Al

Our warriors of the water have defeated our arch rivals, The Forge (and several small children) to power to victory at the annual canal raft race. In a fine display of water-craftmanship, our team paddled our fine creation Dragonana through three heats to glorious win. With the rain lashing down, and The Forge’s 10 metre long raft a constant companion, it was by no means an easy win. Even the canal’s own swan racing team put up fine competition and were in the lead for much of the first heat.

Here’s the first heat as it happened:

Team Hacklab lost the second heat to children in a duck, but were not deterred. Our intrepid team managed to fight off the Forge (despite their dirty racing tactics) and the duck-kids, to savagely wrench the winners whistle from the hands of the youth and blow for Hacklab.

Dragonana was brought to you by Martin, Costa, Mike, Miron, Al, Tim (and others) and “turns up last minute to take the glory” Bart. Thanks to everyone who braved the weather, see you next year!

Welcome to 2017!

Edinburgh’s Mini Maker Faire returns this year on Sunday 16 April 2017. It takes place at Summerhall, right on our doorstep, and is a great chance to meet like minded folk from other hackerspaces, see interesting things that people are working on and play with robots.

For this to happen, the Faire needs makers to bring their stuff to Edinburgh’s biggest nerdy show and tell, that means you!

Here’s some of the stuff the Maker Faire is looking for:

• 3D printers and digital fabrication
• Biology/biotech and chemistry projects
• Crafts and design
• Drones, rockers and remote control toys
• Gadgets, inventions and hacks of any sort
• Glass and ceramics
• Food tech and hacks
• Foundry and blacksmithing
• Electronics, Arduino and Raspberry Pi projects
• Kinetic, fire and installation art
• Music performances and instruments
• Puppets and props
• Radios, vintage computers and game systems
• Robotics, homemade robots
• Shelters, tents and domes
• Sustainable transportation, bicycles and human-powered machines
• Textiles and arts and crafts
• Unusual tools or machines
• Wearables, e-textiles, fashion tech
• Young makers and school maker clubs

If you’re making something like this, find out more and submit your application form now by the end of January to get your space!

Hacklab member Al (who writes in the third person) is helping to organise an event at Summerhall on Monday 28th of November to show some glass pieces that are the output of a collaborative art project, combining glass blowing and casting, electronics, sound design and composition.

The event will include some brief presentations about collaborative art, tours of both the Hacklab and ASCUS’ bio lab, and a chance to meet and discuss cross-disciplinary projects and ideas over a pie and beer. All in all it should be a fun event and all are welcome. More details are here, simply sign up to the Eventbrite event so we can estimate numbers and order the right number of pies!

Recently our Ultimaker 3D printer was kept busy for a few days printing strangely-shaped pieces for Edinburgh-based artist Penelope Kay. Penny had been working with Dr Thomas Pratt of Edinburgh University to create strange pseudo-organic shapes that blur the lines between diagrams and the the real world. The 3D printed pieces were encapsulated in medical-grade resin to make a stackable and re-arrangeable artwork. It’s always great to see interesting things being made in the lab, and satisfying to know we’ve helped bring something to fruition.

Here’s some background on the work, and of the pieces being exhibited at a recent conference:

An installation by Penelope Kay, recent graduate from Sculpture, Edinburgh College of Art and Dr. Thomas Pratt, lecturer in morphogenesis at The University of Edinburgh.

Artists and scientists both try to get things onto a flat surface in order to communicate their ideas. An artist may draw or paint on a two dimensional surface, a scientist may write a report and draw diagrams. This work explores the relationship between two dimensional information and the multi-dimensional world.

The collaboration has resulted in an interactive installation in which delegates are invited to pick up cubes and move them around a table to make their own construction. The cubes can be put together in different combinations by matching the diagrams on the faces of each cube to make various permutations, each creating a new interpretation of the ten cube world.

The diagrams on the faces of the cubes are taken from papers of special interest to Tom. Two, the histogram and dapples, are from Alan Turing’s ‘Chemical basis of Morphogenesis’ (1952). The hourglass shaped brain section is from a recent paper by Dr. James Clegg et al, and the graph and bead diagram are from a paper in progress by Dr. Calvin Chan.

Special thanks to the Edinburgh Hacklab, in particular, Random Switch and Daniel Connell who have shared their technical skills and been immeasurably helpful in producing the cubes.

Your favourite hackerspace is about to get bigger. An empty room became available near our current “suite” of rooms, we’ve snapped it up, and we have a plan…

If you’ve visited the lab and taken the tour, you’ll have seen our current storeroom is quite big but our workshop is quite small. We’re going to fix this by moving members storage to the new, smaller room and then refit G8 (the current storeroom) to be an epic workshop!

Since we improved our small workshop (room G2) with a new bench last year it’s been well used. It’s one of the few publicly accessible workshops in Edinburgh, so it can get pretty crowded. We’re also really tight on room in there, we can’t add any more big tools, like a table saw, CNC mill etc. So, let’s refit G8 to be a great workshop with room for lots of people to hack at once, and space to add to our library of tools.

We’re already talking about new CNC and adding new and exciting tools, it’ll look something like this:

Good plan, eh? Our only problem is budget. We can’t really afford the extra room, and the refit, without your help. We need a few new members to cover the additional monthly cost, if you’re a semi-regular visitor to the lab and have been considering joining, now would be a most excellent time to come to an open night and grab a membership form! Membership gives you 24/7 access to the lab and its facilities, including the epic new workshop!

Far away? Don’t visit often? Would still like to help? Donate and become a Friend of Hacklab!

Whatever happens, we’ll need people to help with the refit, planning the new layout, ordering materials, building benches etc. Please sign up to our discuss list for new room chat. Come along to our Tuesday open nights to see how things are progressing, hopefully you’ll be able to make use of the new room soon!

If you’ve been in the lab during the day in the first couple of months this year there’s a good chance you’ve found me, Andrea and Random sweating over LED strips, surrounded by wires and PVC tubing. It was all assembly work for an artwork called Sentient Forest, which has now been installed in its new home in the Forest of Dean Sculpture Trail (well worth a visit if you’re down there!).

The piece was created by Edinburgh artist Andrea Roe to show the hidden world of mycelium, a fungi that lives below the soil around trees, forming a symbiotic relationship with the trees above, and possibly communicating with the surrounding forest. Mycelium grows outwards from the trees in a tendril-type pattern, so the challenge was to try and replicate this using LED strip and show the movement of information through the fungus. The whole thing needs to be off-grid solar/battery powered, quietly charging itself until it’s triggered by people walking by. And it needed to be invisibly installed in a damp forest hundreds of miles away…

The final piece incorporates around 60m of addressable WS2812B (NeoPixel) LED strip, three Teensy microcontrollers, two PIR modules, a 100W solar panel, 100AH lead acid battery, eleventy billion meters of cable and 14 tubes of silicone sealant.

Here are some behind the scenes photos of it being built:

And here’s the final piece, doing it’s thing: