Our friend John Abella (of the Maker Faire 3D Printer Village and Delaware Makerspace Barrel of Makers) is running a two-day RepRap build workshop in Wilmington Delaware, October 5th and 6th. Attendees will be building Prusa i3 printers with all top-shelf parts: milled frames from Josef Prusa, genuine J-head hotends from Hotends.com, stainless threaded rods and hardened chromed smooth rods.
The workshop is being held at the Wilmington DoubleTree Hotel, and will have catered food for attendees. Every person attending will leave with tools and basic supplies to maintain their printer and get started printing. The workshop fee – all inclusive – is $999.
I finally finished the hydroponic garden I’ve been building at Hive76 for the past few months. The plants have just started to sprout, so it will be at least another month before they can be harvested. But when they are ready, if you want to take some cuttings for yourself at open house you’re more than welcome to. Right now I am growing basil, thyme, oregano and morning glories.
Unfortunately, I’m spending the rest of the summer in Germany so I won’t be at open house to answer any questions in person, but I will be back in september. In the mean time I’ll start posting the blueprints of the hydrogarden, so anyone will be able to build one if they want. Hope to have more of the details next week!
Thanks, to Pete for agreeing to watch my plants while I’m gone, Rob for letting me steal his wood and carpentry techniques to build the frame, and Jordan for helping to design the caster flat bed and general support!
“Hey let’s take the boat out.”
“Hold on, I wanna build a hydrophone first.”
All three major construction methods represented: tape, glue, zip ties.
And so, using the parts left over from the day’s Piezo Transducer Class, some wire, a spraypaint cap, red solo cup, and two sticks, the Hive76 Aquaphone was born. With a battery powered amplifer and some groovy headphones, we had ourselves a mobile underwater listening apparatus. Globs and globs of hot glue waterproofed all connections. Continue reading “A Quick DIY Hydrophone”
Super-wide screen made from a single large sheet of bacterial cellulose “paper”
PJ and a number of other Hive members have been fortunate enough to participate in preparations for the Drexel Design Futures Lab “Projects 12/13” exhibition. PJ was almost certainly the most involved Hive contributor — he helped with the development of a number of key software elements for several of the exhibits.
Side view of a BC culture, showing the cellulose pellicle (white “gel” on surface), growth medium and some bacteria/yeast colonies (dark brown structures). The bubbles are CO2 produced by the yeast.
I wound up getting involved in the creation of a special display screen that was part of an interactive piece which allows people to “play” with a computer model of bacterial swarms. This piece was part of Tashia Tucker’s exhibit, and she wanted an “organic looking” display surface. After some brainstorming that included condemnations of the high price of silicone etc., PJ suggested bacterial cellulose. What!? The idea of a movie screen made by real bacteria to show movies of simulated bacteria was too “meta” to pass up.
I had grown some fairly large sheets of bacterial cellulose in the past, and was interested in having an excuse to grow something even larger — so sign me up! Tashia wanted a sheet that started out about 4’x8′ so that the final screen could be cropped to dimensions that were about the size of a slightly gigantic person.
Yikes — this was literally a tall order. Bacterial Cellulose (BC) is created by the same organisms that are used to ferment Kombucha — in fact, the “Shroom” or “Scoby” in a Kombucha culture is a big lump of cellulose. So this was simple, in principle, but the scale of the piece left a lot of novel details that had to be worked out.
