February 24, 2011
links for 2011-02-24
-
Good to read an explanation of how someone uses git and branches to manage releases. This is the sort of workflow I'd run with, particularly if I was working in a bigger team. It's basically what we ran at STNC/Microsoft, but it's good to see how it relates to git (I'm still getting my head around the distributed version control thing)
February 22, 2011
Liverpool Discovers
I loved the scattering of Superlambananas that were dotted round the city in the summer of 2008 when I moved back to Liverpool. However, I was a little concerned when the follow-up was an almost identical idea with penguins rather than superlambananas and then when Chester did the same with rhinos - it looked like they might flog the idea to death...
However, this year they've tweaked the format and rediscovered the winning formula. Liverpool Discovers sees a collection of different artworks distributed around the city (and with Wirral and St. Helens) on a variety of themes related to the city. So as well as the art there's a story or bit of local trivia to add to the experience.
I've not seen many of the artworks yet, but have come across one or two on my travels. "Fish and Ships" was the first I encountered, when out for a bike ride last week...
And my favourite so far, "Sugar & Chain", which is even better when viewed at night...
February 21, 2011
Getting Started with Arduino Ethernet Course
Want your letterbox to email you whenever the postman has been? Need a clock to show you where your loved ones are? Or a glowing multi-coloured ambient orb to show your energy usage?
Given that I've been working with the Arduino and Ethernet for a couple of years now, when the guys at Madlab asked me to run a more advanced Arduino course, something based on the Internet of Things seemed a no-brainer.
So this Friday I'm running a course to take you through getting your Arduino connected via Ethernet and then talking to a variety of services including Pachube and, of course, Twitter.
It should be a fun and informative day, and you'll get an Ethernet shield and a bunch of components, and a load of example code to take home. There are still some spaces left, so head over to the Madlab Omniversity Internet of Things course page to sign up.
February 20, 2011
FABcamp
Back on the 3rd February last year, Andy Goodwin arranged for he and I to get a look round the Art and Design Academy at Liverpool John Moores University. We were partly there to scope it out for the first Ignite Liverpool, but mainly to see what sort of facilities they had to offer. As this page of notes that I took on the day show, the answer was lots of cool toys...
That'll be one laser cutter, one flatbed cutter, a couple of CNC mills and a very fancy 3D printer.
It was pretty obvious that the next step was to get to play with them, and so the plan was hatched for some kind of hack-weekend to get lots of people with different backgrounds and skills along and see what came out of it.
The difficulty with non-software hackdays, as I've found with running Howduino, is that people can't always bring all the components and tools that they need with them. For software, everyone brings a laptop, and libraries or applications can generally be downloaded in a few minutes from the Internet. Physical components - be it electronics or sheets of plywood - generally need to be ordered a few days before you need them, and very few people have their own laser-cutter to bring to an event.
As a result, most of the similar digital fabrication events that we found seem to focus on either demonstrating the capabilities of the machinery, or walking people through some examples to teach them how things work. Whilst that's useful, and was soon an obvious element to FABcamp, we also wanted scope for people to bring their own ideas along and see how far they could take them in a weekend.
With setting ourselves such a challenge, and pushing the boundaries of what had been done before around hackdays, it was always going to take some time to organise and so it was almost a year later - on the 29th and 30th January 2011 - that FABcamp Liverpool took place.
In the intervening months, I'd dropped away from the organising side of things, as there wasn't much I could offer beyond enthusiasm, opinions and the occasional pointer or introduction. Andy was the driving force behind the event, with the obvious extensive and necessary assistance from the rest of the OpenLabs team and the Art and Design Academy. They found the other partners to bring in, like FabLab Manchester and Razorlab, worked out the details of how the event was scheduled, and undertook the myriad of tasks required to pull off such a great weekend.
The event was split into three strands: an unconference-ish series of talks and presentations (including, by all accounts, an interesting talk on product design from Ilsa Parry); a number of workshops so people could design and 3D print custom lego minifigs of themselves, or learn how to lay out and laser-cut or laser-etch their designs; and a free-form "work on your own projects" track.
It was the latter of these that I worked on, which meant that I deliberately avoided the talks and workshops. It was a real shame in some ways as they looked very interesting, but my experience at Over the Air back in September showed me that I wouldn't make any progress on my own project if I kept interrupting it with other sessions.
I spent the weekend making a split-flap display. It's something I've wanted to build for ages, but hadn't got much beyond initial ideas and sketches. FABcamp gave me the opportunity to start prototyping and seeing if my assumptions held up when exposed to the laws of physics. I also started to get to grips with using Inkscape to lay out vector designs.
By Sunday afternoon I hadn't made as much progress as I'd have liked, but I did have the electronics and software side mostly done - an Arduino driving a stepper motor - and had a proof-of-concept version of the flap mechanism built. It needs further refinement, and then some more time with the laser-cutter and flat-bed cutter but there was a great sense of achievement in getting that far. I don't think I'm the only attendee who came away with a much better understanding of what can be done and, more importantly, the (beginnings of the) skills to make it happen - coupled with lots more ideas of other projects to pursue...
Hopefully there will be more FABcamps in the future, both in Liverpool and elsewhere. There's definitely the demand for them - tickets for FABcamp Liverpool were massively over-subscribed and went within days, and the only promotion that it got were initial tweets from Andy and me.
There are also some other write-ups and video of the weekend over on the FABcamp Liverpool page on Lanyrd.
In the meantime, if you want to play around with digital fabrication and electronics then come along to the monthly Maker Nights that the Liverpool Hackspace is holding in partnership with LJMU Art & Design Academy.
Tags: fabcamp Liverpool makernight
February 18, 2011
links for 2011-02-18
-
Another simple solar circuit, would be good to build some of these at Maker Night sometime.
-
Lots of useful info on what and how to monitor websites.
-
An awesome idea. Getting a collection of people together to all chip in some cash in order to hand out grants to let people get projects off the ground
-
And again, for the next time I'm playing around building wifi antennas...
-
Would've been handy for a project I've recently finished, so for the next time...
-
Would've been handy for a project I've recently finished, so for the next time...
-
Good, in-depth description of building an ultrasonic distance sensor from components (rather than off-the-shelf). At some point I'll use this to build a no-moving-parts anemometer...
-
Interesting to read about what DIY Drones is doing with their warranties. Concerns on that is what's holding back development/release of the Mazzini boards - selling something that people then wire into the mains has proved a bit too scary
-
A good article arguing for better meetings
February 11, 2011
A Snapshot of the NW Tech Scene
As I was pulling together a list of techie events in the NW for a friend I realised it might be of use to share it with the wider world. So, undoubtedly incomplete, but here's something of a snapshot of the regular tech meetings and gatherings in the Liverpool-Manchester area. Feel free to add any I've missed in the comments section... (or email me if comments aren't working for you - there's a weird bug that I've not tracked down yet that means not all comments work. Sorry)
Liverpool
- Ignite Liverpool - roughly quarterly events with a series of short, fast-paced talks on all sorts of topics.
- Geekup Liverpool - a gathering for software geeks on the last Tuesday of the month, sometimes with talks
- DoES Liverpool (formerly known as Liverpool Hackspace) who run Maker Night - gatherings for anyone interested in hardware hacking, electronics, Arduino, laser-cutting, 3D-printing, etc. on the
thirdsecond (from May 2011) Wednesday of each month - Social Media Cafe Liverpool - monthly events for anyone interested in "social media" (i.e. Twitter, blogging, Facebook, etc.)
- Liverpool Linux Users Group - first Wednesday of the month, a gathering for people interested in Linux, often with a talk.
- Cathedral Valley - semi-regular lunchtime gatherings with a techie/entrepreneurial leaning, based loosely in the "valley" between the two cathedrals
And two I haven't made it along to yet (mostly because there are too many listed above to fit in even more :-)
- Liverpool Scibar "It's science in a bar"
- Liverpool Cafe Scientifique
Chester
I haven't made it over to Chester to any of these meetings, but know quite a few people who regularly attend:
- Chester Linux Users Group
- Chester Geekup
Daresbury
Daresbury Business Breakfast is an always-packed monthly event for tech business-people to get together for a chat over free coffee and bacon baps.
Manchester
With so much going on in Liverpool I don't make it over to Manchester all that often, but do from time to time. Mostly to attend the language-specific groups that tend to gravitate to Manchester as it gives them a bigger catchment area (or at least doesn't have a catchment area incorporating a chunk of the Irish Sea...)
- Geekup Manchester - monthly gathering of software geeks
- NW Ruby Users Group - monthly meeting for Ruby fans, usually with a talk although it's often not about Ruby :-)
- Techcelerate - regular events focused more on the business end of tech
- Social Media Cafe Manchester monthly gathering for those interested in "social media"
And ones I've not attended...
- HacMan - weekly meetings of hardware hackers
- PHPNW - group for PHP users, in the NW...
- Drupal NW User Group
- Python group
- Manchester Free Software
And finally, NW England Perl Mongers - a language-specific group which admirably roams around the NW rather than expecting its members to come to it.
Updates:
I've also updated the links for LivLUG and DoES Liverpool (formerly known as Liverpool Hackspace) who run Maker Night.