Soundlab, heart and soul at NESTA HQ

 

With the echoes of Electric Fire's "Do your own thing" still earworming away I sit reflecting on a great event I was lucky to be part of last week at Nesta HQ in London. Soundlab, as part of Heart and Soul, has been exploring in partnership with music tech companies, NESTA and Goldsmiths uni how music technology can be more accessible and how barriers to expression can be reduced.

I am linked into this via the mightly Ashley Elsdon from Palmsounds, Ash worked tirelessly on this event getting companies and developers to give their time (and app codes!) to attend these events and display their tech.

So many great things stand out about this event, the first section of the day was for NESTA staff and from chatting to them they seemed to be really excited to see the reality of a project that they fund and work on. Director of NESTA's Digital arts and media Tim Plyming summed it up astonishingly well when he described not having got on well  with music education and feeling excluded from it..yet within the first 10 minutes of the first Soundlab event he attended he  created more music than he had in his life previously.

I could write pages about the thoughts that these events bring to the surface around accessible innovation, creative process, gestural and physical performance interfaces etc, but rather I will cut to my overriding memory/thought of this event... It is AMAZING and incredibly uplifting to be part of an event where such joyous noise and music are made so readily. It's mindblowing to see people who possibly would be considered by others as "non verbal" and poor communicators..with the right barriers reduced, be up on stage commanding an audience with deep rich emotional performances... that I still hum days later.... I await  Electric Fire's first EP/album keenly. Huge props to Ash, Justin, Mark and all the Heart and Soul team.

Picture dump.... :)

A little light prototyping

 Spent a bit of time today making this light prototype out of some MDF I CNC'd and some yellow LEDS (next revision will be white but I bought a 1000 cheap yellow LED's some years back so they get used first!). It was quite a challenge to solder so I'll tweak the CAD to make the pocket a bit larger to give me a bit more room to work in. I have a few ideas for different sizes of these... Firstly the internal diameter of this one matches the spindle currently on the CNC so I hope to have a snazzy spindle light that I'll probably attach with some small neomydium magnets in the back of the case. Another size I'll make for the manual mill spindle and I fancy making one that could fit to my DIY helping hand accessory for use in combination  with a lens. They also could make a nice light to mount on a camera to take macro shots.

Getting into rocketry

rocket launch keychain camera from concretedog on Vimeo.

So I've been getting into model rocketry, I got bought a starter set as a gift some time ago and finally got the 2 rockets built over the summer, I've launched them a couple of times but yesterday was the first time I did some video, both from the ground and also attaching a cheap keychain camera to a rocket. The above is the result. (And yes.. forgot to set the camera date and time so appear to have launched over 150yrs in the future!)

My lad looking very pleased with the larger estes amazon rocket

So... I have plans! I have a larger kit that will step me up to use the highest over the counter rocket motors available and then after that i'm going to look into getting certified to fly high power rockets. I'm looking to diy as much as possible so have been playing with designing rockets in virtualisation using the amazing free design and simulation package OPENROCKET .. I've also got into sewing lightweight ripstop nylon to make parachutes! I'm learning a lot about sewing and am aiming to make some cross form parachutes after reading some chute theory and running some math. I've also built a little prototype jig assemble that has worked well to enable fixing fins at exactly 90degrees from any given centreline of a circular tube.. I'm going to build a better version at some point and post again.

Derby Mini Maker Faire

 

So, I had the pleasure of helping out at derby Mini Maker faire at Derby Silk Mill museum the other weekend. Here is a photo dump of my shots of the day.. not very good but gives and air of this excellent event. Massive props and respect to Dominic, Hannah, Chris, Andrea and the rest of the team.

The hands of a crewer who has been rigging big steel burny sculptures!

They doubled the size of the show this year with the use of a huge tent...

One of the museum spaces

Maker briefing number 1

BUNNIES!

I spent a fair bit of time co-hosting the make a keyring workshop, casting polymorph!

Super nice laser sticks..

Pattern printing rolling pins

the mighty ragworm

Supervised this brilliant marble run activity a fair bit

BIG ENGINE and paper aeroplane challenge in this room

Shonkbot workshop

HUUUUUGE CNC router!

Smaller CNC but scratchibuilt.. (great cheap spigndle tip from the builder!)

I got to put this massive head on this with the sculptor Johnnie White... Brilliant work

Cast ice gearwheel form the drive system of the burning sculpture

Bubbles....

EM drive, Hackaday prize SEMI FINALS! and International Collaboration

So over the last few months I've been tweeting a lot about parts I've been making as part of a team entering the hackaday2015 prize. They are parts for an experimental (and contentious) drive system called an EM drive. Now.. I need to come clear.. nobody seems to be able to adequately explain the physics behind this possible phenomena... let alone me so it has been fun as people have been asking me a lot of questions and I can only say... I've just been making components! However here is Paul's simple explanation of the project

"The EMdrive is a new type of thruster - recently invented by Roger Shawyer. 
Unlike other propulsion systems which need to repel mass to produce thrust, the EMdrive can convert electrical energy into thrust directly. 

A working EMdrive would start a revolution in spaceflight, enabling manned deep space exploration. 

Several builds have been made worldwide (eg Chinese University, NASA), many show positive results. This topic is still quite new and needs a lot of research. 

Most EMdrives work with frequencies around 2.4 GHz. This makes them big and hard to test under DIY conditions (big vacuum chamber, liquid metal contacts) 
So our attempt is to build one which works with 24GHz, which reduces the form factor significantly. 
A so small EMdrive could be flown to space for 30000$ on a pocketqube satellite. "

  It's got a LOT of attention within the hackaday prize and has solicited hundreds and hundreds of comments on Hackaday, Reddit, Twitter, NASAforums etc and a great interview was conducted with Paul on n-o-d-e.net http://n-o-d-e.net/post/119343131451/building-a-diy-emdrive

I've really enjoyed the feeling of being in a team on this project.. even though we are quite challenged geographically! There are 3 members, myself in Wales UK, Paul Kocyla the project lead in Germany and Montasser Sallam in Jordan. To say we have never met irl, we have forged great bonds and very productive teamwork between us utilising many little productivity hacks... 

One of my favourite little hack/workflows has been our use of OpenScad as a CAD environment.. OpenScad is free and opensource and is a code based CAD environment.. the beauty of this means that it is SUPER simple to share work... me and Paul regularly ping each other direct messages with entire CAD files pasted in as plain text.. I have even been known to open the text in ScorchCAD (an android port of openScad) and do work on the file on my phone.. great for fitting in dev work around other duties... true digital nomadery! 

So we are through to the semifinals and are very excited to be there. The final assembly of the MKII system and test rig (DIY laser interferometer etc) is being put together by Paul to hopefully perform some initial tests just before the final hackaday prize deadline.

If you want to support us.. (we don't want your money) please raise the profile and go visit the main project page on Hackaday and 'like' the project by giving us a skull! https://hackaday.io/project/5596-em-drive

And here is a collection of bits wot I made for it!

 Frustrum cavity.. lots of angles and geometry on this one.. accurate to around 0.02mm and >16um

 Piston assembly for tunable cavity experiment/prototype.

 Improvements in my CNC toolpaths above! Lower one the wrong way top one better! Cavity endplate.

 Above and below, assembly for a RF enclosure and heatsink for test of MKII assembly.

 The MK1 frustrum assembled and dissasembled