Interlock is a non-profit organization that provides space for its members and the local community to develop and share their interests in science, technology, art, and culture.
I mentioned before that I’ve been tinkering with said plotters and webcams and some minimal computer vision noodling. Eventually, I’d like to implement some of my own software (likely using Processing) to do some more in-depth sketchy-yet-robotic drawings.
As such, I had been trying to think of easy/cheap ways to get a pencil working on the device. A normal pencil will only get so far before it needs sharpening, and none of my plotters have yet become talented enough to lumber over to the pencil sharpener. Soo…
Tada! Did you know they make mechanical pencils that auto-advance their lead? I didn’t, until this was mentioned on a mailing list I’m on for discussing the Chiplotle python plotter library (and plotters in general).
A quick Amazon Prime-ing of the BIC AI mechanical pencil and away we go. I stuck it into a hollowed out plotter pen, as demonstrated above, and it seemed to work fine and auto-advance the lead whenever necessary. Sweet.
So for the two of you out there interested in pen plotters, now you know. For the rest of you, maybe you’ve got an Eggbot or a Makerbot Unicorn or some cool sort of homebrewed plotter… go get it running with some genuine 100% leadmixture of graphite with clay binder. And if you’re into drawing and/or robots and/or software, you should stop in and play with the plotters someday. I’ll get you started, so bring in some vector artwork, and maybe some paper, and we’ll see what happens!
A few Wednesdays ago, after a long and cozy day of working from home, I decided to break my “never leave the house or have meaningful human contact” rule, and I ventured out to the snowy tundra of Henrietta. The threshold for this odd behavior is quite high, but I just couldn’t bring myself to miss the first meeting of Hacks/Hackers Rochester, a local group aiming to mush together journalists, programmers, technologists, designers, and what-have-you, just to see what kind of nutty/useful stuff results.
Before I get too far, I’ll have you know that their next meeting is Wednesday, February 15th (at RIT’sCenter for Student Innovation), and you can get at them on their meetup group, or their twittery bits. If combining technology and journalism sounds fun to you, you should stop by, because it seemed like a bunch of smart and interesting people.
Ok. For the rest of our time together, I’m fixin’ to dump a few links on you. I am not a journalist, nor a programmer, but I have been quite interested in this area for some time, and hope to contribute – at the very least – as a well-informed cheerleader, brainstormer, facilitator, or village idiot. We’ll see. Either way, maybe I can give interested parties some ideas of what’s possible/probable before the next meeting.
Open Sesame
“Open” excites me. Open source software, open hardware designs, open data, “free culture” in general. Fun things happen when information is free and accessible. Maybe this first dawned on me when I saw the Oakland Crimespotting site. By now, everybody has seen a multitude of visualizations made by dumping data on top of Google Maps. Back then it was pretty new and exciting. What struck me most, at the time, was that the Oakland PD was publishing this data to a public website, and in a format that was fairly easily scrape-able and parse-able. Wow! Amazingly pedestrian, really, but for a city or county government it seemed unthinkable (and still does, apparently).
Many municipalities are doing a decent job in this area nowadays. Some have even progressed enough that sites like EveryBlock have sprung up, taking these public data feeds and massaging them into a format that mere mortals can make sense of. Baltimore has an open data website that looks like it has lots of useful info, in easy to digest formats. Chicago too. I’m sure there are many others… those were just the first two to pop up when I poked around for “data dot blah blah dot gov” sites. There is no data.cityofrochester.gov site, unfortunately. How do we make that happen?
Dumpy Data
In the meantime, we rely on FOIA requests for information from local governments. Often times, these arrive in the least convenient format possible, and they are likely full of sloppy and inconsistent data. We’re pretty lucky then, that after cleaning things up, the D&C often shares this data with us on their RocDocs site.
I wonder if they know about Google Refine? Refine is “a power tool for working with messy data, cleaning it up, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases like Freebase.” If you’re dealing with cruddy data of any sort, you should check it out. It’s a bit of a weird install, running as a web server on your computer. Ask your local nerds if you’re having trouble… it’s worth it.
Community Data
Even if you can get it in a decent format, governments don’t always have the data you need. Or if they do, it might be stale by the time you can get at it. There are some fun things happening in the world of open data acquisition. Let’s call it “open mapping”, although I’m sure there are non-location-based projects I’m overlooking.
First, Google is changing the terms of service on their Maps product… taking it out of “beta” status and reaching into your wallet for some payback. If you have a certain amount of map views per day, it’s no longer free to use. Thankfully, all along, a large community of folks have been creating their own street maps by compiling open government data (TIGER files in the US), or by walking, biking, and driving routes with a GPS logger and uploading their tracks. OpenStreetMap is the result, and it’s an amazing feat. Anybody can edit the map… so feel free to liken it to the “Wikipedia of maps”, even though that probably makes some people bristle. Not coincidentally, the resultant data is available under a farily open license, and has thus been mixed and remixed into a plenitude of other projects, products, and experiments.
OpenCycleMap builds upon OpenStreetMap, and highlights cycling routes. It is rather sparse in the US. I recently attended some public meetings on Rochester’s bicycle plan, featuring some large maps of city streets rated “A” through “F” for bike safety. Perhaps that belongs on such a map, editable by all those who actually ride the city streets and know that traffic volume and speed are not the only relevant dimensions for such a grade.
OpenHeatMap lets you upload a spreadsheet of data and crank out a heat map on top of OpenStreetMap. Mapbox is a bit more sophisticated, but costs some money for hosted maps. No matter… the Mapbox developers have released TileMill, a gorgeous application that lets you handcraft interactive maps yourself. It requires a bit more knowhow, but I’m sure Hacks/Hackers has plenty of that.
The folks at Safecast wanted to map radiation levels following the Fukushima disaster in Japan, so they cobbled together some GPS loggers and Geiger counters. After driving around the country, they plopped the data on top of the OpenStreetMap. This isn’t child’s play yet, but every day it’s getting easier to bring together the hardware and software needed to record data and make it easily available.
A Brief Aside
These radiation mappers weren’t “traditional journalists”. Maybe it wasn’t even journalism or news. Whatever. It was really important info, and I’ll bet no reporter thought “I’ll just go out and record that data, instead of waiting by the phone for an official report”. I hope, after hanging out at Hacks/Hackers, that mindset will change.
Semi-related: Rochester has a nuclear power plant nearby, and Interlock has a Geiger counter:
(not a terribly well calibrated Geiger counter, admittedly)
For some more thoughts on the future of local news and journalism, from people much smarter and more cogent than I, I will simply link without comment to some posts I’ve bookmarked from Ryan Sholin, Jeff Croft, and Tim Porter.
Burbling Infobrooks
If real-time info is needed, Pachube is a free clearinghouse for data feeds. It’s ridiculously easy to upload sensor data to the site, whether it be temperature, weather, energy use, and so on. Equally important, it’s also easy to retrieve that information as a regularly updated and well-documented stream. Would you like to browse the 2700 available feeds tagged “radiation” on Pachube? Probably not. But it’d be a relatively simple task to create a program that retrieves and maps them in an easy to digest format.
Some folks – mainly in New York City – weren’t quite satisfied with the current status quo of air quality monitoring. So they’re building their own sensor network using open platforms to measure and make the data available to anybody that wants it, in real time. This stuff isn’t too technically challenging nowadays. We just need to pair up those with a need for info with the people who know how to get this stuff done.
Too Long; Still Reading
There’s plenty more fun stuff happening in this area, but that’s enough to keep you occupied for a few hours a least. If – after you close all your browser tabs – you still find your cravings unfulfilled, do join us at the next meeting, or fire away in the comments here. I’m sure we’ll be able to fill up or otherwise utilize your vast cranial resources. See you there!
We’ve got a 3d printer! It’s still a bit “in progress” as far as building and tuning it goes, but anybody interested in small-scale hobby-level 3d printing should stop in to ogle as our new eMakerHuxley RepRap prints out whistles and gadgets and geegaws all night long.
The build was pretty involved, but with a group of four folks we managed to get the majority of the work done in one long Sunday, a time-lapse of which follows:
That resulted in the following structure, which just needed to have its nozzle and build platform installed (and quite a bit of wiring).
With surprisingly little calibration and tinkering, we finally got our first fully printed part last Friday, the semi-traditional whistle model. The quality is really good already, and will get a bit better once we tweak some settings and really get the machine purring.
I think the nozzle is clogged now, unfortunately. So my goal tonight is to clear that out and get plastic extruding again, and then try to print out the interlock logo, which you can see above, extruded from a DXF file in openSCAD. Come visit, and bring a model you might want to print! There’s plenty of inspiration and/or finished “things” on Thingiverse if you don’t know where to start, and we’ll have a class soon on how to go from and idea to a 3d print… so stay tuned!
It’s true, we’ve managed to move all of our gear and junk into a new space. We’re in the same building, but we’ve now got over twice the space, and some delineation between a workshop sort of room, and other rooms that are more office-like. Above, you can see a shot of the new workshop. It’s pretty close to the size of our entire previous space, and we’re excited to fill it up with useful tools and fun projects. The first step though, was painting:
In addition to having more space, we also finally got roof access. That, plus a particularly motivated new-ish member (Walter), means that we already have a respectable antenna farm installed up there, perfect for the roughly 50% of our membership with ham licenses.
We’ve set aside a whole room for all the ham gear and a secondary electronics workbench (although it’s already surpassing the main bench as far as sweet gear goes).
The network goons have a server closet now, so normal humans can be isolated from the constant whine of small fans and hard drives.
There’s a large room set up as a classroom or conference room, perfect for some upcoming classes that are in the works, and nicely isolated from other noisy activities in the space. I reckon we can accommodate a dozen people per class, if they all need hands-on desk space, and more if it’s just rows of chairs.
There’s more to the space that hasn’t been shown here. Three more rooms in fact… some of which we’re not quite sure what to do with. If you want to see more pictures, there’s always our flickr group, or better yet: come visit us in person! Check out our calendar for a schedule of events and open nights.
As is usually the case, Interlock managed to cajole/bribe the organizers of BarCamp Rochester into giving us a table in the atrium, upon which we could set up our wares and lure in unsuspecting geeks. The conference itself was really great, with lots of interesting talks, and lots of attendees and traffic by our table. Everybody seemed quite excited about the “Skeletonizing Carcasses with Flesh-eating Beetles” talk, myself included.
In the past, we’ve had a slight lack of table-sized projects that moved, made noise, or otherwise stimulated people to come talk to us and see what Interlock is all about… but no longer!
After becoming a little obsessed with old pen plotters over the past few months, I decided I’d like to try assembling my own drawing robot. The main goal, again, was to have something small, cool, and interactive to attract folks at events where we have a table or booth. So about a month ago, our journey started with destruction… one printer and one printer/scanner gave their slightly non-functional lives to this project. Anything slightly cool was saved, and of course the precision rods, stepper motors, and timing belts were the main goal. I wanted this to use pin-feed card stock, so an old dot-matrix printer was also sacrificed.
I was without camera for most of the month, so documentation is non-existent. Regardless, the documentation would have been something like this: “!@#$!@#$ MORE EPOXY! !@#%!#$”, along with pictures of me looking frustrated. Let’s just say, this machine is a hack, on top of a kludge, wrapped in a cob-job. We ended up with the paper-feed mechanism from the dot-matrix printer acting as the Y axis, and a small solenoid from adafruit riding along on the X axis with a wobbly pen-holder (and some tape (and epoxy!)). This was all hooked up to a rickety breadboard (I designed and ordered an Arduino shield via Batch PCB, but it didn’t arrive in time) with two Polulu stepper drivers, an Arduino, and a simple transistor doohicky for toggling the solenoid. We ran grbl on the Arduino, and after tracking down a bug in said code and reflashing the firmware, we were well on our way. I learned a lot, stressed a bit, and the morning of BarCamp we barely managed this:
But it got better throughout the day, with some live on-the-scene hacking. I managed to get a toolchain set up to get webcam input traced and plotted thusly:
That toolchain starts with OpenCV handling the webcam, and doing a “trace outlines” sort of procedure. From there, a PNG is saved, converted to vectors by autotrace, converted from eps to hpgl (the language of old-timey plotters) by pstoedit, slurped back into Python via the Chiplotle HPGL library, where I have a few routines scale and optimize the tool path, and then we output some ugly gcode and stream it to the Arduino. Phew.
It’s a bit roundabout. But it worked, and it made people smile and wander over to talk to us… and they got some cool robo-portraits out of it. I’ll leave you with another image and video of the bot doing its thing. A few more can be found in my flickr gallery.
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