his keyboard idea some more. Strages made a little more progress on the Photobooth Mark II but not much. There was minor discussion of BEAMbot design. We called about another possible location for a Make Shop, they wanted $700-$750 a month for it.
- 08/25/07: Met at Bandito Burrito for lunch and continued on to the.narro.ws. Supplies for building a Marx generator were gathered and purchased by Tanstaafl who then began the construction of the capacitor bank. Opticron purchased a replacement Ramline 510 tablet for the Photobooth, since the old one died the week before, and got Linux and the photobooth script loaded on it. Photobooth is now operational again. Everyone contributed in a discussion of Ackis 2.0 and what could be done with it.
- 09/01/07: Met at Moe's for lunch and continued on to the.narro.ws. Tanstaafl tested his capacitor bank which didn't exactly work as planned sadly. Gregabyte did some more tests concerning his Weeble Antenna project and bought some of the materials he needed in order to start his Hydroponic Gardening project. Strages did more research concerning his Multitouch screen project and purchased a better solar cell for BEAMbots.
- 09/08/07: Met at McAlister's for lunch and continued on to the.narro.ws. Tanstaafl worked on salvaging components from a scrapped mother board. Parts were placed in a craft box newly purchased for that express purpose. Gregabyte worked on the newest evolution of his Hydroponic Gardening project. Daylon worked on modding his Gamecube and showed off a super bright LED he bought made by Cree.
