altLab - DIT Creativity

Day star­ted with a small queue to access the showers and a bre­ak­fast table side pro­jects meeting.

Today’s plan for world domi­na­ti­on involved:
— Con­nec­ting OSCu­lat­tor with Pachube
— Trac­king fish in the fish tank
— Coo­king bio­plas­tic sam­ple experiments
— Twit­ter bot with pro­ces­sing and/or javascript
— Taking apart old keyboards
— Plan­ning a real­ti­me vide­owall for AZ Labs

Most of the goals were rea­ched des­pi­te the usu­al setbacks.

Bio­plas­tic is sick. It’s basi­cally star­ch, water, gly­ce­ri­ne and vine­gar sti­red together and hea­ted slo­wly to a pasty bub­bly form that takes a day to strengthen up. Today we coo­ked a few vari­a­ti­ons of the stan­dard reci­pe to make a few sam­ple expe­ri­ments with dif­fe­rent ingre­di­ent ratio, coo­king time and thick­ness, to com­pa­re the pro­per­ti­es and pos­si­bly may­be pro­ba­bly figu­re out some inte­res­ting use for them in futu­re pro­jects. They take about a day to cure, so we have no con­clu­si­ons just yet, but we’­re all pretty sick of the smell of vine­gar by now! Stay tuned for the fol­low up, coming to an hac­kers­pa­ce blog near you soon.

Fish are nice. We like fish. Fili­pe brought some with him and seems to be plan­ning some cute trac­king sys­tem ins­tal­la­ti­on. A crack in the main expe­ri­ments tank hold him back a few hours whi­le the sili­co­ne pat­ch dri­ed up, so it isn’t qui­te ope­ra­ti­o­nal just yet, but we’­re alre­ady wor­king hard on the next evil step for world domi­na­ti­on: devi­sing a cle­ver way to cen­tra­li­ze and reu­se his lit­tle fishi­es trac­king valu­es. And sha­re them with the world whi­le we’­re at it. Who knows who might need a bowl fish trac­king stre­am of valu­es out there.

We took a lit­tle walk wan­de­ring about Mon­te­mor-o-Novo, qui­te a pea­ce­ful town as it turns out, we mana­ged to find an open res­tau­rant with some excel­lent tra­di­ti­o­nal Por­tu­gue­se food, whi­ch was nice. Meanwhi­le, back in the new tech world, our plans for tonight’s gene­ric audio mis­chi­ef jam got held back by the lack of a mix table, some lag with nin­jam wire­less and an all­nigh­ter live bro­ad­cast stre­am pum­ping out of Aute­ch­re’s web­si­te.

After many months of plan­ning and plot­ting and con­ju­ring evil dark for­ces with a few selec­ti­ve fri­en­dly con­tacts of the Audi­ên­cia Zero col­lec­ti­ve, the day finally arri­ved whe­re we head out for 1 week resi­dency with mem­bers form all of our three hac­klabs: LCD from Por­to, AltLab form Lis­bon and our very own xDA from Coimbra.

I mana­ged to setup a ride with a cou­ple of the big bos­ses from LCD, mis­ter Ricar­do Lobo and Pedro Ange­lo. I wai­ted for them the enti­re mor­ning, still sligh­tly reco­ve­ring from Satur­days pho­to exhi­bit ope­ning at Gale­ria Icon (whe­re xDA cola­bo­ra­ted with Sue doing some dj’ing and pro­jec­ti­on map­ping). Pho­ne­call reve­a­led they were alre­ady run­ning late and suf­fe­ring a major set­back, a for­got­ten wal­let, for­cing them to go back to Porto.

Long story short: The northern comi­ti­ve arri­ved a few hours later than sche­du­led to our des­tiny: Con­ven­to da Sau­da­ção, Montemor-o-Novo.

Peo­ple from the other labs were alre­ady moving around wor­king on some of their own pro­jects: Móni­ca gre­e­ted us out­si­de whe­re she was tes­ting the wifi access dis­tan­ce for her tree pro­ject. And insi­de we unra­ve­led the AZ room whe­re Gui­lher­me was bot­ching latest robo­tic cre­a­tu­re and Cata­ri­na gre­e­ted us with a handsha­ke using her latest spe­ed­pro­ject, a glo­ve with a led that lights when you sha­ke hands. Fili­pe was set­ting up his fish trac­king sys­tem in a cor­ner. Mau­ri­cio, Sér­gio and Tara were also around doing their own thing and others are sche­du­led to show up through the rest of the week.

Quick tour of the loca­ti­on reve­a­led it to be pretty cool. A reha­bi­li­ta­ted con­vent insi­de a typi­cal Por­tu­gue­se cas­tle with an over­vi­ew of the enti­re city. Plans for sight­se­eing abit aren’t enti­rely out of the ques­ti­on but we are mos­tly all really eager to get down and dirty with the technology.

Sit­ting down we finally start to assi­mi­la­te all the poten­ti­al: We have a Maker­bot table for 3d prin­ting. A microwa­ve oven, some star­ch, vine­gar and gly­ce­ri­ne to do some secret bio stuff (not bre­ak­fast pan­ca­kes). Tool­bo­xes, com­po­nents and PCBs for elec­tro­nics fun and non pro­fit. Plenty of pro­ject ide­as invol­ving data visu­a­li­za­ti­on, and fabric inter­fa­ces. And a very evil plan for col­la­bo­ra­ti­ve sound synthe­sis that will hope­fully invol­ve the PA, some con­tact mics, ran­dom MIDI/OSC valu­es from the run­ning pro­jects and plenty of laptops.

We can alre­ady pre­sent the first pro­ject, the Whi­te LED Red Glo­ve quick pro­ject by Cata­ri­na and Isa­bel. Whi­ch it’ll be easi­er to des­cri­be by quo­ting her own description.

This mit­ten lights up when its wea­rer sha­kes hands with some­o­ne. It has two expo­sed soft con­tacts around the thumb and across the palm whi­ch, when brid­ged by bare skin, turn on the LED embed­ded on the flower. The mit­ten itself was cre­a­ted by fashi­on desig­ner Isa­bel Tomás, and we then sewed a tou­ch swit­ch cir­cuit onto it using con­duc­ti­ve fabric and thre­ad. Isa­bel and I desig­ned this as a soft cir­cuits exer­ci­se for some upco­ming mate­ri­als workshops, and we’ll post some ins­truc­ti­ons soon.