For those who have been present at alt lab meetings know by now that I’m currently developing a 3D Laser Printer.
Laser projection
As far as electronics everything is almost good to go with some minor tweaks, but I’m facing a giant problem now. I don’t have time to develop software for this pet and I don’t want it to be delayed for much longer than it already has been, so I’m requesting for kind hearted developers to step up and help me in this task.
Any help is welcome please contact me to lj dot marques@fct dot unl dot pt (replace “dot” for “.”).
Current device
Please adress this Git Hub repository for your kind code donations:
Feeding 15 sleep deprived hackers is not an easy task and during the AZ Residency only 3 people were brave enough to put their culinary talents to the test: Joel, Vitor and Mariana. Everyone agreed that their homemade meals were awesome and no bug reports were filed. Since we believe in sharing, here are Joel’s delicious open source recipes (in french comme il faut):
Salad Dressing [ VO ]
4 cuillère à soupe d’huile d’olive
3 cuillère à soupe de vinaigre balsamique
2 cuillère à café de miel
sel
poivre
Goûter et ajuster : si trop sucré, ajouter du vinaigre / si trop amer, ajouter du miel.
Bask Chicken [ VO ]
Prévoir un bon morceau de poulet pour chacun des invités
Poivron
Tomate
Sauce tomate
Oignon
sel
poivre
Eau
Faire cuire et dorer le poulet dans une poêle avec du sel et du poivre.
Faire revenir les oignons et le poivron dans une autre poele sans les bruler avec de l’huile d’olive.
Prendre une grande casserole.
Y mettre des tomates grossièrement coupées, les oignons et les poivrons pré-cuits avec de l’huile d’olive.
Faire mijoter une dizaine de minutes.
Rajouter le poulet.
Laisser mijoter en prenant soin de recouvrir le poulet de sauce. Remuer de temps en temps.
Servir avec du riz.
Since it’s really hot and most of our members are headed towards the beach for some well deserved vacations, we won’t be holding our Tuesday night public sessions until the end of August. Have a great summer and see you in September!
Caros amigos: o estabelecimento altlab encontra-se encerrado até ao final do mês de Agosto para descanso do pessoal. A gerência agradece a vossa preferência e espera ver-vos de novo em Setembro :)
After many days of work, stress and fun, we seem to have managed to pull through 10 projects to showcase at O Espaço do Tempo! The exhibition opened yesterday, 12th July at Convento da Saudação and will remain in exhibit until the end of the month.
We also have a mini-site with bios of the authors and descriptions of the works, temporarily hosted here. Not only of the works present at the exhibition but also a few others developed during the residency that couldn’t be exhibited by one reason or another. Check them out!
Big thanks are in order to everyone at O Espaço do Tempo for the opportunity we had, and all the in loco support to our needs, you rock. :)
2 days to go until the exhibit opening of the Audiencia Zero Labs residency at O Espaço Do Tempo!
A few folks seem to be missing in action. Mauricio is back with some news from Interactivos to lend us a hand on pending projects. Mónica and Pedro are still working on B-wind!. Margarida working on his robot Freddy. Victor Silva rehearsing his The Last Words of Dominico. Victor and Marco working on Discardable Beauty. Guilherme finishing his Róbotica Criativa works. And me finishing up Meta Gen Haiku. Catarina and Joel should also show up tomorow with their Micro Dérive.
Website with more info on the presented projects should go online soon. In the meantime if you should show up on Monday the 12th July in Montemor-O-Novo for the exhibit. We will have 7 projects installed under exhibition until the 31st July, and 2 liveacts presented on the exhibition day 12th July.
In the meantime we’ll leave you with some important t-shirt quote material we have recently acquired:
“48 horas são 6 dias de trabalho, em turnos de 8 horas”
“Eu só faço projection mapping quando estou bêbado”
“Não tens pincel para isso. Vai antes de rolo.”
“Queres falar ao telefone? Fala aí! *slap*”
LCD + AltLab + xDA
12 – 31 July 2010
Convento da Saudação | Montemor-o-Novo | Portugal
Exhibition: Monday to Friday – 6pm / 11pm | Saturday and Sunday – 4pm /11pm
Opening: 12th of July, 18h00
Artists : Catarina Mota | Filipe Cruz | Francesco Cerutti | Guilherme Martins | João Maia e Silva | Joël Belouet | Jorge Ribeiro | Pedro Ângelo | Margarida Faria | Maurício Martins | Mónica Mendes | Marco Moura | Mariana Ferreira | Mécia Sá | Ricardo Webbens | Sérgio Ferreira | Tiago Serra | Vitor Lago Silva | Victor Martins
This exhibition presents the results of a unique experiment. For 17 days, 30 members of the Audiencia Zero Labs from all over the country and also abroad lived and worked together on collective projects. New teams were formed, infinite ideas proposed, new tools and technologies experimented with, incredible adventures lived and new friends made. The projects at this exhibit are just the tip of the veil, the true impact of this experience is yet to come.
You thought we were dead. But the nerds in black were never gone.
AZ Residency at Espaço Tempo has resumed its course on the 14th July 2010, and we’ve been kicking it real with some hardcore project dev for a whole week now! Our main aim is to get all of these projects kicking and screaming on the 12th July for the big opening of the exhibition.
Catarina and Joel spent most of their week fiddling with some heavy duty MakerBot printing trial and error. In between random python re-learning fast courses, they managed to pull off some awesome hacks, such as a makerbot microscope to observe bacteria, a nutella jesus on a toast, and some robot printed & baked cookies.
Random project quotes include:
“we have scientifically proven that strawberry yogurt is not printable”
“if you believe, it will work”
“how big should we make jesus?”
“only two jesus toasts and already out of nutella?!”
“there is a guy coming by on monday to get a jesus on a toast”
Meanwhile Francesco and Mariana been hard at work on their ant tracking project. Marco drawing some more Suicide Girls for his secret projection art installation project. Ricardo working on his thesis. Pedro and Mónica working some more on the RTiVISS (Real-Time Video Interactive Systems for Sustainability) project. Vitor upgrading his version of Attic Tesla / Last Words of Domenico performance. Margarida working on her arduino based reactive robot.
Myself and Tiago arrived yesterday night and been hard at work in our own projects as well. Me preparing a release version of Gen Haiku, helping out with the webdev side of things on the iCookie fast-hack project and conjuring some evil plans for world domination preparing a liveact for the opening day of the exhibition. And Tiago working on his bus GPS tracking system app.
Joel Belouet has been working on an art piece involving microorganisms and needed a support structure for his microscope camera. It turns out the MakerBot sitting on our table was the solution.
At first Joel attached the camera to the z axis and the slide rested on the build platform, but it soon became clear that it would be much better to have the sample remain still and the camera move instead. Inverting the positions meant attaching the slide to the bottom of the z axis platform in order to prevent the camera lens from bumping against it. This setup also allowed him to use the z crank as a focus mechanism.
So we were happy with the physical setup which, in conjunction with ReplicatorG’s control panel, proved very useful for finding and tracking microorganisms within the sample.
But we also wanted to try an automated scan.
So the next step was to generate a path for the camera. We made a bunch of experiments with MakerBot’s Frostruder Tool Sweet, but eventually an stl + skeinforge, with a feedrate of 12 mm/m, turned out to be the best solution.
Finally, the microscope camera (which is a cheap webcam with a macro lens that Joel flipped upside down) was connected to his Processing script that records both video and stills from the incoming video feed.
Video of fist automated scan (sample is moss from a well).
Joel will continue to work on this as part of his art project, but this setup seems to be useful for a few other things:
- Record microscopic images of each and every area of a sample: just feed the makerbot a grid-like design, set the processing script to take a photo of each quadrant, go enjoy the great outdoors, and when you return to the lab you’ll have all the images waiting for you on your hard drive.
- Automatically capture images of live bacteria: we’ll try to do this by having the processing script track certain types of motion and capture stills when it’s detected.
- Some dancers here at the AZ residency also became very interested in using it as live video feed for performance.
Well, that’s it for now. We’re going to get more coffee and think of a way to make an action movie starring nematodes and tardigrades :)
In the next weeks we’ll be giving two workshops at BetaLab, a co-working space organized by betahaus| within the Chiado-After-Work program.
Here’s all the information and workshops’ schedule (in Portuguese):
Workshop DIY Kinetic SolarBots – Construa o seu próprio robot cinético solar.
Neste workshop os participantes vão construir um pequeno robot cinético através da montagem de um circuito solar com um pequeno motor e do design/modelagem do corpo do robot com Shmelzolan (plástico utilizado em artesanato).
Qualquer pessoa é capaz de fazer uma boa soldadura, é só uma questão de prática! Neste workshop aprendemos a soldar construindo circuitos muito divertidos como o Pisca-Pisca LED, uPONG (Retro Video GAME), Drawdio (um lápis/pincel que emite sons enquanto desenhámos) entre outros.
Datas : 14 de Maio / 21 de Maio / 28 de Maio
Horário : 17h – 21h
Preço : entre 10 – 35 Euros/Pessoa (consoante o kit seleccionado para construir)
Local : Rua Garrett, 70 (Baixa, Lisboa)
CC : Photo by LadyAda (www.adafruit.com)
A inscrição para qualquer um dos workshops numa das das disponíveis deve ser efectuada via email para o endereço : daniela@betahaus.de
AltLab is a collective dedicated to independent research and experimentation in alternative media.
Events
We meet every Tuesday, at 21:30h, in Cacilhas (directions here). Everyone is welcome to join us for some hacking, brainstorming, coding, whatever it is you’re into that day.
