Workshop

[Edward Watson]

Hey all - just off the back of Toms messsage:

Our "Hacky-sack: MakeItGlo" workshop project is fastly getting off the ground i.e. we have most the kit in stock, prototypes have existed and we are looking at fabrication. The below is subject to review but should give you my perspective at least.

For those that don't know the details, the so-called Hacky-sack workshop is centred around building a DIY RGB lamp called the 'MakeItGlo". It's an array of independently controllable RGB LEDs linearly-bused and attached to an insulated wire coat-hanger shaped with a circular foot so as to form a a freestanding tower. The LED pixels are positioned along the length of the tower, connected with ribbon cable, lit via either a USB charger or 9V battery, and controlled via a Digispark. The tower is then bent to (any) shape and covered with grease-proof paper cutouts to defuse the light as required (Don't worry, shots of the prototype coming soon). 

The workshop is the product of a bunch of ideas donated/copied from a bunch of people so in that spirit, I am putting out a call for more ideas and resources to the space. See below:

1) We need a source of insulated wire coat-hangers (I like the white ones) - so anything people can come up with would be great.

2) We seen a few volunteer solderers to help make our RGB pixels from the components we've ordered in, in addition to tinning the interconnects.

3) We also need to get some ideas on the poly-plastic clip designs that hold the pixels to the tower. It needs to be positionable and use as little  polyplastic as possible.  

4) Ideas (useful and comical) and hands-on for coding the RGB light sequences would also be great (e.g. candle, cylon, disco, police, seasonal-disaffective etc). After a number of prototypes are made I will be experimenting with a *very* cheap proximity sensor as a user input to select though them.

5) I'll be making posters, but extra help would also be good here too.

Internal space prizes for contributing to the project include (subject to availability) getting your very own Hackerdeen Keyring-a-ma-jig - useful for emergency fabrication such as tweesers, microphone shirt clips (in my case) etc. As a bonus, it also takes on a cool marbled effect colouring from whatever material your back pocket liner is made from, apparently. 

If you are interested, don't just email in but vote with your feet - come along to the space during our next few meetups and muck in ;)

Cheers,

Ed