Brilliantly inventive. See if you can work out how all the different mechanisms work – there are some amazing and subtle ideas in here. Great stuff.
Tip of the hat to Joe for spotting this as it hit Digg this afternoon.
Two outstanding computing events are coming to Newcastle in the next few weeks:
The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s flagship teacher training experience, Picademy is a two-day extravaganza of all things “Pi in the classroom”. There doesn’t seem to be a course outline for what’s covered, but the events are very well-regarded by previous attendees.
The course is free, and being held on various dates at Google Digital Garage, Newcastle City Library. For more information and to apply for a place, see the Raspberry Pi website.
Apply very soon – the first dates are almost upon us!
Micro:Bit boards are being distributed (free of charge) to every year 7 student in the country, assuming your school signed up to the scheme. The school also receives a class set of boards, a few for teachers, and a few spare units for breakages.
There’s such a wealth of stuff around Micro:Bit it can be hard to know where to start. Most of the teacher training events have passed, but there’s a teacher / student / family drop-in style workshop event right here at Northumbria University on Saturday 25th June. So if you have a Micro:Bit and want some ideas or help, or if you’re trying to work out what to do when yours arrives, or if you’re plain curious – this could be your chance.
Free, but registration required (through the link above)
At Maker Faire UK last year Think Physics had two stands; a wall of light boxes, and a magnificent harmonic pendulum display which, slightly embarrassingly, I still haven’t written up. Hoping to avoid a similar mistake this time around, I should introduce you to this year’s new installation: the Technology Wishing Well.
Er… yeah, that’s a bit of a mess. What you’re looking at is a corner of my desk, on which you can see the black disc of a small turntable. That’s part of the light box installation, repurposed shamelessly (hey, I’m allowed to steal from myself, right?). On the turntable are a couple of LED lights. The green one is pointing upwards, the red one fell over and is pointed off to one side.
Left of frame is a retort stand, holding a Raspberry Pi (Pi 3! Woohoo!) and a PiCamera, which as far as I can tell is a mobile phone camera module on the end of a stubby little cable. The Pi is driving the big monitor upper right, and the window in the top corner is showing… what, exactly?
OK, so I’ve written a little Python code which does the following:
So, as the turntable turns the green light smears into a ring, and the fallen-over red light smears into a… weird red blobby donut thing. My python code is appallingly slow, but conveniently the result is mesmerising to watch as it gradually builds up. Which is a relief, because we’ve committed to building this thing and there’s no turning back now.
The plan is to build a big one of these, so the current turntables can sit on the big turntable, and then we’ve made a giant light-powered video Spirograph-like-thing. We’re also planning to build little gizmos which move lights around, or change their colour over time, or … well, you’ll have to wait and see. You’ll also be able to make your own lights and toss them onto the turntable disc to add to the artwork as it develops, which is where the whole ‘wishing well’ idea comes in.
There’s lots to do before Maker Faire, but right now I’m just excited (and a little relieved) to see something on a screen rather than in my imagination. This moment’s been a long time coming.
The header image shows the first run of the software – here’s detail of the second, just before the Pi crashed hard. Umm… I should probably look into what caused that.
My desk, earlier this week.
All is now revealed: I was prepping for a new workshop, delivered for the first time this morning to the poor unsuspecting members of our Autumn 2015 cohort for the Royal Institution Engineering Masterclass scheme. This was their sixth and last session, and we wanted to leave them with something creative, challenging, and just a little ridiculous.
There are lots of ‘chain reaction’ type workshops around, and while they’re a heap of fun they tend to go big on the trial-and-error aspect of engineering. I wanted something just a little more thoughtful that brought in a wider range of elements. So the plan was hatched for each stage of the machine to weave in and out between the physical domain and the electronic.
That is: the connections between stages of the chain reaction wouldn’t all be mechanical. So we had a wide range of sensors, some Arduino code to handle those inputs, and a few different types of servos, relays and motors to transfer the electronic processing back into the mechanical realm.
It was a lot of try to pack into a 2½ hour workshop, but it almost worked. It helps that this bunch of Masterclass students are smart, capable and inventive, and they worked really hard to make something out of the session. We didn’t get a sustained chain of machines going, but here’s what they did, and what it all looked like:
Well done, everyone. I thoroughly enjoyed working with you, and you should be properly proud of your inventiveness and ingenuity.
Some of you were asking about the Arduino kits we use: I recommend Oomlout’s ARDX kits. There are other starter kits out there, often with glossier booklets to accompany them, but I’ve found Oomlout’s documentation to be better-written than most, and the range of components is good. They’re also one of the cheaper starter kits. You can buy directly from Oomlout (which is a lovely chap called Aaron who’s usually around at Maker Faire UK) or via Amazon. Other useful suppliers include Pimoroni and Kitronik.
The Arduino ecosystem is vast but fairly accessible, and the suppliers above have a huge range of breakout boards, add-on ‘shields’, sensor inputs, servos, and so on. The hardest part is starting to think of projects to apply all your new tools to – which is precisely why I like things like chain reaction machines or playing musical instruments. There are lots of books of projects like plant waterers or burglar alarms, but straight-up playing with this stuff gives you an excellent idea of the range of problems to which you might apply it all. In the end, I think guilt-free playing is the most effective route to learning about electronics and micro controllers, at least for these initial steps. Later on… well hey, people do degrees and apprenticeships and make careers in this stuff. But start with something you find amusing.
I’ll be making quite a few changes to the Chain Reaction workshop before I run it again. But I will run it again. Thanks again all!
Update Monday 23rd – the lovely folks at Cambridge Science Centre have this morning tweeted a link to this video. Wow.
I may be a little obsessed with DIY robots. We’re gradually building up a robot menagerie in the Think Physics office, and I’m planning a comparative review of some of the available kits and plans. But that’s not ready yet, and in the meantime you may like to know about this:
I met Matt and Dan at BETT at the beginning of the year, where they had a tiny stand showcasing early prototypes of their Ohbot robotic head. Think Physics bought a couple – we were showcasing one of them at the Juice Festival last week, and you’ll see them around at more of our events over the coming months. I continue to be impressed by them, and the software’s particularly good. It’s Windows-only, but adopts a Scratch-like block programming system which is both straightforward and quite flexible.
Right now, the guys are back on Kickstarter with a more developed, easier-to-build and more expressive version of Ohbot. It’s turning even more into a robot puppet, and once they get over the injection moulding hurdle it should be considerably cheaper than the previous short-run laser cut prototypes.
Ohbot’s interesting because while it is a robotics and programming project, it’s also about self-expression, dialogue, emotion, and our responses to technology. I very much like the pure robotics approach of miniature robotic arm MeArm, and the accessible turtle-graphics programming focus of Mirobot, but Ohbot is a fascinating addition to the mix. For Think Physics’ purposes, I like it because it’s clearly using the same palette of components and techniques as our other robots, and it’s also doing something rather different. If the Maker movement is about any one thing, that thing has to be “technology put to creative use”, and Ohbot is an excellent invitation to think beyond Arduino coding and wiring components together, and to really explore how we want our technology to work for us.
The Ohbot2 Kickstarter closes on Sunday morning (!), and as I write this is tantalisingly close to success. If you can help it reach its target, do pledge for one of the rewards.
Update: Success!
The Ohbot2 Kickstarter was successful on Sunday, so the team are gearing up for full-pelt production in time for Christmas. Congratulations, guys!
The Centre for Life’s forthcoming live science show In a Spin is being produced in collaboration with Think Physics. Today, therefore, has involved much sketching, planning and calculating, as Joe and Duncan from Life build props and set-pieces for the show.
Don’t be fooled by the cobbled-together appearance of the strip of lightbulbs above. Oh, no. That is a very rough-around-the-edges prototype. What it shows, however, is that we’ve done our sums more-or-less correctly, and we can indeed switch a bunch of lamps with a controller and a relay without blowing anything up unintentionally. Which would have been embarrassing.
Tomorrow, Joe’s world will revolve around a pile of laser-cut arrows, and new intern Callum will hopefully show us how to draw up a PCB which we can get fabricated by Northumbria’s magnificent milling machine.
I’d say ‘watch this space,’ but really, don’t: watch the show at the Centre for Life, from 16th June.
Think Physics, and Think Club members, had a great time at Maker Faire UK this weekend. As you may have seen from our blog, we’ve been creating and making things for Maker Faire for a few weeks.
Here are some of the creations from our wall of light boxes. There was an ever-changing parade of light sculptures on the wall, although some boxes lasted a little longer than others.
If you came along, can you spot your creation?
Maker Week may be over, but there’s plenty of making still to be done. You’ll notice from the picture above that I’ve been hacking away at the turntables again. Meanwhile, Joe now has a refined version of our LED lamps sorted out. It’s pretty neat, and bright enough, but we’ve counted up and realised we’ve the means to make a lot more lamps. Tomorrow is likely to see some production-line soldering.
The biggest challenge of the day, however, has been the pendulum:
Joe is right to look pensive. We wired things up, swung a kettle, heard chime roughly when we’d expect them – then, just as we started to celebrate, we noticed that the chimes were, in fact, coming entirely at random. Drat.
We scratched our heads, rewired, tried again. It was worse.
We scowled at it, tried something else. That didn’t work either.
Eventually… we ate some of the biscuits. Subsequently, we think we have a solution. It’s a bit touch-and-go, but close enough that we reckon we can afford to sleep tonight. We’ll pick up the pieces in the morning and see if our current thinking is correct.
>ulp<
Biscuits.
We forgot the biscuits.
Whilst you’re all pondering how that could possibly happen – and today, being the end of maker week, I had some really good biscuits, let me tell you – here’s what we did:
Above, the Think Club crew beavering away. I have absolutely rubbish photos of the incredibly intricate soldering work being done to assemble our advanced lights for Light Play. So I won’t show you the photos, but I will tell you about the lights, since they’re works of art. We have Trinkets – which are like half an Arduino, if that means anything to you – powered off a single 1.5V cell via a step-up board that works, as far as we can tell, via unicorns. The Trinket drives a handful of Neopixel RGB LEDs, and a couple of controls allow you to set the colour, or the rate change of colour. It’s all terribly neat and self-contained, and particularly pretty. Pictures next week, promise.
Meanwhile, we assembled the pendulum frame and finally got around to hanging the pendulums. Pendula. Penduloptera. Whatever:
What really surprised us was that our frame was clearly wonky. Like: properly out-of-kilter. With trepidation we offered up a spirit level to the cross-member, and found this:
Huh. Well, that’s fine, then. I guess.
The pendulum array now looks like this:
OK, so there’s one missing from the end, and the lengths aren’t sorted, and we need to tidy lots of things up, and we haven’t got the instrumentation in place, and we have yet to even begin the essential stage which is ‘flashing light optimisation’… but you get the idea. Suddenly, the undergrads revising for exams in the quiet work area just outside Think Lab went from wholly indifferent to ‘ooh, shiny!’ and started talking to us. Which was nice, and gave us a taste of how people might respond when they see this thing in place at the Faire next weekend.
So – huge thanks to the Think Club 0 crowd for their endeavours this week, they’ve done a heap of work and have been delightful company to boot. The bulk of the work for both projects is done; next week Andrew, Joe, Sarah and myself have a bunch of finishing-up to do, then… dun-dun-duuuuurrrrrr: Maker Faire UK. Woohoo!
We also seem to have a gigantic pile of biscuits to scoff. What a disaster that is.
Maker week was busy enough today that I mostly took photos of the empty lab at the end of the day, like the abandoned soldering table at the top of this post. However, here’s Jess in flow making turntables, and Chris in deep code:
Turntables were most definitely on the menu today, with Jess, Lauren and Sarah completing at least a dozen:
We’ve also made significant progress on the rest of the light wall, and there’s been lots of marking up of the pendulum frame. Also, on my way home tonight:
Oh yes. We have pendulum bobs. Though I think the people in the queue behind me at the checkout were a little confused about why I was buying quite so many kettles.
Tomorrow: bringing it all together. >ulp<
Sorry, no posts matched your criteria
