Wednesday January 6 was the first Dorkbot of the second decade of the 21st millennium – it is otherwise abbreviated as the “1g6s-th” Dorkbot. Hosted at the marvelous Location One non-profit space in SoHo.
The man as he is, and the man as he should have been. Douglas Repetto is the founder of Dorkbot and wanted to show me this recent photo of him sporting a ’stache (mid-shower) not too different than the fur on my face right now.
Now for the dorks:
The first presentation was by NYCCNC.com, a milling workshop housed in an Upper East Side apartment! Quite impressive, and the presenter John Saunders had a working sample of this target-practice machine that was fabricated entirely by his milling machine.
Next up Natalie Campbell gave a presentation about SP Weather Station, which is a collaborative project between her and Heidi Neilson; the weather station sits on the rooftop of Flux Factory where I currently maintain long-term Residency. While the weather station’s main medium is digitally-collected data, they then turn that data over to artists who interpret the data visually through printing, book arts, photographs and silkscreens, among other artistic processes.
And the final presentation: co-presented by Victor Adán and Douglas Repetto, they demonstrated an antiquated pen plotter printer and how they’ve managed to continue using these mostly serial-driven devices with modern computers using drivers they compiled at chiplotle.org – now that’s a spicy plotter library! (the ebay screen above was because Douglas was showing his ebay search string to narrow results to find specific pen plotters at bargain basement prices!) The results of their pen plotter printing can be seen on the image at the top. Pretty exciting!
I’m a fan of most-things-map, but this one has me really sad. Final Fantasy XIII has was released in the last weeks of 2009 in Japan, and has already been heavily criticized for its extremely linear playtime and at times lack of actual user-control. Some have described the game like hitting buttons to watch a CG movie. But with regards to the linear comments and critiques, take a look at the following map, which is approximately the first 6 hours of gameplay, and you’ll understand why RPG-fans and non-linear gamers alike are upset, quite upset:
go here, get this, go there, do that, beat that boss, proceed to next room, cross bridge, keep going, don’t turn, just straight. booooooooooooring!
The LEDs4N00Bs workshop was a real success, and thanks everyone who attended, built toy-boxes, and to Julius for giving a really wonderful first workshop at our new space in Long Island City.
I introduced the workshop and then Julius gave a 30-odd minute presentation about his art, and a little history and science of LEDs. We followed with the art/toy making session, which lasted for around 1.5 hours!
We weren’t able to acquire some .5W solar panels like in the image above, so we were relegated to 9V batteries which can be easily replaced, and combined with a switch are able to extend the longevity of both the battery and the LEDs. Our kits required: 9V battery, a pre-fabricated clip to draw power from the battery, a switch, LED and a resistor. From this people made some pretty interesting toys!
Visitors to Flux Factory were greeted by an evil flamingo! A working example of some found objects, scrap wood and simple LED hacking.
The lecture and presentation, Julius talking about his art.
A small sample of a complete circuit powered by a AA battery.
Then the hacking begins! Bit boxes, batteries, LEDs, soldering station!
Blue ‘bots! I like the switch hack: a hole drilled into the case so no need to open/close the lid.
Another hack in the works, a modded Obama chia-pet!
If only turning on democracy was this easy!
The circuit: you can see the negative wire (red) goes to the right eye, and the wire from the switch continues to the left eye and sequences like an eyeglass bridge.
And one of my favorite aspects of any workshop or classroom environment, the mess! The aftermath is always chaotic, but evidences the activity of life:
