Tag Archive for: maker

Think Club 0 – Maker Week, day 3

A quiet day today, with family commitments reducing the turn-out. Nevertheless, Joe’s particularly proud of getting the colour-changing lamps to work. My still photo above really doesn’t do them justice.

Pendulum frame

We’ve assembled the two ends of the pendulum support structure. Look at the size of that thing!

turntable

We now have a working turntable design which is slow enough to look good. It’s a bit bodged but works surprisingly well, particularly since it relies on a chopstick as a key component. I’m unreasonably delighted by that.

Meanwhile, Chris was immersed in Sonic Pi, the Scalextric was briefly up-and-running, and Andrew’s done a heap of calculations around the pendulums, working out what notes we should go for and hacking my simulation code so we’ve had a bit of a listen. It’s much less irritating than it was.

Oh, and we’ve ordered another round of electronic bits, and most importantly restocked the biscuit supplies. With exciting new varieties, no less.

So tomorrow we’ve mass-production of turntables to arrange, lights to finish assembling, colour-changing light circuits to solder up, and pendulum bracing to sort. We’re hoping the Think Clubbers come back after their day off. Otherwise, a busy day will become a hectic day.

Think Club 0 – Maker Week, day 2

A day of concentration, quiet focus, and trying to work out whether there’s any limit to Lauren’s new-found obsession with Sonic Pi. Turns out: nope, five hours straight wasn’t nearly enough time to exhaust her fascination.

Today was a bit of a skills day. Soldering (note to self: next time, buy the kits with the pre-programmed PIC controllers. Sorry, everyone), Arduino stuff, Sonic Pi… and a little wiring up of lights for the light wall. I’m delighted to report that Think Club has finally earned the ‘Let the blue smoke out of some electronics’ achievement, though since the LED in question is still sort-of working we’re not sure it counts.

Today’s game of choice: Snake Oil. Unanimous vote to play it again at the end of the day rather than Spaceteam, so we’ve clearly some work to do in choosing tomorrow’s game.

Speaking of tomorrow: pendulum raising, turntable construction, and possibly a few more boxes to cut.

Think Club 0 – Maker Week, day 1

The intrepid members of Think Club 0 – our trial of a maker club – today began preparations for Maker Faire UK in a couple of weekends’ time. We’ve several projects to show, including a couple of physics/arts installation pieces. I’ve previously posted about early efforts with the pendulum wave, and we’ll come back to that later in the week. Today, however, was all about cardboard. Well, cardboard, and dismembering miniature tripods.

It’ll all make sense as we make more progress, but today looked like this:

Great work from everyone today. We’ll show you progress through the week, as everything starts to take shape. We may even play more Spaceteam.

Tag Archive for: maker

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