Hackerspace Happenings

Are you a hackerspace member? We want to know about cool projects you are working on, or have completed, tools you’re using, fun stories about your space and its members, best practices you’d like to share with other spaces, etc. Say you build a new CNC mill–we want to hear about it! Maybe a member is organizing a Mini Maker Faire, has designed a cool robot, or has built something beautiful out of wood. We want to cover all of these things. Send it to johnb@makezine.com or tweet me at @johnbaichtal and I may be able to post it. Also feel free to subscribe to my hackerspaces Twitter list.

Bay Area Consortium of Hackerspaces Established

What a great idea! More hackerspaces should form regional groups like BACH, the Bay Area Consortium of Hackerspaces:

BACH is a loosely-organized association of hackerspaces in the San Francisco Bay Area. BACH strives to be very thin, with almost no over-head. We exist to help member spaces coordinate, communicate, and collaborate. Above all, we support the Bay Area hackerspace community’s existent inter-dependence and resilience. Learn more and find notes on past roundtables at hackerspaces.org.

Our next BACH Roundtable will be in September (date TBD) at LOL [Liberating Ourselves Locally], a people-of-color-led, gender-balanced makerspace in East Oakland. Subscribe to the mailing list and stay tuned for an announcement with date, time, and address!

BACH just sent out their first newsletter and it was pretty amazing, packed with news and projects. If you’re interested in Bay Area hackerspaces, be sure to subscribe at the link above.

BioPrinter Community Project Night at BioCurious

Sunnyvale’s BioCurious hackerspace focuses on biology and developing technology that amateur scientists need. Case in point, their ongoing bioprinter project:

Come join our ongoing BioPrinter community project!

Did you know you can print live cells from an inkjet printer?

Companies like Organovo are developing ways to 3D print human tissues and organs. We are currently working on an implementation of the BioPrinter using the innards of old CDROM Drives and Arduino electronics to print live cells using a reworked inkjet cartridge. So far we have successfully printed some glowing e. coli cells. We are working to improve our printer and experiment with printing yeast and plant cells.

The meetup is every Thursday at BioCurious.

Noisebridge to Host Arse Elektronika

On Oct. 3-6, 2013, San Francisco’s Noisebridge hackerspace will host Arse Elektronika, monochrom’s conference on sex and technology.

Identity, but also identification. Technologies for the exploration of identities. Technologies for the articulation and performance of identities. Technologies for the enforcement of hegemonic identities. Technologies for the verification of identities. For example: What about the vast fencing-off of the old wild internet; the #nym-wars and the push for “real names”?

We typically assume there is ‘something’ that takes and/or performs an identity. What is this entity? Are awareness and consciousness strictly limited to and made sense of in human experience alone? How is identity understood and made sense of in terms of artificial intelligence? What might transhuman, android, or cyborg identities consist of? What does sexual desire mean to a dolphin?

NPR Segment Deatures HacDC’s Summer School

Some good publicity was had by HacDC:

HacDC’s Summer School 2013 was featured a few days ago in a NPR story by Geoff Brumfiel about the upcoming ArduSat launch. ArduSat is an Arduino-enabled satellite that you can buy time on to run your own Arduino-powered extra-terrestrial experiments that make use of the nanosatellite’s “STANDARD sensor package.” Read more about it and listen here (includes workshop photographs by NPR’s Heather Rousseau):

Dallas Makerspace Couple Launches LED Matrix Kickstarter

Congrats to Stephen and Stacy Wylie for meeting the funding goal of their LEDgoes modular LED matrix kickstarter:

All of the commercial systems we saw on the market are locked into proprietary interfaces and/or have only one color, not replaceable, not expandable, limited in communication, and are expensive! The DIY area was not much better as existing systems either cost $45 a character (over twice the retail price we are asking), had a learning curve, limited to one color, not modular, and all of them required expensive external controllers you had to program to get going.

Somerville, MA’s Artisan’s Asylum is offering a Hacker Junk Mosaics event on Aug. 25:

Bring your box of keepsakes, letters, photos and cards you’ve been saving for no real reason and transform them into a decorative project you can display. Apply Melissa’s “Junk Mosaic” process by combining the colors and patterns of 2D materials with the shapes and forms of 3D objects using collage and assemblage. Experiment with design, composition, and dynamics. Bring your own – or work from Melissa’s collections of papers and recycled parts from computers, printers, and other electronics. The only requirement is imagination and creative energy!

Speaking of classes, Artisan’s Asylum has posted their fall class list and the offerings look great!

Starting a Creative Makerspace in Kenya

Alex Odundo is crowdfunding the Victoria Innovation Center, a nascent makerspace in Kenya. His first project? To make the sisal plant economically viable by building machines to process it.

I want to see my people living a life that’s enjoyable, that isn’t suffering. I want to see them getting good food and using their resources productively. I don’t want them to regret where they were born.

That’s why I’m establishing the Victoria Innovation Center in Kisumu, Kenya, to enable innovators, engineers, and designers with good ideas to walk in and get the tools they need to test and produce products. It will also be a place to educate, innovate and develop manufacturing skills. The aim is to increase empowerment, income, and quality of life; once finished, the makerspace will have the modern tools to help efficiently make durable, productive machines.

Bloominglabs Makevention this Weekend

Bloomington, IN’s BloomingLabs will participate in the city’s Makevention to be held this Saturday:

Makevention will be held August 24, 2013, from 10am until 5pm at the Convention Center in Bloomington, Indiana. Local and regional makers of all kinds will be there showing off the things they’ve made, and you should plan now to be a part of it! This will be a family-friendly event for all ages and a fun way to get involved in the Maker movement. Be inspired, socialize with other makers, learn a new skill, recycle things, play, craft, and invent.

Milwaukee Maker Fest Call for Makers

Milwaukee, WI will be holding a MakerFest Oct. 19 at Milwaukee Makerspace:

Part science fair, part county fair, and part something entirely new, Milwaukee Maker Fest is an all-ages gathering of tech enthusiasts, crafters, educators, tinkerers, hobbyists, engineers, science clubs, artists, students, and commercial exhibitors. All of these “makers” come to Milwaukee Maker Fest to show what they have made and to share what they have learned.

Currently the festival is looking for exhibitors — follow the link above to submit your project!