Derby Mini Maker Faire 2017 Photodump!

So travelled down to Derby yesterday to see the Mini Maker Faire... mainly becasue it is an ace proper maker faire and also the venue is closing for a couple of years for a large refurbishment project so its the last one for a while! Had a fabulous time and saw loads of amazing people and things!

So many cool robots in the place!

Me and the fabulous KonichiwaKitty... :)

Spencer... Mr RC2014, maker of extraordinary  retro computing kits!

Fascinating bit of machining this... a WWII bomb made by Qualcast ... yep thats right Qualcast the lawnmower company, this is one of the many objects being digitised into an archive of models at Derby Silk Mill museum.

 Singing TESLA COILS.... So utterly brilliant... working out how we can get  aload of these into a space in NWales!

 Derby Silk Mill makerspace has this MASSIVE cnc... it must be able to take 3 8x4 sheets... tis a beautiful monster!

Bristol Hackspace had this brilliant manual machine for drawing great images!

 Kids making supercool LED ghost badges!

 Pimoroni injection moulding mould for pirate coasters!

 Not sure anyone could spot Steve all day...

 My kids loved Jarkmans mahoosive controllable inflatable tentacle!

 Coretec robotics battles!

 Ben from Boldport exhausted at the end!

The astronauts caravan... wow... a weird spinny experience!

15 minute make! Small router table

So, I've been thinking about how I can form consistent bevels in materials mainly for making rocket fins and am experimenting with a few different methods.. yesterday I got a bit of shed time and very quickly made this small router table. It's simply a piece of MDF screwed to my workbench and some holes made to accommodate a cheap Katsu trimmer router I bought a while back. The trimmer router itself is really good for a ridiculously low price! I bought one a while back as I'd seen lots of people using them in CNC builds and was worried that the source might dry out so picked one up! As a small table router it works well on most materials by is to fierce and unforgiving for balsa (I'm currently building a rocket with balsa fins) so my next idea is to try and make a hand powered sanding jig.

Hole cutting drills.. I always tread carefully with these as they seem to want to fling the drill about as they engage!

Couldn't be  simpler way to mount the table... and yes ... my shed needs tidying!

DoES Liverpool Rocket Design Workshop

Had a great evening last night running one of my rocket design workshops in DoES Liverpool. A brilliant group of people turned up from all over the place and a good time was had I think! Its the third time I have run this workshop and I cover a bit of rocket 101... how model, mid and high power rockets work and are launched and a bit about stability. We then all build an example design in the open source OpenRocket design and simulation package and the final section is I share some ideas and approaches to scratch building with a focus on using makerspace type tools but also alternatives if the snazzy stuff isn't available.

Heres a few shots from last night!

Met with a mug of tea... awesome!

Not a bad turnout with a couple of people also not in this shot!

Didn't take many shots of the different spaces but here's one!

Some very nice 3d printers including a sweet Ultimaker extended (good for BIG nosecones!)

Do we get the pun?! A cheesey rocket pizza.... Top work and great pizza was consumed!

 

ESTEC European Space Agency open day

So, went over to Noordwijk in the Netherlands last weekend to attend the Open ESTEC day with thousands of other people! ESTEC is the technical heart of ESA and they open a massive amount of it and a load of the staff volunteer to come back in to talk about the work that they do. It was a fabulous day and met some wonderful people. I took far to many photographs to upload them all so for now I though I'd chuck some of the tweets I did in the storify below. It was great to see all the science and technology but additionally brilliant to meet up with a few people again or for the first time! Most notable was to meet Montasser who works at Innovative Solutions In Space who I have talked to for 4 years and even been on a Hackaday Prize team with but had never met irl. I also got to see the DARE rocketry team (blog from when I visited them earlier this year here) and also got to see Jasper from the Delfispace program who does a lot of work on Pocketqubes. A fabulous event.. if you get the chance to go... GO!