We had 12 brave souls for the Printed Circuit Board fabrication workshop, held yesterday. Thanks to Don for teaching.
Etching in acid:
The finished product:
No life forms were harmed (except perhaps for a blackberry).
15 June 2009
27 May 2009
Quartz Composer Workshop
Learn to Make Interactive Video with your Mac!
June 20, Noon – 3pm. At . Free.
Reserve your space on Yahoo Upcoming
We are very lucky to have Surya Buchwald (also known as Momo the Monster — ) teaching a Quartz Composer workshop.
Quartz Composer (QC) is a free, powerful but easy-to-use visual programming language for the Apple Macintosh that can create and manipulate amazing video and graphics in real time. This workshop will take you from starting the program for the first time to building your own interactive scene controlled with a gamepad. You’ll learn how to teach yourself QC, and meet others with whom you can collaborate and troubleshoot. No programming experience necessary.
For more information about QC, see:
To play with an interactive video piece (written by Surya), go to — click and hold your mouse on the video and move it around to control the video.
Required:
- Macintosh computer running 10.5 (Leopard). Anything from a G4 iBook to a Mac Pro tower will work.
- Gamepad (Mac-compatible). We recommend the Logitech Dual Action (either Apple Only or USB), which looks like a Playstation controller and can be purchased for $20 at Fred Meyer (or $22 at Radio Shack, $25 from Best Buy). You can use any USB controller or joystick, but this one will be the easiest with which to follow along.
- XCode - This can be installed from your System DVD that came with your computer – it used to be called ‘Developer Tools’. It will install the components needed to develop software on your machine, including our Quartz Composer program. After installing, do a system update.
Immediately following the QC workshop, from 3-6pm, we will have a meeting of the NorthWest AudioVisualists, a new group of artists, musicians, animators, and video jockeys, which will include live performances using QC. See for more information.
Fabrication Workshop June 14
Sunday June 14, 1-5pm
$35 (includes materials)
RSVP and pay at (Workshop: Fabrication 14JUN09 Techshop)
If you have any questions, email Don Davis – don@tempusdictum.com
Have you ever wanted to lay out and create your own printed circuit board? Then this inexpensive course is for you. This is a focused workshop on fabrication that will take three designs and follow them all the way to physical circuit boards using commonly available chemicals and the freeware version of Eagle PCB design ().
You should bring a laptop and any small designs you are working on. You will leave with enough materials to etch your own circuit boards, with the exception of chemicals that you can buy from any hardware store.
26 May 2009
Willamette Week Article
Willamette Week did a story on TechShop, including a quote from yours truly:
Fun article, worth a read.
9 May 2009
Arduino Workshop photos
The Arduino Cult Induction was a great success. We were hoping for 15 people, and we got 25! And everyone was enthusiastic about other courses we are planning on teaching. Don did a great job teaching, Chris showed up to help people, as did I. The first time you host a course, especially one that involves computers, soldering, and tools, there are lots of things that can go wrong, but everything worked out great. We were able to set up extra tables to handle all the people (we only have bench space for 18, but we were able to set up extra tables and I brought some folding chairs from home. A little crowded, perhaps, but nobody seemed to mind.
Here are some photos (click to see larger size):
18 April 2009
Arduino Cult Induction Workshop at TechShop, 1-5pm May 9
Have you ever wanted to build your own microcontroller and learn how to run a program on it?
OpenTechSpace, TechShop, and Tempus Dictum present an “Arduino Cult Induction” Workshop at TechShop on Saturday, May 9 2009, from 1 to 5 pm.
The cost of the workshop is $35, and includes all the parts you will need.
TechShop is at 10100 SW Allen Blvd, Beaverton ()
In this workshop, you will build a complete and functional Arduino-compatible micro-controller (Dorkboard), and will upload and run a program on it. The Arduino development environment is very popular with artists and other creative people, and can be built and programmed even if you have little hardware or software experience.
To sign up for the class, go to
and purchase the “Cult Induction Tech Shop 09MAY09″ workshop
If you have any problems, email Don Davis - don@tempusdictum.com
You will need to bring the following:
- A laptop (Mac, Windows, or Linux, although there are some problems with the latter)
- A USB cable (standard A->B type — like
- A soldering iron (20-30 watt pencil type) and solder
- Wire cutters (dikes)
Other tools that can be helpful, but are not strictly necessary, include tweezers, a magnifying glass / helping hands, wire stripper, needle nose nosed pliers or small hemostats (locking forceps), etc.
You can find most of these things at , Radio Shack, or most hardware stores.
You will be supplied with:
- A Benito USB to serial programmer (see )
- A Dorkboard kit (see
- An introduction to the Arduino and microcontrollers in an artists setting
- Help when you need it
- The knowledge that what you built works!
For more information on the workshop, see
For more information about the Dorkboard, see
For more information about Arduino, see
For more information about TechShop, see
For more information about OpenTechSpace, see
To find like-minded and helpful people, see and
Note that this Workshop is identical to the popular Arduino Cult Induction held at PNCA.
21 February 2009
Tech Space Officially Unofficially Open
Today was the official unofficial opening of TechShop in Beaverton (). They have already been teaching some classes, and even though they only have about half of all the tools and equipment they hope to have, they decided to officially unofficially open. They are continuing the deal where if you join now, not only do you get a discount, but your membership doesn’t start ticking until they officially officially open! Already they have a fantastic woodshop, welding equipment, some metal shop stuff, and have recently added a sewing and fabric arts area. We have started adding tools to the electronics lab, including some soldering stations, a digital oscilloscope, and have received several donations from people of parts and components. About the only thing we need to start teaching classes is some comfortable stools to sit on (we have plenty of comfortable chairs, but they are a little low for our fantastic workbenches).
15 January 2009
Progress!
Busy week! We got the electronics lab organized on Tuesday, with the benches in place and power run to almost all of the benches. We got our first donations of tools and parts the same day as well. On Wednesday, we gave a tour of TechSpace and the electronics lab to a bunch of people who came over after Lunch 2.0 at OTBC and people told me they really enjoyed it. Thursday, we got some things from Tektronix, and will be getting more stuff from them.
As of now, the space is actually usable, with a few tools (more coming soon), a soldering station, two scopes, several cabinets full of parts, a magnifying lamp, several cabinets full of parts, and a couple of boxes of random useful things (including a bunch of Legos).
You can see photos here:
7 January 2009
Open Space Technology
I’ve been doing some reading on Open Space Technology. In addition to the name similarity, Open Space Technology and Open Tech Space share some underlying philosophy, based on self-organizing systems. This is discussed in the .
The four underlying principles of Open Space Technology are:
- Whoever comes is the right people (because they cared enough to attend)
- Whatever happens is the only thing that could have (don’t worry about what happens)
- Whenever it starts is the right time (the lack of schedule or structure emphasises creativity and innovation)
- When it’s over, it’s over (which also means that if you aren’t getting anything out of a meeting, you should leave)
The basic ideas of both is that if you get people interested in a shared idea together and give them the freedom to interact openly with each other, then great results will happen. For Open Space Technology, this is applied to meetings. One example of meetings that use the precepts from Open Space Technology are unconferences (also called ). The same concepts also apply to things like “water cooler conversations” and other situations that encourage serendipitous interaction.
Similar ideas are the foundation of our Open Tech Space project — the creation of common spaces that allow people who are passionate about specific projects to interact in random ways.
For further reading on Open Space Technologies see the ,
or
25 November 2008
Open Tech Space mailing list
To receive announcements for Open Tech Space, please subscribe to our Google Group